•  Introductory
• Character of Growth of Outer London
• Indications of Structure
• Assmptions
• The Nature of the Plan
• Structure of the Plan: Zoning; the Four Rings
• Structure of the Plan:  Communications
• Structure of the Plan:  the Open Background
• The Policy Aimed At in the Detailed Movement of Population and Work - SPORADIC MOVEMENT OR OSCILLATION: SPECULATIVE BUILDING: VILLAGES - DECENTRALISATION IN AND NEAR THE REGION:APPLICATION TO EXISTING COMMUNITIES: NEW SITES: QUASI-SATELLITES - POPULATION DISPERSED OUTSIDE THE REGION - THE DECENTRALISING BOROUGHS AND THE SUBURBAN RING - INDUSTRIAL LOCATION COMPARED WITH HOUSING - DETAILED STUDIES - STANDARDS - PUBLIC SERVICES
• Realisation: Design and Amenity
• Realisation: the Administrative machine
• The Picture Aimed At

 
REALISATION: DESIGN AND AMENITY

It is all very well to plot out a complete scheme of population, industry, communications, play spaces, social centres, shops, water supply and drains: to propose to add here, to colonise there, to regenerate and to group; all written on paper and shown on two dimensional maps. It is indeed the great disadvantage of the art and science of planning that its realisation must be so gradual, that it remains on paper so long, only coming to life by bits here and there, the single tesserae of the mosaic, whose complete design is easily lost sight of. It is also an initial drawback that it must be presented in this flat way; no one would dream of judging the work of an architect merely on his drawing. Wren would come off poorly in his design for St. Paul’s, compared with the cathedral as we have it in the solid. Perspective drawings, the architect’s attempt at forestalling this realisation, models, which get nearer still - even these can only be used very slightly to illustrate single features or details in a wide scheme of planning covering 2,599 square miles.
Nevertheless it must be stated with the greatest emphasis that the most logical and sociological scheme conceivable on paper will ultimately be judged by its realisation in works of architecture, engineering and landscape. There is not only scope, but the necessity for the highest skill in every direction in the design of buildings, singly and in the mass. Roads and bridges, the new motorways, give great new opportunities; as has been shown in U.S.A. they can be things of beauty to the user and can drop into the landscape unobtrusively and enhancingly.
It is not sufficient for those who are to provide houses or other buildings to rely upon some “controlling authority” with powers to reject or amend poor quality design, and to consider that all is well if these authorities have properly equipped staffs for the purpose. We must aim at good design in the first instance which does not rely upon being licked into shape by an official, however competent and painstaking, in order that it may pass muster. A community is not made up of a number of single buildings, unrelated to each other, and which manage to be at best harmless or devoid of offence. House-builders especially, who have failed in the recent past, must set themselves a higher standard. It is indeed a gigantic task because, in place of one great single conception, we have a mosaic made up of innumerable pieces [half a million houses alone, with the addition of larger buildings and smaller details such as lamp-posts, railings and kerbs] which cannot be designed by one single office and yet must be harmonised and proved to be worthy of the central idea, London, the capital of the Empire.
The word amenity, to which constant official use has given a chilling sound by no means possessed in its original classical context, covers those matters in which positive original design is not so much sought as the maintenance of pleasant surroundings, of which the first is a clean air, with nothing worse than the mists which the Thames may send us, not thickened into pea-soup.
The exclamation against change, from people living in pleasant surroundings, has been in the main justified, for nearly every change in the country round London in the recent past has been for the worse. Those who are fortunate enough to remember the villages of the Middlesex plain (a few still miraculously remain), the lanes of Hertfordshire, the heaths and chalk valleys of Surrey, the woods and slopes of Buckinghamshire, the orchards of Kent and the deep seclusion of rural Essex within ten miles of London, cannot but rage at what has been substituted for them.
This natural and justifiable reaction against change must be conquered by proving that, in place of innumerable houses of various sizes without grouping or climax, peppered over the countryside or strung along the roads, it is possible to create real communities in which people can be proud to live. To look down from the chalk escarpment upon a medieval or renaissance town two or three miles away in the Weald would not offend: it would delight the eye, close pent within its walls, with perhaps an encirclement of tree planted walks around, its silhouette cutting the horizontal line of the South Downs, its colour in harmony with, or in consistent contrast with the green country of its setting. Cannot all the skill of architects and landscapists to-day produce something equally beautiful, both seen at a distance and near to?
Fortunately most of the normal countryside, as emphasised in the Scott Report, derives its beauty largely from the occupation and operation of farming based upon nature’s background with its variety of contour, geology and soil and its dynamic features, the Thames with its tributaries large and small: we have also inherited much of man’s historic addition in the form of villages, farmhouses, tree-planting and landscaped parks. The farming, to produce the typical beauty of rural England, must, as the Scott Report also points out, be prosperous: decayed farmland is not the same as wild nature. Agriculture must be given its chance, and not invaded by intrusive building.
There are, finally, disfigurements which are apt to collect in the neighbourhood of large towns: ill-placed advertisement is perhaps the chief offender. It is also easy for litter, which in its ephemeral form, however objectionable, can be cleared away, to assume the quasi-permanent untidiness of dumps, abandoned workings, etc.
It is unfortunate that certain essential industrial concerns, based upon a geological occurrence, become disfigurements, especially where they clash with recreational use. The three principal ones, brick-making, lime burning and cement manufacture, and gravel digging, are all concerned with building, for which there will be an unprecedented demand after the war. Fortunately brick-making on a large scale, of which the most pervasive disfigurement is the fume, lies outside this Region. The others require most careful balanced consideration, including especially the regeneration of the site after the workings are exhausted. These, and some other industrial concerns, refute the theory that if an operation is useful and efficient, it must be beautiful.
 

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