Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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and housing, offering a potential new agency for development. Balanced against
this was the strength of established positions. Most of the new forms had
required the impetus of the building boom of the turn of the century to bring
them into being. With the onset of slump they were cut back much like ordi-
nary development. The decline of property values prior to the First World War
may have been due in part to political fears, but it was not the product of the
kind of scenario envisaged in housing and town planning reform.
(iv)
In Thomas Sharp attacked the way in which ‘town extensions sprawl out
in sloppy diffuseness all over the countryside’. Instead of the urbanity of the past
there were now ‘little dwellings crouching separately under trees’ which were
‘mean and contemptible’. He had little doubt that the responsibility for this dis-
aster lay with Ebenezer Howard and other social reformers, so that ‘since the war
open development has been sacrosanct’. The sloppy thinking of sociologists was,
however, only part of a wider change in social relations, for Sharp believed that
‘democracy is at present reducing the English countryside from the beauty which
it attained under aristocracy’. A new kind of town planning was necessary
because ‘the only way we are likely to attain any beautiful civic expression is by
stringent but enlightened control from authority’.
51
Such observations show one way in which changes in the perception of town
and country were linked to political and socio-economic developments, in this
case those resulting immediately from the war. One important source of Sharp’s
anguish was the Housing and Town Planning Act () and the ‘homes for
heroes’ housing programme which it implemented. Through Raymond
Unwin’s influence on the Tudor Walters Report the standards laid down in the
act were directly related to the pre-war models of town planning, as at
Hampstead and Letchworth, and made to symbolise the idea of a new begin-
ning.
52
Lower densities, combined with a government pledge to build in much
larger quantities, entailed a major expansion of urban development, as well as
greater public expenditure and higher taxation. At the same time, the Estates
Gazette had talked of a ‘revolution in landholding’ and claimed that by the end
of one quarter of England had changed hands.
53
The apparent, and rather
exaggerated, demise of the great estate, and the loss of control which it repre-
sented, certainly influenced many planners through the period, including I. G.
Gibbon and Patrick Abercrombie.
54
It greatly added to fears of the spread of
J.A.Yelling
51
T. Sharp, Town and Countryside (London, ), pp. , , , .
52
M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes (London, ).
53
F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, ), pp. –.
54
I. G. Gibbon, Problems of Town and Country Planning (London, ); on Abercrombie see J. Sheail,
Rural Conservation in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, ), p. .
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urban influences into the countryside. It was also in the s that Summerson
began his urban estate studies that were subsequently to influence historical
work. Planning moved more decisively away from any connection with the more
individualistic versions of land reform, such as leasehold reform or site value
rating, and became more definitely an alliance against laissez-faire.
There was, however, another and predominant way in which events moved
forward from , centred on the role of government in housing and town
planning. Although the ‘homes for heroes’ programme came to an end in ,
demonstrating the power of contrary forces, its continuing effects were seen in
the revival of municipal house building in the s and the continuation, albeit
in modified form, of new housing and planning standards. However, those stan-
dards were forced down, and planners increasingly found it desirable to talk of
‘practical’ rather than ‘visionary’ planning. Property owners kept up a barrage of
opposition to the ‘confiscation’ of property under the new slum clearance com-
pensation provisions of , and similar sentiments were much to the fore in
the events that led up to the Town Planning Act.
55
In this kind of debate
there was no doubt that housing and town planning reformers were for the ‘new’
rather than the ‘old’, and Unwin was a leader of opposition to the government’s
withdrawal from general social housing in . In this he was joined by
Maynard Keynes, personifying the way in which traditional planning was now
able to link with new concerns.
56
The manner in which economic developments of the early s corre-
sponded with a distinct change in the politics of housing and town planning has
concentrated attention on the way in which the two were previously linked. In
this sense there is both an economics and politics of ‘mass’ production and con-
sumption, and although it is not possible to identify any single point in time at
which such features began, both were certainly in process of formation in inter-
war Britain. Arguably, the new style of suburban housing became at that time
an item of mass production and consumption alongside such linked items as
domestic appliances and the transport that made suburbanisation possible.
