From Garden Cities to New Towns

Campaigning for Town and Country Planning 1899-1946

Dennis Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135832247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book offers a detailed record of one of the world's oldest environmental pressure groups. It raises questions about the capacity of pressure groups to influence policy; and finally it assesses the campaing as a major factor in the emergence of modern town and planning, and as a backdrop against which to examine current issues.

1
INTRODUCTION

There is a general consensus of opinion that the continual growth of our large cities and the decline of population in country districts is an unhealthy sign…The only remedy—setting on one side as contrary to English institutions, anything in the nature of enforced migration—must therefore be through the discovery of a form of life possessing greater attraction than our present cities possess. (GCA Tract No. 1, September 1899)

Towards the close of the last century, in June 1899, a new organization was formed, with the basic aim of campaigning for the adoption of garden cities. Along this road, believed the founders of the organization, lay the route to the new form of life called for in its first public circular [1]. True to its beliefs, the Garden City Association (which changed its name in 1909 to the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and, again, in 1941, to the Town and Country Planning Association) achieved its first success with the foundation of Letchworth Garden City in 1903; and, immediately after the First World War, a second garden city was established at Welwyn.

Although the Association’s campaigning took it well beyond its initial focus on garden cities as such, undoubtedly a major landmark in the history of the Association was the passing in 1946 of legislation that ushered in a State programme of new town building. This legislation, the New Towns Act, effectively closes the first chapter in the Association’s history; from the eccentric cause of a small organization challenging conventional wisdom, the building of new communities had become an accepted aspect of national policy. From 1946 the Association has continued as an active body, but the nature of its campaigning (as compared with that of the garden city pioneers) has taken a markedly different course [2].

In the light of the above course of events, this book opens with the formation of the Garden City Association in 1899 and ends with the passing of the New Towns Act in 1946.

Within this time span, there are three objectives. A central objective is simply to write a history of the campaign, attempting to make sense of the extensive archives and scattered records over what is nearly a fifty-year period; and, in particular, seeking to show how the campaign was organized, who participated and why. A second objective is to acknowledge the campaigning body in political terms as a pressure group, evaluating the methods it used to further its cause, and the effectiveness of the campaign in terms of what it achieved. Finally, a third objective is to locate the campaign and the work of the Association within a wider context of environmental planning history, assessing the contribution and importance of the garden city campaign in what was a formative period for planning as a whole.

The story, then, centres on the work of a particular organization in a particular period, effectively the first half of the twentieth century. It is this period which provides the context for the detailed history that follows; the specifics of the campaign are closely enmeshed within a broader network of national and, indeed, world events. The complex relationship between the details of the campaign and this wider context, traced chronologically in subsequent chapters, represents an important theme throughout the book. Initially, in this chapter, the context is mapped out, and issues that have a particular bearing on the campaign are introduced.

A CONTEXT OF CHANGE

The context for understanding the Association’s own history is one of change, with three themes in particular having a direct bearing on the fortunes of the garden city campaign. One such theme is that of the development of an ideology of reform in Britain, and associated progress on a variety of policy fronts (including that of town and country planning). The political context became distinctly more receptive to the idea of environmental reform at the end of the period in question than at the beginning. A second contextural theme (not unrelated to the above) is the growth of an environmental lobby, with the Association acting at times in unison with other organizations—professions as well as pressure groups—that were committed to at least some its own ideals and aspirations. Finally, as a third theme, it will be shown that radical transformations in the socio-geographical landscape in this period had a fundamental impact on the Association’s own campaign. The changing map of Britain, reflecting a largely unplanned process of urban dispersal coupled with evidence of widening regional inequalities, provided both a setback (in the sense of adding to the problems that garden cities were designed to overcome), and a spur (in raising the issues higher on the political agenda) for the Association’s own attempts to secure a more rational pattern of settlement.

Ideology of Reform

To take the first of these broad themes of contextual change, that of the development of an ideology of reform, it has to be noted that the period in question begins in the twilight years of Victorian liberalism and ends in the shining dawn of welfare socialism. By the 1940s the idea of reform had come to mean something quite different from what it had meant in the 1890s, recast, as it was, from a marginal concept to benefit the underprivileged to a universal concept embracing a wide spectrum of social policy. Significantly, too, the idea of public intervention and the associated role of the State was to be transformed from something to be resisted, or at least restrained, to a position that became fundamental to the whole idea of social improvement. Adam Smith and Samuel Smiles, lingering ghosts from a different age, were replaced as sources of ideas and inspiration by the likes of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge; the Victorian voluntary movement, in the form, for instance, of the Charity Organisation Society and a host of philanthropic trusts, lost ground to new custodians of social welfare in Whitehall offices; and the Labour Party, playing a novice’s role in the early years of the century, in the shadows of both Conservatives and Liberals, emerged in 1945 as the party of government and championing a new era of collectivism.

