Making Plans
Docomomo UK’s Planning Season
Updated 10th September 2023
Tom Cordell
2023 is the anniversary of two significant moments in the history of planning: It’s 90 years since the 4th Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM), which laid out a Modern Movement framework for replanning the city, and 80 years from the publication of Abercrombie and Forshaw’s County of London Plan.
Both events are represented on film. Here’s Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s dreamlike documentary of the CIAM meeting - famously held on board a ship as it crossed the Mediterranean from Marseille to Athens.
The film gives a sense of how this group of architectural radicals could imagine a new world while physically separated from the old by the sea.
The speakers - are identified intriguingly not by nation, but by the city they worked from (Le Corbusier/Paris, Van Eesteren/Amsterdam, Sert/Barcelona, Moser/Zurich, Gideon/Zurich, and Bodoni/Milano). And there’s an innocence to the proceedings that does little to suggest that the ideas discussed on the ship would within two decades come to dominate the way that cities around the world would be remade.
The second anniversary - the publication of Abercrombie and Forshaw’s County of London Plan (only 10 years after voyage of the SS Patris - marks the moment in Britain that these ideas became grounded into a political and economic programme for vast urban change. The plan would laid out the broad course that British Planning would take in the years after World War Two. It - alongside 1944’s Greater London Plan - grasped huge issues - transportation, population density, housing quality, conservation, land use - and placed them within a single coherent framework that was (at least in principle) was democratically accountable.
While clearly highly influenced by the work of CIAM and later 1930s British modernists in the MARS group, the plan also drew on an earlier British planning tradition, in particular the ideas of Scottish philosopher and planner Patrick Geddes who’s insistence on the importance of the survey - “Diagnosis before treatment” - runs through the it.
Unlike Moholy Nagy’s silent film, the London film has live sound, so we get to hear from, as well as see the key players. Alongside the slightly awkward looking Abercrombie and Forshaw, we also see H. Alker Trip, the Metropolitan Police’s road traffic expert who had spent the 1930s devising ways of redesigning roads to tame traffic (UK road deaths peaking in 1940 at over 9000 a year). It would be great to find out who some of the other cameos are.
The film ends with a young planner - Arthur Ling - explaining how the plan would be applied to an area of the city, using Stepney as a case study. He breaks the area down into a series of neighbourhood units of six to ten thousand inhabitants, each based on the catchment size of a primary school. The neighbourhood unit was an idea that Ling had developed through his student work at UCL in the 1930s, through study trips before World War Two to the USSR, and it would become the fundamental building block in Abercrombie’s cellular model of the city.
The decades that followed would see millions of people dispersed from city centres around the UK to new housing, often far away in new and expanded towns.
And over the decades, this vision of how to build cities become challenged. New solutions emerged - in particular the new town of Milton Keynes which attempted to break out of the deterministic staightjacket of a city made of neighbourhood units .
But by the late 1970s the idea of planning anything was being questioned - here’s XTC (a band originating in London’s expanded towns, Swindon) Making Plans for Nigel. They don't sound too keen on the paternalistically planned life for Nigel in (then nationalised) British Steel:
To mark these anniversaries, Docomomo is running a season of events around planning.
in the Summer we walked around East London to look at the relics of Abercrombie’s plan - the neighbourhood units, reduction in population density, new parkland, industrial dispersal, alongside used and abandoned transport infrastructure.
On September 11th, we have an event in London looking at the history of Milton Keynes, with Professor Michael Edwards, who was part of the original planning team for there, and David Mountain of RTPI who has extensively researched it’s history.
On September 23rd (rescheduled) , we’re travelling to Aylesbury, to see what happened to the people displaced from London by the Abercrombie Plan. As well as those rehoused in the more famous new towns, thousands of people were dispersed to expanded towns such as Aylesbury beyond the Green Belt. We’ll also see an example of how smaller British cities were replanned in the 60s and 70s.
We’ll follow this event in spring 2024 with a cycling visit to Milton Keynes to have a look at how the plans worked out on the ground.
More events will be posted as we arrange them!