Martin S. Briggs

“ It is hardly to be expected that the slave-drivers of early Victorian days would produce buildings of any interest, and in fact the great gaunt prison-like boxes that desecrate so many Yorkshire and Lancashire hillsides are a very fair expression of that greedy scramble for money that has caused such a backwash in our own day. For it must not be forgotten that some of the most beautiful places in England were violated in this way. ”

“ Whether from the point of view of appearance, of health, or of mere business, town-planning is the only national method of providing for the future.
It is futile to write letters to The Times about lost opportunities: common-sense would have saved the situation in nearly every case, for town-planning is idealised common-sense. People who have bought a house in a half-developed suburb wake up one morning to find a shop rising on the opposite side of their road. They pack up their furniture and flit to another half-built district a mile further out ”

“ Even a hay-cart presents such a complete obstacle that one or other vehicle has to back till the road widens, and in places the blockage caused by the charabanc forces a cyclist or a pedestrian to climb up on to the steep grassy bank while the monster with its cargo of yelling hooligans pushes past him. Either roads must be widened almost everywhere or motor vehicles of all types must be abolished, and, as the latter alternative is out of the question, we must accept the former as inevitable. ”

“ There are other critics who say that architecture is so much a reflection of social conditions that a beautiful village could only [24] have been produced by a happy and contented people.
It is a question whether such a village is, or ever has been, specially attractive to the eyes of its inhabitants, if indeed they have the ability to consider such things at all. Admiration for the beauty of the countryside seems to be a very modern cult, if we are to take our great writers as typical of their time, though in fact they were usually ahead of their time. ”

“ We have hardly grown accustomed yet to the great new arterial roads, though several are already in use. They seem to me to represent one of our highest achievements in civil engineering as they sweep majestically through cuttings and over embankments with an uninterrupted width of a hundred feet or more. In some ways they are the biggest thing we have in England, out of [68] scale with our doll’s-house villages and landscapes, and out of character with our little winding lanes. ”

“ Yet it was unthinkable that this lovely district, the cradle of our race and the playground of half London, should be allowed to become a second Black Country. So everything that can be done will be done to preserve Canterbury and Sandwich and other priceless relics of antiquity, to save trees, to prevent the blackening of the fields by smoke and the disfigurement of the landscape by tall chimneys, above all to avoid any repetition of those squalid black villages that have driven miners to desperation in other colliery [73] districts. ”

“ Thus in a properly planned area there is no need for large sums to be paid out of the rates for compensation when a road has to be made or widened, because the land for the road has been earmarked in advance. A man who erects a shop in a new street runs no risk of having made an error of judgment in selecting his site: he knows that this will be the main shopping street and no other. Thus town-planning is good business, but like many other movements for reform its inception was due to far-sighted [72] dreamers. ”

“ An endeavour has been made in the preceding paragraphs to picture the unspoiled English village as it appears to the ordinary intelligent observer of to-day. No attempt has been made to glorify village life, past or present. There are some people who see nothing but cause for regret in the invasion of the villages by what we call “progress,” but for the most part those people are not sons of the soil: they are either “week-enders” or people of comfortable incomes who have retired to a cottage orné amid congenial surroundings. ”

“ However, it has not yet caught hold of the popular imagination, and, in the recent case of the East Kent coalfield, where, if ever, there was a crying need for its adoption, the imaginative enterprise of some leading Men of Kent seems to have started the movement which made it possible. This last example shows admirably how town-planning may be utilised to save the countryside. In one sense East Kent could not be saved: coal had been found there, and was too valuable to be neglected, for, after all, we cannot afford to throw away any of our natural resources at the present time. ”

“ A competent lecturer accustomed to such an audience, avoiding like the plague all sentimental talk about the glory of country life, might explain the beauty of old bridges and mills, the simple skill of old craftsmen, in such a way that his hearers would be less anxious to substitute suburban vulgarities for everything that their rude forefathers of the hamlet had made. ”

“ Otherwise the railway has not greatly defaced the landscape as a whole, for there are still large tracts of country where one can be out of sight and sound of it, and it is not so ubiquitous as the modern motor-car. Many village railway-stations and cottages are inoffensively designed, and in the “stone” districts of England are usually built of local materials, but their appearance suffers as a rule from the dead hand of central and standardised control. The habit of erecting enormous hoardings in [31] the fields bordering a railway must go far back into the nineteenth century. ”

“ Poverty stalked through the little cottages, many of which were unfit for human habitation. The cruel game-laws did not prevent the rapid increase of poaching, and the woods were sprinkled with man-traps and spring-guns, which sometimes claimed a gamekeeper for victim instead of a poacher.
And, while economic conditions were rapidly abolishing the old self-supporting village community, changes in the means [28] of transport brought machine-made goods to its doors, thus destroying at one blow the independence of the village craftsman and the rustic character of village architecture. ”

“ English individualism, sometimes an asset, becomes almost a curse when it interferes, as it still does, with nearly everything that can be done to save the English countryside from complete uglification. Consideration of the possibilities of town-planning in this direction must be deferred to our last chapter; for the moment let us consider one or two characteristics of nineteenth-century town growth.
Almost without exception, any man could buy a plot of land anywhere, and build on it anything he wanted. ”

“ There is a social, even a moral, reproach implied by the sight of a tumbledown cottage; and to the present writer’s mind a ruined church is as much inferior to a perfect church as a dead dog is to a live one. Nobody who really loves architecture can really love ruin ”

“ ON every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its steady progress, rapid as it has been. ”