Politics affected this at various levels. The whole idea of ‘mass’ production and
consumption may be affected by the politics and social expectations current in
developed countries at this time. The variable forms of ‘mass’ production and
consumption were affected by political traditions and different economic histo-
ries. Two obvious features in Britain are divisions over public and private own-
ership and the marked regional impact of the new consumer industries. Again,
politics may be concerned with the management of factors of production, such
as land, so that mass production can take place, and with the regulation of the
effects of mass consumption, such as urban sprawl or traffic.
Land, property and planning
55
P. Garside, ‘Town planning in London –: a study of pressures, interests and influences
affecting the formation of policy’ (PhD thesis, University of London, ).
56
J. A. Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment (London, ), pp. , –.
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Parry Lewis and Harry Richardson, working in the s, argued that after
building cycles could not be recognised and analysed in the traditional
way.
57
In part this was due to such forms of government intervention as rent
control and subsidised housing. It was accepted that earlier mechanisms at work
in building cycles were still relevant, notably in the private building boom of the
s. Land values thus rose at that time, although not beyond levels previously
reached c. . However, a main point, in Richardson’s view, was that housing
output exceeded the previous highest level in every year after , and that
there was therefore no slump. It carried the implication that governments were
now expected to regulate affairs so that this did not occur. Events since the s
have, by contrast, encouraged the view that the factors shaping building cycles
were still in place, and that it was a combination of fortuitous circumstances that
produced the long boom. As with the pre- slump, war intervened before
the argument could be decisively settled. Still, government intervention
undoubtedly had important effects on urban development at all levels.
Regionally, Ward summarised state urban expenditure as concentrated on
‘“middle Britain” i.e. the most favoured parts of outer Britain and the more
peripheral parts of inner Britain’.
58
Politically, the overall responsibility of the national government for housing
did become established de facto in the interwar period, and was only seriously
questioned in limited periods of economic crisis. This was to have major effects
on housing tenure. The management of the post-war housing crisis through rent
control meant that until the end of the s the private landlord ceased to be
a major agent in new build, and private renting became increasingly associated
with older properties. After the end of ‘homes for heroes’ Conservative govern-
ments continued to allow an expansion of suburban council housing in the s
because the housing shortage had to be overcome before rent control could be
dispensed with. However, they also took steps to promote owner-occupation.
While this tenure was not yet associated with substantial fiscal advantages, by the
mid-s new building society procedures (coupled with changes in supply)
had brought it within reach of most families with stable and relatively high
incomes. Indeed, it became associated with middle-class social status – some-
thing not generally true of the limited owner-occupation prior to .
59
In the
s, when council housing was redirected to slum clearance, owner-occupied
houses accounted for the great bulk of suburban expansion in all those cities with
reasonably flourishing economies.
The clearest link between mass production and mass consumption lies
through economies of scale, which found their easiest expression in suburban
J.A.Yelling
57
Lewis, Building Cycles, p. ; H. W. Richardson and D. H. Aldcroft, Building in the British Economy
Between the Wars (London, ), p. .
58
S. V. Ward, The Geography of Inter-War Britain (London, ), p. .
59
M. J. Daunton, A Property-Owning Democracy? (London, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
growth. The presence of a new scale in urban development was marked most
obviously in council building and landholding. Thus in Birmingham ‘by the end
of the s vast municipal estates ringed the city periphery in the north east
and south, no less than fifteen individual estates each having more than ,
houses’.
60
Such scale was related to economies of production and management,
although there may also be other explanations. Housing functions could be more
easily discharged through a small number of large peripheral holdings, particu-
larly in view of the sharp divide which was established in the public mind
between public and and private. However, there were some comparable devel-
opments in the private sector during the building boom of the s. M. C.