To generalize in this way, categorizing periods and transitions in such broad terms, has to be tempered with a note of caution. Not only is the reality at any one time inevitably more complex than such generalizations suggest (with a whole range of experience encountered amongst different groups and in different places), but the very idea of an uninterrupted view of social progress is questionable. A ‘Whig view of history’, resting on a perception of the onward march of liberal values and social improvement, cannot be left unchallenged. Alternative interpretations of events are well-founded, and (apart from being identified below) will form an important part of the subsequent analysis [3]. Yet, in spite of contention as to the motives for reform, and whether or not progress is inevitable, the incidence of change itself is not in dispute. Progress in promoting social reforms by no means followed a smooth course across a tranquil ocean of political acceptance; the voyage was marked by setbacks, when the ship of reform was blown off course or pulled by currents which constantly tried to drag it back into what some regarded as safer waters. But if one simply charts the place of reform at the end of the nineteenth century, and compares it with the position in the 1940s, that alone provides strong empirical grounds for mapping out the course of change in terms of a progression.

Thus, in 1899, when the small group of garden city enthusiasts first hatched their plans, they worked in the knowledge that the powers of public agencies (in all aspects of social policy) were still very limited. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the range of State activity had been broadened, with new measures introduced on a variety of fronts, but the approach was piecemeal and the effects muted in relation to the scale of problems bequeathed by more than a century of relative neglect [4]. Significantly for the Association, the first concerted programme of social reforms came between 1906 and 1914 (within the first decade of its existence, after the establishment of the first garden city, and at a time of reviewing its role) when successive Liberal Administrations laid what is commonly regarded as the foundations of the modern Welfare State. A second landmark in the history of twentieth-century reforms was flagged in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Promises were made and hopes raised, but, in the event, little of immediate benefit materialized. It was not, in fact, until after the end of the Second World War that a real breakthrough was achieved, with the first majority Labour Administration pushing back the frontiers of social reform and economic management. By then, the pendulum of presumption had swung indisputably away from the market as the arbiter of change and towards the State and its various agencies as the only rational way ahead [5]. The creation of a Welfare State, in particular, provided a totally different context for the Association to that in which it had been conceived at the end of the past century.

This general pattern of progress is mirrored in the specific area of town and country planning, where the first half of the twentieth century saw the introduction of a variety of measures designed to counter the market as the main arbiter of environmental standards [6]. From the first town planning legislation in 1909, through subsequent Acts in 1919, 1925 and 1932, prior to the wideranging measures of the 1945 Labour Administration (including the 1946 New Towns Act), the history of the garden city movement is intimately interwoven with this wider movement. Constantly campaigning for the means to promote its own ideals, the Association was gratified at each new legislative step forward, yet at times despondent that the steps were not always sufficiently far-reaching nor even necessarily in the right direction. The early legislation, especially, favoured the extension of metropolitan growth through garden suburbs rather than the creation of new garden cities beyond the old boundaries. For all the reservations of the Association, though, the emergence by the second half of the 1940s of a relatively comprehensive planning system was fundamental to the garden city movement’s own history.

Although different writers interpret the changing reform scene in different ways, there is at least agreement on the radical extent of change. Stuart Hall, for instance (who is by no means subscribing to a Whig view of history) writes of the rise of the ‘representative/ interventionist state’ in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s. During this period, ‘old laissez-faire conceptions began to be challenged, new philosophies of state action took shape, the scale of state activity enlarged and the state did begin to pioneer new modes of action of a more interventionist kind.’ [7]

What this process of intervention really meant, however, and the true motives for reform that underpinned it, raises questions that will be returned to in the final chapter. Was reform motivated by relentless pressures for social improvement, articulated by politicians and pressure groups, and reflecting a spirit of humanitarianism that has its origins in the nineteenth century? Or was reform a product of political and economic necessity, conceded less on the grounds of altruism and more because the capitalist system in Britain, increasingly vulnerable to world competition, was forced to introduce measures that would enhance both its productive and reproductive capacity? These questions are central to an understanding of the effectiveness of the Association, campaigning for reform on a particular front, in that each casts a different role for pressure groups in the political process. The one view would explain the role of the Association as a potentially important part of the democratic process, capable through its own actions of influencing decisions; while the other view would see the Association, along with other pressure groups, as being largely irrelevant to the real sources of power and decision making.

