Of Planting and Planning

The making of British colonial cities

Robert Home

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135945893
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

'At the centre of the world-economy, one always finds an exceptional state, strong, aggressive and privileged, dynamic, simultaneously feared and admired.' - Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries

This, surely, is an apt description of the British Empire at its zenith.

Of Planting and Planning explores how Britain used the formation of towns and cities as an instrument of colonial expansion and control throughout the Empire. Beginning with the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster and ending with decolonization after the Second World War, Robert Home reveals how the British Empire gave rise to many of the biggest cities in the world and how colonial policy and planning had a profound impact on the form and functioning of those cities.

This second edition retains the thematic, chronological and interdisciplinary approach of the first, each chapter identifying a key element of colonial town planning. New material and illustrations have been added, incorporating the author's further research since the first edition. Most importantly, Of Planting and Planning remains the only book to cover the whole sweep of British colonial urbanism.

Chapter 1

The ‘Grand Modell’ of Colonial Settlement

Ashley declared no concern of more consequence for the security and thriving of our Settlement, than that of planting in Townes, in which if men be not overruled theire Rashnesse and Folly will expose the Plantation to Ruin.

Lord Ashley (later 1st Earl of Shaftesbury) quoted in Brown, 1933, p. 163

For over two centuries – from the early seventeenth century until the advent of laissez faire doctrines in the 1840s – England planted new settler colonies in Ireland, the New World and the Antipodes in accordance with a centrally devised scheme. The overseas expansion had begun in earnest after the accession of the Stuarts to the combined thrones of Scotland, England and Ireland in 1603. Its aims included commercial gain, strategic manoeuvring in the game of international geopolitics, and the exodus or removal of unwanted social groups (political or religious dissenters, debtors, and the unemployed). In the nineteenth century emigration was also a means of reducing population pressure at home.

Over this period a model for colonial town planning gradually emerged. After the systematic plantation of Scottish and English settlers in Ulster (which for half a century received more settlers than any other overseas colony), Lord Shaftesbury deserves to be credited with formulating, or at least refining, what he called the ‘Grand Modell’ in the 1670s. Elaborated during the eighteenth century, it reached its most sophisticated expression in South Australia, with the celebrated Adelaide city plan of Colonel Light in 1836–1837.

Certain colonial settlements have a particular importance in the evolution of this model: Londonderry and Coleraine in Ireland; Charleston, Philadelphia and Savannah in North America; Freetown in West Africa; and Adelaide in South Australia. The application of the model varied from place to place, but there is an underlying consistency of approach, directed from London. Lord Shaftesbury referred to his ‘Grand Modell’, the Georgia Trustees to their ‘design’, Lord Dorchester and Granville Sharp devised ‘regulations’, and the South Australia Colony Commissioners drew upon Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ‘systematic colonization’ theories in their ‘instructions’.

The plan form of these colonial town plantations has been much studied. Origins have been identified in the bastide towns of mediaeval northern Europe, Renaissance and Baroque revivals of ancient Roman planning, the Spanish Laws of the Indies, and even a seventeenth-century plan of Peking. More recent studies have explored the wider political and social forces shaping the urban environment. The research has inevitably been geographically scattered, and this chapter tries to put together the evolution and elaboration of the model over time, and its influence upon later planning thinking.¹

The Components of the Model

One can summarize the main components of this British model of colonial town planning as follows:

1. A policy of deliberate urbanization, or town planting, in preference to dispersed settlement.

2. Land rights allocated in a combination of town, suburban and country lots.

3. The town planned and laid out in advance of settlement.

4. Wide streets laid out in geometric, usually gridiron form, usually on an area of one square mile (2.6 km²).

5. Public squares.

6. Standard-sized, rectangular plots, spacious in comparison with those in British towns of the time.

7. Some plots reserved for public purposes.

8. A physical distinction between town and country, usually by common land or an encircling green belt.

Policy of Deliberate Urbanization

A policy of deliberate urbanization had its mediaeval origins in Britain with the granting of corporate charters by the Crown, and earlier with the colonies of the Roman occupation (Bell and Bell, 1969). It was consistently applied by the British government to its overseas plantations and colonies. Towns were to be centres for trade and defence, and a civilizing influence.