Carr, summarising the results of his study of the London borough of Bexley,
says:
The large uniform lower middle class estate was developed wherever the large-
scale speculative private builder could find the size of site which gave him the most
efficient use of the scale advantage he had over the smaller builder. Smaller plots
were developed by the smaller builder with better housing . . . Consequently avail-
able large sites . . . whatever their location were developed in the s with lower
middle class housing.
61
These remarks revive claims made in respect of Victorian building, only in
reverse form. Undoubtedly, they need to be similarly qualified, as previously dis-
cussed. Moreover, Carr himself refers to exceptions in which on large estates
with suitable status characteristics and building restrictions better-class housing
resulted. Older features of landed estate development could therefore persist, but
effects were now much reduced. Socio-economic changes, combined with con-
tinued legal revision in the Law of Property Act , meant that leasehold
development was now rarer. This was, however, a period in which large-scale
regional builders emerged, particularly in outer London. New Ideal Homesteads
Ltd, which had originated in Bexley, claimed to have been erecting ,
houses in . Costain in had an estate at Elm Park (Essex) planned for
, houses, and had developed three estates of over , houses in the
London area.
62
It had now also become widespread practice for builders to be
their own developers, so providing a more direct relationship with the market.
Michael Ball describes this as part of a new structure of housing provision, the
origins of which were highly dependent on the contingent factors of this period.
Such a structure linked methods of production and consumption, but inter alia
Land, property and planning
60
Cherry, Birmingham, p. ; for London examples of public and private suburbia see A. A. Jackson,
Semi-Detached London (London, ).
61
M. C. Carr, ‘The development and character of a metropolitan suburb: Bexley, Kent’, in
Thompson, ed., Rise of Suburbia, p. .
62
J. D. Bundock, ‘Speculative housebuilding and some aspects of the activities of the speculative
housebuilder within the Greater London outer suburban area –’ (MPhil thesis, University
of Kent, ), pp. ff.
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‘builders could gain economies by combining the spheres of land development
and housebuilding. Independent land developers consequently were squeezed
out.’
63
Builders therefore provided a new means of injecting large-scale capital
into the development process.
None the less, it would be wrong to give the impression that suburban devel-
opment was now a highly ordered process. The building industry still remained
considerably fragmented, and the contingencies of property continued to affect
development patterns. Town planning did not directly contribute to these devel-
opments through any compulsory powers of land assembly. It did, however,
involve separation of land uses through ‘character’ zoning and establish densities
which tended to demarcate one type of residential development from another.
Arguably, these features helped in the definition of distinctive suburban environ-
ments which could be promoted as an advance over existing forms. However, it
has been generally agreed that formal town plans had only a limited impact, since
they usually followed existing development, and were frequently modified in
detailed application. Under the Housing and Town Planning Act () plan-
ning remained the responsibility of local authorities rather than county coun-
cils
64
and governed only areas of potential development. The act also gave
powers for joint plans covering wider districts, which were usually advisory and
often preceded the preparation of formal local plans, as in most of outer London,
Manchester, Sheffield and other areas. By the early s a considerable number
of local plans were at the stage when interim powers could be utilised. What was
revealed by developments at this time was therefore not just an absence of town
planning, but a more complex situation involving inherent problems.
These became more apparent when planning was extended to built-up areas
after . In the County of London, for instance, draft proposals for the first
urban scheme included height restrictions, developed from previous building
regulations, but no density or land use zones or public road proposals.
65
These
were not included because of the compensation implications, which were on an
even greater scale than in suburban localities. Suburban plans had at least the pro-
tection of a clause which enabled densities to be controlled without compensa-
tion, although development itself could not be prevented. Struggles over
compensation and betterment in the act had not, however, produced any
satisfactory solution for urban areas. Consequently, practical results in both urban
and suburban areas seemed often to come from more direct action by local
authorities. The purchase of open space, although sometimes initially inspired
by local planning surveys, was a notable example. Inside cities, slum clearance
and redevelopment areas were formulated by local authority housing depart-
J.A.Yelling
63
M. Ball, Housing Policy and Economic Power (London, ), p. .
64
Except within the area of the London County Council.