Hall’s analysis stops at the 1920s, but others have reviewed the reform process over a longer period. A.M.Halsey is one who has taken stock of the longer drift of events from the start of the twentieth century, and who, amongst the many fundamental changes that have taken place, sees the growth of the State and the progress made in terms of social reforms as being crucial [8]. Drawing on the work of T.S.Marshall, Halsey measures the worth of these changes against the yardstick of ‘citizenship’—‘a tradition of radical reform in which democracy is both a means and an end which seeks to attain a maximum of equality between individuals in a free society.’ [9] Citizenship is a concept which (in the first half of the century at least) rested on the Parliamentary process as a means of securing social improvement. But, as a measure of reform, the concept is not without contention. Is the State necessarily the best source of determining and administering progress? For the garden city campaign this proved to be a fundamental question that shaped the strategy of the Association from the very outset, when the campaign pinned its colours to the mast of voluntarism, to 1946, when the direction of its subsequent history was finally sealed by the State. This issue, of the relative benefits to be gained by voluntarism as opposed to the State, and of how strategies were adapted to reflect the growing importance of the State, will also be traced in the subsequent chapters.

Environmental Lobby

In addition to the context of reform, a second area of change that affects the history of the Association is that of the growth of an environmental lobby. It will be shown in the next chapter that the Garden City Association was heir to a nineteenth-century urban reform lobby and that, at the time the Association was formed, numerous groups were already at work in pursuit of environmental improvements. By contrast, what distinguishes the early half of the twentieth century is the extension of the lobby of special interest groups into countryside matters, and the growing importance and influence of professional bodies. The relationship of the Association to this gathering lobby for environmental improvements is something that will be explored in the following chapters.

At this stage it can be noted that evidence of other groups active in the pursuit of environmental improvements demonstrates that the modus operandi of the Association as a pressure group was by no means unique. The Association was to be accused of eccentricity because of what they were campaigning for (with, as will be shown, garden cities acquiring a ‘cranky’ reputation), but not because of its campaigning methods. Extra-parliamentary activity was increasingly to become a legitimate part of the political process, and it is interesting to locate the history of the Association within this context. Moreover, the development of mass communication systems in the twentieth century was to add to the effectiveness of such groups. At the turn of the century, penny tracts and evening lectures in institute halls were part and parcel of the world of propagandist groups (as they would then have been known); by the 1940s, groups with a national appeal were making effective use of radio broadcasting, propagandist films, and international networks. In this respect, the Association was to benefit not only from a growing legitimacy for the process of lobbying governments and others from the outside, but also from new technologies that underpinned its efforts.

Although different meanings can be attached to the growth of pressure groups and professions in the twentieth century, the incidence of growth as such is not to be denied. Anticipating such events, Durkheim had some years previously offered an explanation of the growth of professional and special interest groupings in terms of the need to fill a new vacuum in industrial society between the individualism of the family in a market-based economy, and the collectivism and bureaucracy of the State. Professional organizations, espousing rationality, were seen by Durkheim as a source of moral order and political consensus, with various interests locked together in a web of interdependence [10].

While a strictly functionalist explanation of this sort has its limitations, there is some merit in locating the Association within a network of linked (and, to an extent, interdependent) groups, lobbying for power but, taken together, also a source of power in its own right. It will be seen in subsequent chapters that the Association is constantly seeking the ‘middle ground’, and that, from the time of its formation through to the building of a lobby for reconstruction in the Second World War, a search for consensus is a consistent feature of the campaign.

It would be misleading to exaggerate the extent to which the political process was radically altered in the first half of the twentieth century—a period during which the question of the franchise as a central issue of political involvement continued to feature until the end of the First World War. The greater rise in the importance of pressure groups and the influence of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Origins of a Pressure Group
• 3 Choosing the Ground 1899–1914
• 4 The Long Campaign 1914–1939
• 5 Corridors of Power 1939–1946
• 6 Evaluation
• Appendix
• Bibliography