The poet Edmund Spenser, a colonist in Ireland who became the mayor of Cork: expressed this in 1580:

nothing doth sooner cause civility in any country than many market towns, by reason that people repairing often thither for their needs will daily see and learn civil manners… Besides there is nothing doth more stay and strengthen the country than such corporate towns, as proof in many rebellions hath been proved. (Quoted in Gillespie, 1985, p. 167)

The Puritan colonists of New England had a similar approach in adopting the nucleated village as their settlement ideal. This acquired over time a romantic tradition associated with the covenanted community, cultural enlightenment and democratic self-government, but was a largely invented tradition, since Puritan communities in England had previously been dispersed in rural areas.²

After the Restoration in 1660, the Crown sought to bring its New World under tighter central control. One of its first legislative measures for the colonies was the ‘Act for Building a Towne’ of 1662, which became a model for subsequent legislation in Virginia and Maryland. This required the governor to build a town by each river, to comprise thirty-two houses, regularly placed ‘in a square or such other forme as [the governor] shall appoint most convenient’ (quoted in Reps, 1965, p. 93).

The unsatisfactory alternative to such a policy, as perceived by Shaftesbury, was that settlers ‘will expose themselves to the inconvenience and Barbarisme’ of ‘stragling and distant Habitations’ in the countryside (quoted in Brown, 1933, p. 323). The policy was intended to avert the danger of a rejection of central authority, as occurred with Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676. Two centuries of urban growth later, the opposite policy was being applied: decentralization, the main aim of the garden city and new town movement, saw authority and social order best preserved by moving away from the turbulent and politicized urban masses to places of safety, such as Port Sunlight and New Delhi.

The policy laid down in the Restoration period was maintained through the eighteenth century. The trustees for the Georgia colony in 1733 saw themselves as city founders:

The first Honours of the ancient World were paid to the Founders of Citys and they were esteemed as the Parents from whose Wisdom whole Nations had their being and were preserved. (Quoted in Reps, 1965)

The Board of Plantations – predecessor of the Colonial Office – adopted a standard wording in its instructions to colonial governors during the eighteenth century:

… it has been found by long experience that the settling planters in townships hath rebounded very much to their advantage, not only with respect to the assistance they have been able to afford each other in their civil concerns, but likewise with regard to the security they have thereby acquired against the insults and incursions of neighbouring Indians or other enemies. (Labaree, 1935)

Allocation of Town and Country Lots³

The policy of deliberate urbanization was to be secured through a symbiotic relationship between town and country. Under the Shaftesbury ‘Grand Modell’ land was allocated to the settlers in both town and country lots (and sometimes suburban or garden plots as well). Thus a landowner would have both types of property to occupy him, and divide his time between them. One can interpret this, especially when the Restoration was seeking to restore royal authority after the Civil War and Commonwealth, as an attempt to replicate the power relationships of town and country. Royal authority over the aristocracy was partly maintained by a seasonal pattern of attendance at court and London residence, alternating with periods living on the landed estates. In this one may see the origins of the distinctive wording still used for Britain’s system of land-use regulation – ‘town and country planning’.

The settlement scheme for Carolina in the 1670s specified town or ‘home’ lots (300 feet square or about 8,400 m²), and required ‘that all the Inhabitants of every Colony should set thear houses together in one Place’. Ten-acre garden (4 ha) plots were to be laid out in a semi-circle around the town, and beyond them were country lots of 80 acres (32 ha). Rents on land were set high at a penny an acre, to prevent the ‘common people’ from taking up large land grants and living on them.

The later Georgia colony at Savannah followed a tightly controlled and less generous land settlement scheme. Each settler would receive a fixed allocation of some 50 acres (20 ha) in three separate parcels: country lots of 45 acres (18 ha), garden or suburban lots of 5 acres (2 ha), and a town lot of less than an acre. Similar schemes were proposed for later settlements, but the holdings tended to be larger. Lord Dorchester’s land policy for Upper Canada, for instance, increased the standard size of farm lots to 200 acres (about 80 ha).

Such attempts to control the land market, sometimes accompanied by a land tax or quitrent, proved unsustainable in practice. The colonists spread out over the land and amassed larger holdings, with or without the permission of the colonial administration. The Georgia settlers, allowed only 50 acres, complained at their unfavourable situation when compared with the larger holdings in South Carolina. All over the American South cheap slave and indentured labour allowed the establishment of larger plantations.

Town Planning in Advance of Settlement

The town site was to be laid out in advance of occupation according to a prepared plan. This assumed a sufficient number of colonists to begin the settlement, a figure which was set, for instance, at forty families in Ulster, and fifty in New Hampshire. Such advance planning was intended, in the words of an observer of the Carolina colony in 1680, to avoid the ‘undecent and incommodious irregularities which other Inglish Collonies are fallen unto for want of ane early care in laying out the Townes’ (quoted in Reps, 1965, p. 177).

