BOOKS OF THE DAY
" When ? "
Town and Country Planning. By Gilbert McAllister and Elizabeth Glen McAllister. (Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d.)
"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time, of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wear- ing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more."
WHAT Charles Dickens thus prophesied to our grandparents has been repeated over and over again down to this very day, and still we murmur " Amen " and still we do nothing adequate towards a realisation of what we well know to be imperative if our civilisation is to progress and prosper, or even to survive. In their Town and Country Planning, Gilbert and Elizabeth McAllister, though again dazzling us with the now certainly attainable might- be, are honest enough to contrast that which is with that which lately was, so that we must in justice admit that if our goal of a rational social setting is still discreditably distant, we are at any rate slowly creeping towards it. None of the obstacles to its attainment are now technical. The planner's ingenuity, time and patience is less needed now for the solution of his problems, which he clearly understands, than for the arousing of public opinion, so that sufficient pressure may ultimately be brought to bear on Parliament to awaken it at last to the most urgent of all the nation's needs after victory, a rationally organised and integrated background to the lives of all of us. The prosecution is very ably and economically conducted, and if, in securing a conviction, in establishing the fact of our criminal lunacy—negligence amounting to fraud—national sabotage—grand larceny—murdei or whatever, the authors seem sometimes a trifle reckless in their reasoning, it really scarcely signifies, as one-half of their evidence that no one can gainsay would amply suffice to condemn the status quo.
Yet if figures and statistics are found to be here and there overworked and used too much as adjectives, it may make pedantic persons suspicious of the whole argument—in this case quite groundlessly. Thus in showing how deleterious both to health and morality is extreme density of population—an admitted fact where most of the other living conditions are also adverse—overcrowding itself is regarded too much in isolation as the root-cause if not the only one, with too little attention paid to the generally low standards in everything that poverty must still connote, whether in food, clothing, equipment, education, medical care, recreation or what you will. Thus, being perverse by nature, I feel provoked into backing myself to house a com- munity more densely than in any condemned slum yet in perfect health, provided no household has less than £5 a week and provided I have carte-blanche as to what I spend on my buildings. Again, I am not persuaded that overcrowding or even poverty engender so much more crime than do easier circumstances, as the police-court statistics would seem to indicate. We in Hamp- stead may have the advantage of a more subtle criminal technique than has Hoz-ton, and certainly less temptation to dishonesty, but are we, I wonder, really so much more virtuous? False income-tax returns, dubious speculations, black-market dealings and so on rarely involve- police-intervention, whereas the less sophisticated, impulsively bashing each other, pilfering or picking pockets receive unremitting police-attention. Also, in demonstrating that "There is abundant proof that the same evil conditions result in stunted mental development," it is stated that in Lewisham scholarships are 8.1 per i,000 children as against 1.2 in congested Finsbury. Here certainly is waste and tragedy anyway, but I suspect that the figures apply not to scholarships won, but to those actually taken up, where there is often a heart-breaking shrinkage due solely to the poverty of the winners' homes. True there are plenty of homes in which study of any sort must be a sheer physical impossibility, such for instance as the notorious "back-to-back houses" that even now Leeds is demolishing at the rate of only 66 per annum, which means that we shall not see the last of them go for another seven centuries!
The authors are so sure as to what is necessary for our salva- tion that their whole thesis is informed by great clarity and directness, the result being a most educative book of singular vigour and readability for all its statistical tables. A single quota- tion must serve to set forth the authors' credo: "The authors have tried to show that it is not possible to deal effectively with the housing-problem without also tackling the town-planning problem. They have tried to demonstrate that the problems of physical environment, whether for industry, commerce or family life, are so closely inter-related as to be capable of solution only by national planning. They beliery that positive planning can be achieved only through a Ministry of Planning operating in turn through regional and local planning organisations.' . . .
One doubt. I rather wonder whether Mr. and Mrs.
McAllister really know the hill-lands as well as they should?
"The Welsh mountains and the Scottish deer forests remain unused except for sport, and so, too, do the Chilterns and the Cotswolds."
Sir George (" Grasslands ") Stapleton would have something to say about our Welsh mountains, where, even in my own native Snowdonia, the ruggedest part of all Wales, sheep abound at every altitude to the almost entire exclusion of grouse, whilst in the Cotswolds, though partridge-driving and fox-hunting still flourish, so, too, most laudably, does farming. As for the Chilterns, if the authors have their way (and maybe they should) I foresee high grazings on the chalk hills there making way for garden-cities, of which mode of living they are
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