Paul Waterhouse

“ In so doing, I do not forget that I am lecturing in Manchester, a city with problems of her own and a history of her own, nor do I forget that I was born here, but I find several points which make London the most useful field for the illustration of the historical phenomena which we desire to study. It is, in the first place, a town of which most Englishmen know something; it is, with few exceptions, the most interesting town in the world, and as regards the problem of expansion in area and in population it has no rivals on this globe. ”

“ Moreover Wren was unconscious of the future growth of London and imagined a concentration of functions which subsequent history has proved impossible.
We may understand from this illustration that even a supreme mind with a mass of data to work upon cannot form a scheme for a city which will hold its own as long as the buildings he erects endure. The very stones that Wren handled are smiling down on the accumulated facts which would have impaired his scheme in eight generations.
No one knows to what size a city will grow. ”

“ Nothing in town-planning is impossible. I temper this by the single observation that there are some gradients which neither horse or motor can climb.
To leave alone is best—to do great things is noble, to do little things is wasteful. ”

“ Are we then to conclude that town-planning is merely a useless aspiration, and that its systems, if it has any, are so uncertain of general application as to be nugatory? Not so. For, to take an analogy from another craft, the system of man patching, which we call medicine, is justified by the dire necessity which says man must be healed or he dies. Similarly the study of ideal perfection in towns so far from being merely visionary, or positively mischievous is actually needful. For crises occur in the life of towns when action must be taken, decisive and costly action. ”

“ One of the main duties of the town planner in an old city is to make sure that no disrespect is done to anything which is old and beautiful or historic. And this avoidance of disrespect means, not merely preservation, but such an arrangement of the new surroundings as will insure that these treasures of the past may look their best and may seem at home in their surroundings. ”

“ The aim is indubitable, but does the method, does the craft exist?
Please believe me, I speak in no mockery of town-planning, and if I am about to suggest to you that it is impossible to lay down a general code or science which under that name can be said to have universal application, it is not because I ignore the need of such a science but because I have some facts to put before you which show how impossible it is to secure that uniformity of circumstance upon which alone a science can be built. ”

“ There are, for example, many cases of suggested street widening which should not be met by any dealings with the street in question at all, but rather by an entire relief of that street by the substitution of a parallel route. Particularly is this the case where a street, which has been the high street of an old suburban village, finds itself absorbed into a town. The ruthless widening of such a highway results as a rule, in much wanton destruction of old-world beauty and in a damage to property and consequent expense, which the adoption of a parallel route would altogether have avoided. ”

“ If a man of comprehensive ability and artistic skill sets himself to replan an existing city, reserving as fixed data the main, natural characteristics, such as rivers and hills, and all old buildings of architectural worth, as well as main roads of egress, he will probably be astonished to find how closely the existing conditions and disposition lend themselves to the possibility of readjustment to fit in with his model scheme, and what very simple changes will suffice to bring the real within reach of the ideal. ”

“ But we may relieve our minds with the thought that the entire rebuilding of Manchester or of London is as unlikely as it is undesirable. A physician is not, thank heaven, called upon to invent a new man, but he does keep before his mind's eye a vision of what he believes to be the perfect man and is able, for a fee, to do a good deal of useful work in patching up imperfect humanity.
The town-planner's work in old towns is similarly a remedial rather than a creative work. ”

“ Every town, however small its beginnings, and however large its developments is the subject of its own servants, I mean its roads.
In every kingdom certain towns establish themselves early in history as road centres. They may have sprung up at the junction of cross roads already existing as routes to other more important places—or they may as in the case of London be the object, the main and primary object, to which the roads tend.
At all events there came a time, early in our civilization, when London was a comparatively small centre of a comparatively large road radiation. ”

“ Put in another way it may be said that the town planner is playing a game of which the rules may in three or four generations be completely changed—but in order to make a move in that game at all, and move he must, he should at least know the rules as they are in his day. Again a city must not on account of its slow growth and many designers be denied that title to artistic worth which we allow to a cathedral that has taken four centuries in building. ”

“ A city has a corporate architecture, a cumulative architecture, no less important than the architecture of its component houses though hitherto that architecture has been disregarded, the only tribute to its very existence being the coinage of the word town-planning. The nobler word town architecture is as yet not come into use. A city is or should be a work of art. ”

“ And these academic exercises, even the vision of a replanned London are not really without their uses. The logical result of the considerations we have just been entertaining is undoubtedly that, except for the necessary building of new buildings which should wherever possible be confined to the replacing of old structures that are of no artistic or historic value, it would be better in the case of all old towns to do nothing whatever in the way of innovation except under dire necessity. ”