Granville Sharp’s instructions for the Sierra Leone colony (1788) stated that the settlers were to be ‘restrained from purchasing land for private Property until the Bargains for the Publick land are concluded’ and the town had been laid out by an ‘Agent-conductor’. This position (more usually called the surveyor-general) was a key appointment in colonial settlement, requiring close co-operation with the committee of proprietors or trustees. Surveyors of ability won an honoured place in their colony’s history, as well as a permanent influence upon its physical form – Holme at Philadelphia, Oglethorpe at Savannah, Light at Adelaide. Elsewhere Charleston and Freetown took a different form from the visions which Shaftesbury and Granville Sharp, respectively, had for them.

The slow process of laying out the town often caused discontent among the new settlers, who might be required to camp for months in temporary tents and huts. In 1793 the Sierra Leone colonists petitioned their London directors that after 10 months the surveying was still unfinished because of the slowness and incompetence of the surveyors, and asserted that they could have done the work themselves in 2 months (Wilson, 1976).

By contrast, the Savannah colonists waited with relatively little complaint from February to July 1733 for the town to be laid out, and then met in the main square for the allocation of plots, followed by a general feasting, which resulted in several deaths from the effects of bad liquor (Reps, 1965).

The most famous victim of settler rancour was Colonel Light at Adelaide. A conscientious and talented man, he completed the 1,042-acre (422 ha) survey in 2 months, compared with the 5 months it took Hoddle to lay out the 240-acre (97 ha) town of Melbourne. His trigonometric survey method was subsequently found to be more accurate than the alternative of ‘running surveys’, but criticism by the colonists, and lack of support from his superiors, led him to resign his position with most of his staff. He wrote in his journal preface a self-justification which is now inscribed on the base of his statue in Adelaide:

The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged of at the present. My enemies, however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it; and I leave it to posterity and not to them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or to blame. (Elder, 1984)

Wide Streets in Geometric Form

The physical form of the colonial planned town was a rectilinear or gridiron layout of wide streets, embodying classical ideals of symmetry, order and proportion. This has been called ‘the ultimate symbol of the imposition of human order on the wilderness’ (Hamer, 1990, p. 198).

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the revival in Europe of classical plan forms, used by monarchs to symbolize their authority. Great Britain acquired such baroque fashions from the continent relatively late. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century symmetrical gridiron layouts (usually without diagonals) became a feature of the estates developed by aristocratic land-owners in London, starting with the Bedford estate at Covent Garden in the 1630s (Morris, 1979). These layouts were applied in the colonies, often with scant regard for topography. Brisbane was a striking example of the failure of the rectangular plan in undulating or hilly country, sometimes creating road gradients as steep as 1 in 3 (Lanchester, 1925, pp. 196–199).

Although there was some common practice, no model book of physical planning standards existed, as the differing sizes of streets, squares and plots in the various colonies attest. Charleston (1672) and Philadelphia (1682) were both planned with main streets of 100 feet (31 m), and secondary streets 60 feet (18 m) wide at Charleston and 50 (15 m) at Philadelphia. Savannah had main streets 75 feet (23 m) wide. In Kingston, Jamaica they were 50 or 66 feet (18 or 20 m), in Freetown 80 feet (24 m) (twice that for the main street), in Adelaide 132 feet (40 m). Colonial town plans might also divide the street blocks longitudinally with a conservancy or back lane for the removal of refuse and night soil, varying between about 12 and 22 feet (4 and 7 m) (Home, 1990b).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Glossary
• Year of Independence and Population of the Main British Colonies
• Introduction: ‘The Chief Exporter of Municipalities’
• 1. The ‘Grand Modell’ of Colonial Settlement
• 2. ‘Planting is My Trade’: The Shapers of Colonial Urban Landscapes
• 3. Port Cities of the British Empire: ‘A Global Thalassocracy’
• 4. The ‘Warehousing’ of the Labouring Classes
• 5. ‘The Inconvenience felt by Europeans’: Racial Segregation, Its Rise and Fall
• 6. ‘Miracle-Worker to the People’: The Idea of Town Planning, 1910–1935
• 7. ‘This Novel Legislation’: Institutionalizing Town Planning, 1900–1950
• 8. ‘What Kind of Country Do You Want?’ The Transition to Independence
• Conclusions: The Legacy of Colonial Town Planning
• References
• Index