The Radical and Socialist Tradition in British Planning

From Puritan colonies to garden cities

Duncan Bowie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317018339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on the key period between the late 18th century and 1914, this book provides the first comprehensive narrative account of radical and socialist texts and organised movements for reform to land planning and housing policies in Britain. Beginning with the early colonial settlements in the puritan and enlightenment eras, it also covers Benthamite utilitarian planning, Owenite and utopian communitarianism, the Chartists, late Chartists and the First International, Christian socialists and positivists, working class and radical land reform campaigns in the late 19th century, Garden City pioneers and the institutionalisation of the planning profession.

The book, in effect, presents a prehistory of land, planning and housing reform in the UK in contrast with most historiography which focuses on the immediate pre-World War I period. Providing an analysis of different intellectual traditions and contrasting middle class-led reform initiatives with those based on working class organisations, the book seeks to relate historical debates to contemporary themes, including utopianism and pragmatism, the role of the state, the balance between local initiatives and centrally driven reforms and the interdependence of land, housing and planning.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315553672-1

Radicalism, socialism, planning and planning history

Many practitioners and commentators, including this author, take the view that planning has lost its way. In the British context, and more specifically within the planning regime in England, there is now little notion of a public purpose, and the role of planners is seen by government and by political and economic thinkers as primarily to enable the private market to respond to the challenges of growth. We have largely lost any concept of a social purpose for planning, and the success of planning practice is largely judged on whether planners have facilitated development in terms of contributing to economic growth, with little consideration of what could be termed as the wider ‘public good’. As a historian and a professional planner engaged in the development of planning policy as well as teacher of practising planners and potential planners, I have written this book on the presumption that knowledge of the history of planning can inform both academic discourse and planning practice.

In political theory and practice, planning has traditionally been associated with the ‘left’, or to be more precise, with a number of left traditions – Fabian, social democratic and communist. Most of these traditions are perceived as centralist and state dominated. Other more pluralist traditions recognise that the state and planning can operate at a number of spatial levels – international, national, regional, sub regional, local and neighbourhood level, and that a centralist perspective is not necessarily the most democratic. While anarchists may seek to limit or abolish the role of the central state, libertarian socialists generally accept the principles of subsidiarity – that governance and planning should be undertaken at the most appropriate level which is closest to the individual and the community. This is the starting point for the federalist and pluralist traditions of socialism and an approach to planning which rejects centralised – and by extension – authoritarian decision making. In a context of localism, consumer choice and deregulation, the dominant paradigm across the contemporary political spectrum, planning is widely seen as out of step with current political thinking, both in practice and in dominant conceptualisations within contemporary political science. This book is therefore seeking to use the historical record as a basis for challenging the dominance of neo-liberal perspectives within contemporary discourse.

However, both planning in the broader sense and spatial planning specifically, are critical to the delivery of progressive policy outcomes – the term ‘progressive’ being used here in a broad sense to incorporate radical and socialist perspectives across an extensive chronological period. This study seeks to reassert the positive role of planning as understood in previous historical periods in contrast with the contemporary context, in which planning is widely regarded as a negative factor. The object of the book is to provide an understanding of the past, but also to provide inspiration for those working within such a negative and hostile contemporary environment. It is my hope that today's planners will have time within their day to day pressurised and constrained work situations to read about the struggles their predecessors fought and to understand that there is another more positive role that they as professionals can play in society.

Taking a historical perspective does demonstrate the positive role of planning in contributing to the delivery of public policy objectives and recognises that this positive function does involve constraining the operation of the market and the behaviour of individuals where this conflicts with public policy objectives. This is essentially a Benthamite perspective – that planning should be about achieving the greatest good in terms of benefit to the greatest number of people.