65
I. G. Gibbon, History of the London County Council – (London, ), p. ; Garside,
‘Town planning’.
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ments outside the framework of town planning, although they had a much
greater impact than the nascent town plans.
66
The high cost of potential compensation which deterred planning, and the
difficulties in collecting betterment highlighted in the struggle over the
Town Planning Act, produced more interest in resolving the matter within
uniform landownership. Gibbon, whose work is an essential guide to the pre-
occupations of the period, defined planning as laying down ‘such provisions for
the use of land as would be made by a person of enlightened and public spirit if
he owned all the land’.
67
He was especially concerned with the ‘multiplicity of
separate ownerships’ which existed in cities, and which in his view made it
impossible to plan them to best advantage. He hoped to resolve this by means of
schemes for pooling individual interests, which would allow the benefit of
unprofitable land uses, such as open space, to be captured by other development
within the same landownership. These arguments once again connected plan-
ning with landed estates, and also with the growing interest in redevelopment
during the late s. The literature, and official reports such as that of the
Moyne Committee, continued to associate slums and other problems with frag-
mented ownership.
68
However, despite some breakup of urban estates, in many
towns the inner areas were precisely those where building leases were now ter-
minating. Yet the advantages of large estates as units of renewal failed to make
their mark because of the larger pattern of social and economic change.
The immediate effect of the financial crisis of was to bring about a
reverse for housing and planning schemes, and at one time to threaten a real
return to pre-war conditions. In the longer run, however, it produced a new set
of concerns which strengthened the economic aspects of housing and town
planning.
69
Strong disparities in regional growth connected the outward spread
of London not to sloppy social thinking, but to the depressed regions of the
North. Similarly, interest in the economic aspects of urban ‘obsolescence’
kindled by the Housing Act caused the question to be increasingly debated
in terms of large-scale contrasts thrown up by new growth. The economic aspect
was strengthened by the support which Keynes gave to housing programmes,
redevelopment schemes and town planning. The compensation and betterment
problem also linked to an important principle of Keynes, namely the ‘fallacy of
composition’ whereby what was economic for the collectivity was not necessar-
ily economic at the individual level. While new economic thinking and schemes
of the ‘middle way’ did not prevail over older traditions, they did at least weaken
resistance to planning on the grounds that it was hopelessly uneconomic.
Land, property and planning
66
M. Miller, ‘The elusive green background: Raymond Unwin and the Greater London Regional
Plan’, Planning Perspectives, (), –; Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment, pp. –.
67
Gibbon, History of the London County Council, p. .
68
Report of the Departmental Committee on Housing (Moyne), Cmnd (London, ).
69
The argument in the rest of this section draws on Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment, pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
By the end of the s, therefore, planning had recovered effective large-
scale strategic arguments. However, it had not recovered the exceptional unity
of purpose that had marked its formative phase before . It was no longer
possible to present outward movement as an unequivocal benefit, and the result
was a distinct split within the professions concerned with urban development.
‘Mainstream’ planners, including Unwin and Abercrombie, sought to reshape
traditional policies by lifting planning to a new regional scale, and by using open
space to limit continous sprawl and to shape distinct communities against a green
background. This group continued to emphasise urban congestion for which the
remedy was outward movement. Another group, however, particularly strong
among architects and local authority officials like Herbert Manzoni in
Birmingham, saw obsolescence as the key problem for which the solution was a
more efficient land use which reflected the economic value of the land.
With economic depression, rent control and intense competition from sub-
urban development, obsolescence of inner-city property was seen to extend well
beyond that taken in contemporary slum clearance. Obsolescence was accepted
as an economic, not just a physical, process, while new forms of architecture
offered the prospect of redevelopment at high density which would bring the
value of buildings back into line with that of the land. This was very different
from the decentralisation, low densities and lower land values traditionally advo-
cated by planning supporters, although it placed equal emphasis on new forms.