“ Even if control were administered on a county basis, there are small counties in England where it would be difficult to enlist a committee of men whose decisions would be readily accepted by the bigwigs of the architectural profession. It seems to me that a very carefully drafted scheme of control might be organised for most of the large cities and perhaps half the counties of England, though even then the situation would bristle with difficulties, but for the more scattered districts—where at least an equal number of mistakes is being made—the problem seems insoluble. ”

“ Similarly, it is idle to expect that a modern factory building should be erected to harmonise perfectly with rural surroundings: one can only ask that its designer may bear in mind the spirit of the place, and treat it as tenderly as circumstances permit. ”

“ This is one of the ways in which town-planning can serve the nation.
The development of a modern town is inevitably centrifugal; it spreads and sprawls outwards along the main roads into the country unless that tendency be checked. Every mile that it grows outwards means a few minutes’ extra time for travelling to and from work, congestion increases at the centre, and the country—as a place for recreation—is driven further and further away. ”

“ Occasionally a manufacturer like Sir Titus Salt coquetted with the idea of a rational lay-out for a town, but no scheme got very far until the idealist founders of Bournville and Port Sunlight inaugurated a new school of thought, proving effectually that good housing was not necessarily bad business.
[43] At the present time, when authorities on town-planning have long made it clear that orderly development is both desirable and practicable, the haphazard growth of suburbs into the country is a deplorable and even a painful sight to every intelligent person. ”

“ It is one of the brightest spots in the history of English progress, but it has not been sufficient to stem the rush of ersatz building that followed the War.
For it is the bungalow craze, with all that it now implies, which has most seriously damaged the appearance of rural England during the last eight years. There is nothing inherently unpleasant in the bungalow type of house. Properly designed and constructed, it may be made a thing of beauty harmonising perfectly with its surroundings. ”

“ Old bridges, for example, are altogether unsuited to heavy and fast motor-traffic. Often built askew with the line of a main road, they are nearly always very steep, very narrow, and, though often sturdy in appearance, are incapable of bearing the weight of a heavy lorry and trailer moving with the speed of a railway train. Here again is a problem requiring solution. Some people would attempt to adapt the old bridge to modern needs, others prefer an entirely new structure placed parallel with the old one, and, of course, the third alternative is complete demolition. ”

“ To realise what has happened, let us put ourselves in the place of an Englishman who is now returning home after a sojourn of twenty years in some remote Eastern outpost of our Empire. Imagine him as a sensitive observer like Doughty or Kinglake, a man who has learned to appreciate the savage beauty of the Arabian desert, the very antithesis of his own land. ”

“ But in a town-planned district an area is set apart for dwelling-houses, another for shops, another for factories. The position of each area is determined by local conditions, by the “lie of the land,” by the prevailing wind, and by the situation of railways and roads. There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. This branch of town-planning is called “zoning.” Sites are reserved for municipal buildings, for schools, churches, cinemas and all the other requirements of our complex life. Roads are planned wide where heavy traffic is anticipated, narrow elsewhere. ”

“ He looks forward to passing through Lenham, Charing, and Harrietsham—three beautiful villages on the main road—but as each is approached his car swerves along the new racing-track and thus avoids the village High Street, rejoining the old main road, widened beyond recognition, a little farther [10] on. He passes through a great cutting gashed through the chalk. Felled trees lie by the road, old walls are pulled down, all bends are straightened out, everything is cleared away to allow the cars and charabancs to roar through the countryside. But is it countryside any longer? ”

“ On the whole, advertising is becoming more artistic, possibly more restrained. But house-agents continue to be terrible sinners in this respect. Close to my home is an avenue, still miraculously preserving its beauty, though surely doomed. ”

“ Probably most young people now employed in remote villages and on farms would give their skin to get away from what they regard as the monotony of rural life, and one must sympathise with that view. The introduction of wireless and cinemas will make their existence less irksome, and the phenomenal increase of motor-bus facilities allows them to travel cheaply and frequently to the nearest town, with its shops and bright streets. ”

“ Occasionally the jerry-builder has anticipated us here, and has erected some terrible Victorian nightmare of a shop right up to the old building-line of the historical cottages that he has demolished. In such a case the children of the Petrol Age may be able to expiate the sins of their fathers by pulling down that shop. But more often there is a building of real merit standing at the very bottleneck through which the procession of traffic has to squeeze its way, such as the old church at Barnet or the Whitgift Hospital at Croydon ”

“ Too scattered, too cowed, and too poor to organise a successful revolt, many of the villagers found their consolation in the little barn-like chapels erected by the Primitive Methodists and other Nonconformist bodies in the early part of the century. Usually severe and uncompromising, often ugly, these buildings represented a revolt against the partnership of squire and parson with its iron grip on village life. ”

“ As time passes we may hope to witness the disappearance of the hideous sheds and huts that survive to remind us of the War, now so long ended.
Apart from national and municipal architecture, the design of which must be assumed to be in competent hands, there is a great deal of building carried out by large corporate bodies who have it in their power to insist [79] on good design, and above all on design which accords with local surroundings. Among these are railway companies, banks, “multiple” shops, and brewery companies. ”

“ How it may be effected with the minimum of damage to the beauty of our countryside will be discussed in the next chapter. England has not yet sunk to the level of the Western States, where it is a simple matter to shift a barbed-wire fence a few yards back on each side of the furrows that do duty for a road, and where the iron or wooden shacks that constitute a “home” may readily be wheeled to a new site on the prairie. ”