THE SIZE OF LONDON
By SIR ERIC MACFADYEN
DO people want to live on top of one another? The L.C.C. seem to assume that we do, to judge from their 50-years plan for London. In many ways the plan is a fine performance: notably far-sighted, imaginative, and bold in its handling of the traffic problem, its treatment of areas in which various specific functions have become localised, its aim to recover the lost identity of London's boroughs. It promises to restore us our " sweet Thames " flowing through a London which must strike the eye of a stranger as architecturally worthy of the world's greatest city.
But London has to be lived in as well as looked at ; on the human side it is the life of some four million people which forms the subject of this plan. And the grasp, and sweep of vision which it shows in its engineering and architectural innovations, froth the Angel to the Elephant, arc sadly lacking when it comes to the human values involved. The lawyers are to have their " precinct " and the legislators theirs ; so, too, is the University ; but what about London's children?
If the slate were clean, how should we go about planning the area covered by this plan, which comprises nearly half of all "London "? I suppose we should decide how many people it could accommodate in comfort ; how much room was wanted to provide them with homes ; how much should be given up to the factories and businesses in which they were to work ; to public open spaces and public buildings of one kind and another ; the geographical distribution of these various claimants on the available space ; and the lay-out of the roads and railways to carry the resulting traffic. If we reverse the order and come to the people last we may find we have a quart to put into a pint pot, as the L.C.C. attempt to do.
Hamburg and a round dozen of Ruhr towns have been presented with slates which the R.A.F. has wiped clean enough in all con- science ; and if I know anything of German thoroughness the chance which the fortune of war has given them will not be missed. Fifty years hence are our .grandchildren to say that Germany snatched victory out of defeat and evolved a sane and worthy design for living for its urban masses, while London's opportunity pro- duced only the substitution of new slums for old?
On the data on which the L.C.C. work the most overcrowded boroughs, even after shedding a proportion of their population to West and North-West London, will still have 136 persons to the net acre. Less than one-third of the people in these boroughs arc to live in houses ; more than two-thirds are to be put into tenement- flats built up to eight storeys, ten storeys and (to a very small extent) three storeys. And West London is to come off even worse. To take the spill-over from the 136-per-acre areas it is to be rebuilt at a density of zoo souls to the acre—a design not for housing Londoners but for packing herrings.
Multi-storey tenements will have a place no doubt in any com- prehensive scheme of urban reconstruction. They permit of certain amenities which, for a proportion of the population, afford com- pensations to balance their disadvantages. Much credit has been due to the L.C.C. in the past for developing and improving the possibilities of this type of housing. Perhaps one Londoner in ten would prefer a flat ; possibly another one in ten does not much mind. But the L.C.C. plan reveals a flat-complex. A thriving and progressive democracy can be broad-based only on the family home, and flats are no homes for families ; nor is a slum any less a slum for being stood up on end instead of being spread out on the surface.
We are looking to a twentieth-century economy to provide work for all in peace as in war ; the bugbLar of unemployment—if we have the wit—may be replaced by the boon of leisure. When a man has a job, and feels he can expect to keep it, his thoughts and his wife's thoughts can turn to the raising of a family; if the family and not the " only child " is to be our national ideal, parents must be given first some real sense of social security and next the prospect of creating a decent home for their children. In ten-storey flats one's children are a nuisance to one's neighbours and to themselves. Even the pram becomes a problem. How many mothers of families have had a hand in making the L.C.C. plan?
A decent home is not only the natural environment for well-bred children but the proper background for the right relationship of their parents. Besides security, and a little leisure not all to be spent in strap-hanging, we need a measure of privacy if we are to be happy, and the chance to keep some 'touch with nature. For most of us a home cannot be complete without a garden. To be within a mile of a park cannot make up for the want of one.
The reason the L.C.C. plan fails so lamentably on its human side is that it starts by begging the main question and assuming that we must keep as many people in London as we can. A penny rate produces L250,000, and a reduction of a million in the county's population would mean a significant reduction in rateable values. But man is not primarily a rate-paying animal ; and our rulers must be brought to conceive of us as human souls, not merely persons per acre. There were 4,536,267 souls in London in 190x, and by 1935 the number had dropped to 4,185,200. All the time out-of- date businesses are losing ground and certain industries becoming obsolete ; and all the time new businesses are rising to the top, new industrial processes being adopted, and new plant being installed to meet their needs. It should be the object of public policy to take advantage of this automatic process and discourage the siting of new establishments where population is over-dense, diverting it to centres where the workers can live and thrive in health and comfort. Population follows industry, and industry is no longer tied by the leg as it was in the pre-electric age. It has acquired and is acquiring a new mobility. Many new trades, and future extensions of old ones, can be sited in new towns where we shall have a clean slate to write on ; there are plenty of successful examples. Or they can be provided for by the expansion of country towns which have the space for expansion and into which they will infuse new life. It is hopelessly retrograde to slow down, as the L.C.C. contemplates doing, the trend which has been operative for more than a genera- tion towards the thinning out of the County area. It must instead be facilitated and speeded up.
The problems of the physical reorganisation of the country as a whole have been comprehensively reviewed by the Barlow, Scott and Uthwatt inquiries ; and the solutions which have emerged command general agreement. They shift-with the replanning of our great cities, not in isolation, but as parts of a plan for England. In London's case the tendencies which resulted in the movement out of the county area of over a third of a million people within 34 years will continue in force, and in fact will operate more power- fully, after the war. Reinforced by deliberate policy they are capable of dispersing a round million of London's congested popula- tion, to their own benefit and to the advantage of the other three millions, in the course of a generation. The bulk of the L.C.C.'s costly ten-storey blocks will then but cumber the grbund. But before the conception of a comprehensive national plan can take shape it will be necessary for the new Ministry of Town and Country
Planning to face up to its responsibilities, and to the implications of a national policy for the functions, and for the finances, of all local authorities. Left to themselves and without guidance as to what is to happen outside their own borders, or how the Govern- ment intends that the cost shall fall as between taxes and rates, the authorities of our great towns will continue to make their plans (for plans they are bound to make, and quickly) in the dark as to many of the essentials, and chaos and confusion will result. If the fact of this L.C.C. plan, so bold where bricks and mortar are concerned, being so inadequate when human needs come in, serves to force this fundamental issue to the front it may yet prove a blessing in disguise.
Previous page