Planning is not about consensus as perceived by the current UK government. It is about making explicit choices between different and often conflicting options. Planning decisions should not only involve assessments of who benefits from a policy or a specific development, but also an assessment of who is disadvantaged – who loses out. This brings us to the fundamental question as to what should be the explicit socialist objective of planning – beyond the general Benthamite concept of ‘the greatest good’. The concept of public gain from private development value has been a core part of the discourse about the role of planning throughout most of the period covered by this study. The role of planning as constraining the operation of the land and property market is itself part of the neo-classical paradigm. The neo-liberal perspective that planning should facilitate the operation of the market is not accepted by this author. State and market are in fact interdependent – planning impacts on the market but the delivery of planning policy objectives is impacted on by market factors. In practice, in most countries where the private sector is dominant, the role of public sector planning is to seek to regulate the operation of the market. A neoliberal position would seek to minimise the degree of regulation and state intervention, while a Benthamite perspective would argue for the minimum level of intervention necessary to achieve the ‘public good’. An explicitly socialist perspective might seek to use planning for redistributive purposes – to advance the interests of households with less wealth and income and access to the market, to mitigate the negative impacts of a free market in land, property and development and to seek to achieve a more egalitarian society.

Despite common assumptions to the contrary, planning as policy and practice has always been related to other key components of state governance such as investment and taxation. Planning cannot be considered independently of consideration of the control and use of land or of the provision of new and improved homes. Planning cannot be considered independently of consideration of provision of schools, health facilities, leisure and access to open space. This narrative seeks therefore to relate the debate over planning and the perspective of liberal, radical and socialist reformers across the period covered to debates over land, housing and public health more generally. This book discusses radical and socialist visions of new communities but it is fundamentally about the reforms of policy and more broadly the political reforms necessary for the achievement of these visions.

Many histories of UK planning, housing and land reform start in the late 19th century with Ebenezer Howard, Octavia Hill and Henry George. References back to previous periods tend to be brief and lacking in detail. This book seeks to provide the prehistory and to demonstrate that these three reformers were perhaps less original in their ideas than is perceived by many historians and in fact derived many of their ideas from earlier reform campaigns. The book seeks to focus on the activities of working class radicals and socialists to provide a counter-narrative, or at least supplementary narrative, to those narratives which focus on a small group of middle class philanthropists and writers whose prominence generally rests on their authorship of texts which are perceived as ‘classic’ and remain in print and on course reading lists.

It is important, however, to acknowledge that there are a few exceptions to the traditional historiography. Academic writing on utilitarian planning of the late 18th and early 19th century is limited to Hyde's essay (Hyde, 1947), though it should be acknowledged that Home's pathbreaking study of British colonial planning, Of Planting and Planning (Home, 1997), also makes the link with utilitarian philosophy, as does the more recent study on the planning of Adelaide by Donald Johnson Anticipating Municipal Parks (Johnson, 2013). In this work, I also draw on the extensive primary and secondary literature on early colonial planning in America and Australia – for non-indigenous Americans and Australians, this was, after all, the beginning of their national history. It is however important to recognise that much of the planning of the settlements in these new countries was actually undertaken in England as the colonising country and can be related back to British politics and ideology and should therefore be seen as part of British planning history.

Eldon Barry's Nationalisation in British Politics (Barry, 1965) includes a survey of the mid and late 19th century land reform movement, including the Chartists, the Land and Labour League and the land nationalisation movement of the 1880s and 1890s. I should also acknowledge the anonymous pamphlet on Land Nationalisation in Britain published by the History Group of the Communist Party (Communist Party History Group, 1957), which covers, if somewhat briefly, the activities of some of the organisations studied in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book, although I will admit to only discovering this rare mimeographed pamphlet after I had largely completed my research. David Englander's unpublished Masters dissertation on the Workman's National Housing Council (Englander, 1973) provides a detailed narrative study of working class campaigns on housing reform in the 1890s and early 1900s while A J Peacock's study of the Land Nationalisation Society and the English Land Restoration League, also an unpublished Masters dissertation (Peacock, 1961), has proved invaluable. It is highly regrettable that neither of these works has been published – Englander's published study, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain (Englander, 1983) uses very little of his earlier work. The classic study by Avner Offer on Property and Politics 1870–1914 (Offer, 1981) should be acknowledged as setting the land reform movements of that period within their wider economic and ideological context. It is also important to pay tribute to Anthony Wohl's pioneering study of late 19th century housing reform, The Eternal Slum (Wohl, 1977), which is still unrivalled for its coverage of the subject, and first led me to a recognition of the relationship between political history, housing and planning.

