VILLAGE PORTRAIT .
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
PLANS for the reconstruction of our towns have been much in the public eye. London, Plymouth, Coventry, Portsmouth, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Exeter—these are a few only of the great English centres of population for whose welfare schemes have been elaborated. The Government's programme for the building of new towns—towns which should not merely shelter their inhabitants from the weather at the beginning and end of a long daily journey to work, but should provide them near their homes with employment and with resources for a full community life—has caught the public imagination. Mr. Lewis Mumford, broadcasting last month on his arrival from America, declared : " There are many reasons for coining to Britain today ; but the chief of them, at least for those of us vtho are interested in the development of cities, is that you seem on the verge of the most important change that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution."
But the village? Those of us who life in the country have been wondering if the humbler but no less real needs of thousands of English, Scottish and Welsh villages were being jostled out of the queue. We have sometimes suspected, that the powers that be thought of villages as only towns writ small, and supposed that Sir Patrick Abercrombie's plan for Greater London or Mr., Thomas Sharp's design for Exeter need only be reduced to miniature scale for the solving of village problems. We recalled words written by Sir Patrick himself more than ten years ago: " Village survey . . . . forms an all-important part of the preliminaries of rural works. The village and its parish are so entirely the basis of rural England that a new Domesday survey should be put in hand as complementary to the broader aspects of regional survey." With that instinct for self-help which survives better in villages than in towns we have wondered whether we could not ourselves make some contribution to the work of the planning authorities., To those interested in village planning a modest exhibition of charts, drawings and a model entitled Village Survey, which Mr. C. S. Orwin opened on Wednesday at the London Housing Centre in Suffolk Street, and which will remain on view there till October r2th, is of lively interest. The Leverhulme Trustees appreciated that there did not exist, at least in published form, any survey and plan for a village that provided adequate guidance to those who in 1946 were pondering the future of their communities. They therefore commissioned Mr. Cecil Stewart, architect and town- planner, to undertake the survey and replanning of a village. They left to him the choice of f. suitable site. He chose the Kentish village of Sutton-at-Hone. This village makes no claim to be one of those which Mr. Goodhart-Rendel has happily 'described as "stuffed" beauty spots, but its neighbourhood is rich in the memorials of history and pre-history. A few miles away the Swanscombe skull was discovered in a gravel pit that demonstrates the primaeval story of the Thames. Close to the village a great Roman villa lies buried again by a tangle' of thorns and briars ; not far from it two Saxon graveyards have been unearthed. It includes, in a house still inhabited part of a chapel which the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem built more than loo years ago.
Of these distinctons, however, Sutton-at-Hone is 'not today very conscious. It is a homely, workaday community of some 85o persons, occupying about 250 dwellings. Less than 20 miles from London, it combines agrkulture with some industrial occupations. Much of its older housing is out-of-date. It feels_ the pull of neighbouring town life. It has a road problem that is likely to be made more acute by the opening of the Purfleet tunnel under the Thames. It expects within the next ten years some interesting school developments. Meantime it is conscious of such immediate practical needs as a recreation ground and a new village hall.
Mr. Stewart concentrated first on a survey. The exhibition in- cludes a rough preliminhry plan for the village's future, but today we are invited to inspect not that final plan but the methods and results of his survey. He enlisted the help of a geographer, Mr. A. E. Smaiks ; of a sociologist, Mr. Dennis Chapman, and of an economist, Dr. Marian Bowley. He felt, too, that no good plan could be made without the co-operation of the villagers themselves. His work began with a preliminary assembling of already available but scattered information, and was mostly concerned with the set- ting of the village rather than the village itself. Then he presented the information and outlined his further programme to a well- attended meeting in the village hall. He spent a morning in the school, questioned the boys and girls, and arranged an essay com- petition on My Plan for my Village which yielded much instructive and some amusing information about the outlook of the rising generation. His investigation culminated in a house-to-house visi- tation of enquiry, by young women graduates. Mr. Stewart will now complete his plan after further 'consultation with the village.
The Leverhulme Trustees have made possible a pioneer job of unmistakable value. If, like other pioneer jobs, it excites sugges- tions for future improvements in technique, so much the better. This experimental survey has been financed from a source which could not, of course, undertake a similar review of the thousands of other villages which need replanning. But there are at least many elements in this experiment which villages could provide for themselves—through Village Institutd and other adult organisa- tions, through Boy Scouts and Girl Guides and schoolchildren. Any village which organised even a partial survey on these lines would be supplying, for professional treatment by its town-plan- ning authority, valuable raw material that would not otherwise be secured. It would also be contributing to that new Domesday Book for which Sir Patrick Abercrombie pleaded.
The old Greek injunction " Know thyself " applies to villages as well as to men. It has, moreover, many village applications outside the field of planning, not least in village schools. The Women's Institutes recognised its virtue when they organised last summer an essay competition in village history. It implies that even a modest survey, wisely planned and locally conducted, would prove exceed- ingly interesting to those who undertook it. It would show their village to themselves and their neighbours in new and often un- expected lights. I suspeft that you could count on the fingers of gne hand the number of village-dwellers in the country who have in their minds as full and interesting a portrait of their community as Mr. Stewart's work has painted for those who live in Sutton-at-Hone.
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