find the cleared and cleaned up spaces a relief. In them we have hope for the future, opportunities to be taken or lost.’ 13 It was apparent from soon after the worst of the Blitz that the government was broadly backing, albeit with considerable financial nervousness, major reconstruction in the most badly affected cities, so that by the end of the war a series of plans for the future of those cities had been published and/or exhibited. 14 Southampton was to have a wholly new road system and city centre; Portsmouth a rather more modest redevelopment; Bristol a heavily zoned new city centre, including an ambitious new shopping precinct in the Broadmead area; and Hull (through the joint efforts of Abercrombie and Lock) a fairly ambitious redevelopment that included segregated industrial zones and a new, semi-pedestrianised shopping area.
Abercrombie – in his mid-60s, exceedingly well connected, author of the hugely influential textbook Town and Country Planning (1933) that saw virtually no role for preservation, even in the most historic cities – was also persuaded, for a not especially generous fee of 250 guineas, to submit a plan for Plymouth. The doyen of town planning did not disappoint. ‘The outworn street pattern was totally abandoned, the old Devonport shopping area was swallowed up, and the precinct principle was applied to the civic, business and shopping areas’ is how the planning historian Gordon Cherry has aptly summed up Abercrombie’s 1943 vision for a city where less than a tenth of its pre-war housing stock was irrevocably beyond repair as a result of enemy action. ‘Unified architectural treatment would be introduced. A new central area road system was decided. One monumental feature was provided: a garden parkway from the station to the Hoe constructing a backbone to the whole of central Plymouth.’ It was, Abercrombie himself insisted, the only possible way ‘out of the disasters of war to snatch a victory for the city of the future’. There was little or no local consultation, with all objections overruled. 15
In one blitzed city, even more than Plymouth, the man and the hour came together. ‘Every town should have in its architect’s department a group of town planners . . . Building science is advancing so rapidly that we have no right to build for a thousand years . . . A house should be regarded as permanent only for about thirty years and should then be replaced by an up-to-date one . . . For the good of the community private interests must be subordinated to public ones.’ The speaker was Donald Gibson, City Architect of Coventry, addressing the Royal Society of Arts in early December 1940, less than three weeks after a night’s intense bombardment had destroyed or seriously damaged most of the medieval city centre. Since his appointment a year before the war, he had been working on radical, more or less modernist plans for the city’s future, culminating in May 1940 in a MARS-influenced exhibition on the ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’; but the devastation only six months later created a wholly new opportunity.
As early as February 1941, the city council was able to make the choice between two competing plans for the centre’s redevelopment. One plan (by Ernest Ford, the City Engineer) emphasised continuity and traditional street patterns; the other, Gibson’s, envisaged an entirely new centre that, set inside an inner ring road, would boast not only impressive – and culturally improving – municipal facilities (including library, civic hall, museum, adult educational institution, and school of art and art gallery) surrounded by large open spaces but also a largely pedestrianised shopping precinct of six- or seven-storey buildings. Perhaps emboldened by Gibson’s appeal – ‘Let it not be said by future generations that the people of Coventry failed them, when the ideal was within their reach’ – the Labour-controlled council voted 43 to 6 in his
Abercrombie – in his mid-60s, exceedingly well connected, author of the hugely influential textbook Town and Country Planning (1933) that saw virtually no role for preservation, even in the most historic cities – was also persuaded, for a not especially generous fee of 250 guineas, to submit a plan for Plymouth. The doyen of town planning did not disappoint. ‘The outworn street pattern was totally abandoned, the old Devonport shopping area was swallowed up, and the precinct principle was applied to the civic, business and shopping areas’ is how the planning historian Gordon Cherry has aptly summed up Abercrombie’s 1943 vision for a city where less than a tenth of its pre-war housing stock was irrevocably beyond repair as a result of enemy action. ‘Unified architectural treatment would be introduced. A new central area road system was decided. One monumental feature was provided: a garden parkway from the station to the Hoe constructing a backbone to the whole of central Plymouth.’ It was, Abercrombie himself insisted, the only possible way ‘out of the disasters of war to snatch a victory for the city of the future’. There was little or no local consultation, with all objections overruled. 15
In one blitzed city, even more than Plymouth, the man and the hour came together. ‘Every town should have in its architect’s department a group of town planners . . . Building science is advancing so rapidly that we have no right to build for a thousand years . . . A house should be regarded as permanent only for about thirty years and should then be replaced by an up-to-date one . . . For the good of the community private interests must be subordinated to public ones.’ The speaker was Donald Gibson, City Architect of Coventry, addressing the Royal Society of Arts in early December 1940, less than three weeks after a night’s intense bombardment had destroyed or seriously damaged most of the medieval city centre. Since his appointment a year before the war, he had been working on radical, more or less modernist plans for the city’s future, culminating in May 1940 in a MARS-influenced exhibition on the ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’; but the devastation only six months later created a wholly new opportunity.
As early as February 1941, the city council was able to make the choice between two competing plans for the centre’s redevelopment. One plan (by Ernest Ford, the City Engineer) emphasised continuity and traditional street patterns; the other, Gibson’s, envisaged an entirely new centre that, set inside an inner ring road, would boast not only impressive – and culturally improving – municipal facilities (including library, civic hall, museum, adult educational institution, and school of art and art gallery) surrounded by large open spaces but also a largely pedestrianised shopping precinct of six- or seven-storey buildings. Perhaps emboldened by Gibson’s appeal – ‘Let it not be said by future generations that the people of Coventry failed them, when the ideal was within their reach’ – the Labour-controlled council voted 43 to 6 in his
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