While the Barlow Report leant in favour of the mainstream approach, other
contemporary writings increasingly reflected the new enthusiasm for large-scale
urban redevelopment.
70
At the outset of the war there was little consensus either
on this issue or on the overall scope for planning.
(v)
As in the First World War housing and town planning came to the fore after
as a focus for a programme of reconstruction and reconciliation. Commonly,
town planning is seen as occupying the role that the government housing pro-
gramme provided in the earlier conflict. Certainly, there is some justification for
this, because reconciliation had always been a major theme of town planning and
because the term ‘planning’ contained an essential reference to the role of public
policy in leading the nation’s affairs, and this was at the heart of new reforms. It
remained true, however, that the most popular form of town planning lay in the
improvement of housing conditions. Beveridge called for a ‘revolution in
housing standards’ as a means of reducing ‘the greatest inequality between
different sectors of the community’. At the same time, he introduced Keynesian
J.A.Yelling
70
Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population (Barlow), Cmnd
(London, ).
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themes by enlisting increased housing expenditure as ‘the most immediate con-
tribution that can be made towards winning full employment by the radical route
of social demand’. This would involve ‘substituting a vast orderly programme of
expansion for the distinctive meaningless fluctuations of the past’.
71
As is well
known such ideas were contested even during the war, but they did shift policy
to some extent.
It was in this context that the Uthwatt Committee on Compensation and
Betterment produced a document which seemed possibly about to alter the
whole future of property relations.
72
Yet in another way the Committee’s
purpose was a more limited one – to carry into policy a scheme for the nation-
alisation of development rights on undeveloped land that had been put to the
Barlow Committee by Sir Arthur Robinson. State permission would now be
necessary for development. Its refusal would entail no compensation, and if
granted the state would tax away most of the development gain. Urban land was
treated separately in the Report, but eventually similar controls were established
for major land use change, when attempts to collect betterment within the same
land use were abandoned. Still, the Town Planning Act did redirect better-
ment arising from ‘planning gain’ into the public purse, and appeared to release
planning from some of its financial shackles. Equally radical was the Uthwatt
Report’s support for a leasehold system based on public ownership of land. It
recommended that all development pass through a central planning agency
which should only lease land, and that no private freehold should be created in
redevelopment areas. Freehold owner-occupation, linchpin of the property
strategy of Britain’s dominant political party, was to be frozen out of all new
development.
Whereas green belts and new towns were to become the best-known features
to result from wartime planning, the greater innovatory challenges lay within the
city itself. Redevelopment was a policy which directly linked Beveridge’s aims
of improved housing and increased employment through construction, since
projection of future population suggested that replacement would soon become
the most important element of building. The City of Manchester Plan ()
envisaged that ‘in years from now about one half of the houses in the city
may have been swept away and replaced’.
73
Typically, it placed this action within
a zonal framework in which Zone B, next to the city centre, was ‘chiefly the
most urgent inner redevelopment areas and approximately bounded by the inter-
mediate ring road, the most important zone from a planning point of view’.
Survey reports suggested that per cent of households in Zone B wished to
leave their present house, and only per cent of these wished to remain in the
Land, property and planning
71
W. Beveridge, ‘Introduction’, in J. Madge, ed., The Rehousing of Britain (London, ), p. .
72
Ministry of Works and Planning, Interim and Final Reports of the Expert Committee on Compensation
and Betterment (Uthwatt), Cmnd (London, ).
73
R. Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan (London, ), p. .
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zone.
74
The Plan had less to say about the city centre but war damage, affecting
many major British cities, provided a new arena for public policy which consid-
erably aided planning’s claim to be central to economic as well as social and aes-
thetic life.
75
The concept of large-scale redevelopment arose from concerns of the s,
but the treatment of both redevelopment and city centres also linked back to the
longer planning tradition. Aided by the fortuitous manner in which the Barlow
Report fed immediately into policy formation at the beginning of the war,
‘mainstream’ planning ideas were carried forward by the Reith Ministry, the
Dudley Report and the London Plans.