The only work previously published which analyses the relationship of early 19th-century socialist theory and politics to the built environment, as far as I am aware, is Frederic Moret's study Les Socialistes et La Ville (Moret, 1998) which is a comparative study of individuals and organisations in France and Great Britain. It is perhaps significant that it was a French academic who saw the impact of political theory on built environment practice as significant. Bronstein's comparative study of land reform movements in Britain and the United States (Bronstein, 1999) also includes useful material on Owenite and Chartist initiatives.

It should be acknowledged that there is a significant literature on communitarian settlements, with copious volumes on the Owenite experiments and increasing academic study of Owenite followers and their religious tendencies, for example Latham's study of James Pierrepoint Greaves (Latham, 1999). Some studies of the post-Owenite settlements however tend to be more in the form of inventories rather than critical studies of the politics and ideology of the settlement's founding, progress and dissolution. In contrast, the home colonisation experiments of the late 19th and first decade of the 20th century, with their links to socialist agitation, have been subject to very limited study by academics though they are touched on in the works of Brown (1971) and Harris (1972). Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes have both been the subject of numerous published works, and it could be asked whether there is any point in subjecting them to further study. The later chapters of this work do take a somewhat different perspective in seeking to examine the extent to which these ‘founders of British planning’ took ideas from previous socialist, radical and anarchist thinkers. In this context, the recent study by Scott and Bromley of Geddes’ early sociological studies is enlightening (Scott and Bromley, 2013).

This work therefore attempts to provide a chronological narrative of radical and socialist planning and pioneers from the 1790s to the outbreak of the First World War, while also seeking to demonstrate that utilitarian planning at the beginning of this period itself drew on earlier examples of settlement planning, dating back to the Puritan settlements of the mid-17th century. This book is not intended as a history of urban form or as a comprehensive history of British town planning in this period. This can be found elsewhere, not least in the works of Ashworth (1954) and Benovolo (1971) and I do not attempt to cover those settlement initiatives, which were part of Britain's programme of imperial conquest and based primarily on military objectives, such as the creation of new fortified towns as part of the Ulster plantation of the late-17th century. In contrast to some of the works referred to above, this book has the explicit intention of linking the narrative of reform to political organisations and parties and to situate the debates over planning, housing and land within the wider context of political and social reform. By using primary sources, the book gets both underneath and beyond the more familiar representations in the established secondary texts. It is recognised that this work is ambitious in its time span. History is most often told in episodes. Episodic history has its limitations – to fully understand the significance of a historical event, it is necessary to know what happened before and what happened after. Few students, practitioners or politicians have much knowledge of past reform movements and policies. An understanding of the past can also inform how we respond to the current context and this book therefore seeks to fill a significant gap in the literature.

The chapters in this book are arranged chronologically with extensive quotation from primary sources. Each narrative chapter focuses on a specific chronological period and on a specific ‘movement’ or ‘discourse’. Chronological developments and specific interventions in terms of both theoretical contributions and policy initiatives can however be related to a number of key themes, which are relevant to contemporary debates. These key themes are:

1. The contrast between middle class philanthropic reformers and ‘grassroots’ campaigns originating within working class based radical and socialist organisations; the extent to which these represent distinct ideological positions and whether there is a clear separation of ideological traditions across the historical timescale.
2. Comparing utopian and pragmatic approaches to constructing a ‘New Jerusalem’;
3. The role of the State in the initiation of new settlements.
4. The role of local initiatives relative to centralist reform.
5. The inter-relationship between policy on land and taxation, policy on housing and policy on planning, and the inter-dependency of these three reform objectives.

The chronological narrative cove...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Radicals and planning in Britain and the colonies
• 3 Enlightenment planning
• 4 The Benthamites and utilitarian planning
• 5 Owenite co-operation and plans for new communities
• 6 The influence of the French utopian socialists in England
• 7 Working class radicals and the land
• 8 Social reform and social science
• 9 The socialist revival, land and housing reform
• 10 Visions and politics of the garden city pioneers
• 11 The institutionalisation of planning and housing
• 12 Radical and socialist influences on land, planning and housing reform
• Index