76
John Forshaw and Abercrombie’s plan
for the County of London () thus envisaged much lower densities of rede-
velopment than had been current before the war, and a wider variety of land
uses within a framework of communities and neighbourhoods. Mixed develop-
ment, later to take on quite different connotations, was originally conceived in
order to allow the house back into redevelopment alongside the flat.
77
These
trends were not always supported by those that had been at the forefront of pre-
war redevelopment. They met with various degrees of resistance in places like
Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow, presaging later conflicts between ‘housers’
and ‘planners’.
78
However, in the short run they prevailed everywhere to some
extent, partly because of the recognised popularity of the house among
working-class populations.
Although land concerns re-emerged in the s, again in a context of plan-
ning, the Second World War was probably the closest occasion on which land
came to occupying a central role in public policy as the point around which ten-
sions between public and private could be resolved. Cheap land, freed from the
economic pressures and spatial constraints of unfettered private ownership, could
it was argued allow a greater variety of land uses and townscapes, and provide a
basis for drawing communities together and expressing their needs in planned
developments. This failed to come about, as it had in the past, because such pol-
icies simply lacked the strength to become a focus of solid public support.
Moreover, while in the face of future uncertainties they had some attraction for
both of the main political parties, they were the primary focus for neither. Far
from land becoming a point around which public and private could be drawn
J.A.Yelling
74
Ibid., pp. –, .
75
N. Tiratsoo, Reconstruction,Affluence and Labour Politics (London, ); J. Hasegawa, Replanning
the Blitzed City Centre (Milton Keynes, ).
76
J. B. Cullingworth, Environmental Planning –, vol. : Reconstruction and Land Use Planning
– (London, ); Ministry of Health, Design of Dwellings (Dudley Report) (London,
); J. H. Forshaw and P. Abercrombie, The County of London Plan (London, ); P.
Abercrombie, The Greater London Plan (London, ).
77
J. A. Yelling, ‘Expensive land, subsidies, and mixed development in London, –’, Planning
Perspectives, (), –.
78
M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower Block (New Haven and London, ).
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together, in key areas of post-war development they were still kept rigidly apart,
notably in housing where the renewed growth of owner-occupation and council
provision continued a major tenure change with important implications for the
division of the ‘unearned increment’. Community planning faded into the back-
ground. A decade after the war, land values were rising rapidly, and were soon
to reach unprecedented heights which some were to ascribe to the unintended
effects of planning itself.
79
This is not to deny that town planning was placed in a quite different position
after the war, and that the act allowed public policy to play a much greater
role than had been the case in pre-war plans. Moreover, many aspects of policy,
such as green belts, new and expanded towns, redevelopment and road plans,
were clearly promoted by wartime planning, and came to a demise together in
the s along with Keynesian economic management. Despite that, what hap-
pened later even in these areas was not a coming to fruition of wartime inten-
tions. Nor can this simply be ascribed to the Conservative governments from
and the ending of the tax on development gain. The continuance of a
Labour government would probably have seen a closer realisation of the plans,
but many significant changes had already occurred, as John Cullingworth’s official
history shows.
80
To take only a few examples, collection of betterment within
urban land uses had been abandoned, as had a central planning agency, and
housing subsidies were kept outside the framework of planning. Post-war eco-
nomic and political pressures soon produced a ‘return to reality’ which limited
more radical movement from pre-war positions, while the impact of the planning
tradition derived from the formative period before was further attenuated.
81
Land, property and planning
79
P. Hall et al., The Containment of Urban England, vols. (London, ).
80
Cullingworth, Environmental Planning.
81
N. Bullock, ‘Ideas, priorities and harsh realities: reconstruction and the LCC, –’, Planning
Perspectives, (), –; Tiratsoo, Reconstruction; Yelling, ‘Expensive land’.
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