“ I venture to state that the town-planner consulted by a corporation will always, before sanctioning a widening, consider one or two important alternatives. In the first place, it is a fact that there are many streets in which the obstruction is brought about by causes altogether other than narrowness. Constantly it is due to cross traffic from side streets. In some cases, where they are of importance, it will generally be better boldly to face the possibility of forming a viaduct so that one road may pass over the other. ”

“ In a very large town it is of course important to secure a certain possibility of progressing diagonally, otherwise the journey from place to place may unduly resemble a knight's move on the chess-board, but if I were planning anew a town of fair size, I would certainly retain a strict parallelogram formation for its central area and start the radiation at a quarter of a mile or half a mile from the focus. ”

“ The sinuosities of the Thames are constantly forgotten, and it is a perfect marvel to me that hardly anyone recognises the importance of the fact that in crossing Westminster Bridge, though we thereby approach the south side of the Thames, we are travelling due east, so that a continuation of the line of the bridge would produce a road capable of leading almost direct from Westminster to the city. ”

“ If King Street, for example, were to end abruptly in the kind of landscape in which people hunt foxes and shoot partridges, both elements, the rural and the urban, would suffer from the contact simply because the town folk wouldn't and couldn't put up with the country roads, and the green fields and hedges wouldn't survive the friction, if I may so put it, of the citizens. In other words, a town of a certain density of population necessarily defies and defiles the immediate proximity of the country. ”

“ We do not on such grounds bar the claim of a cathedral reared in successive ages; and so when supreme difficulties of traffic, or supreme ugliness, or obvious inconvenience, or manifest social changes call imperatively for some remodelling in the city's features the aid should be sought of some artist who has made a study of the science of town-planning. It is clear, is it not, that no real work of art can be effected, either by a body of laymen elected mainly on political or economic grounds, or by an expert whose training and skill are directed to problems of a purely engineering nature. ”

“ Town-planners are too ready to assume as data, facts which should not be so assumed. Indeed it would be a good rule in the logic of the town-planner to be always ready to suspect his major premiss, and in particular to increase his suspicion when the major premiss in question is one of long standing and of venerable antiquity. ”

“ Three generations ago then Islington was an isolated village becoming a country residence for city men, its next stage was to become a suburb, from that it rapidly became part of outer London, now it is indistinguishable from London itself, but has undergone, like other absorbed townships a civic revulsion towards independence by promotion to Borough-hood. ”

“ The enterprise which keeps a town healthy and bright and gay would not suffer a gradual despair on its outward course, if it could feel that it had on this circumference a region of attractive and residential importance rather than a gradual collapse into the wilderness. ”

“ In fact there come times when it is obvious that something must be done and it is quite clear that however imperfect may be the science of town-planning and however liable it may be to fallibility in its methods of forecasting the future, that science must be called in to guide the measures for which necessity is clamorous. ”

“ Yet experience shows first that towns tend, whatever their originator or their guardians may prescribe, to take matters into their own hands, secondly that with the utmost forethought no man can plan a large town ab initio, nor can even a large section of a town be replanned with the certainty of acceptance by posterity; and thirdly that large towns are always changing the units of their formation, old houses give way to new, and one district gives way socially to another. ”

“ In the provision of open spaces, heed should be given to the possibilities connected with the modern idea of circuit roads. Such roads may easily be planned in most cities in such a course, as to combine with the required avenue a broad girdle of almost rural woodland and meadow which would go far to mitigate the unpleasant relapse through gradations of ugliness, which forms the outer ring of most English towns. ”

“ It might, if its proximity to the centre were rather closer than that proposed by the Board of Trade, lie outside the suburb which has exchanged its residential decadence for commercial importance and inside the district of the better class suburb. It ought not, therefore, to be very difficult to devote a good portion of this property to rural development. The land might still have a financial value, for it is more than possible that an enactment restricting the number of houses per acre might lead to the formation of a rural suburb of greater worth than the existing inferior house property. ”

“ Two simple and obvious opportunities for the town planner's skill are the removal or alleviation of traffic difficulties and the provision of open spaces.
In the first of these exercises he must always beware of assuming that the problem set before him is the proper subject for his attack. Frequently, a mere symptom is mistaken for the disease, and it is by no means certain that a corporation's idea of its own needs is correct. ”

“ The word town-planning at least implies a certain aim, can it be said also to imply a definite and scientific method? History and facts seem to answer No. For though one may argue that as the building of a house requires the forethought of an architect, so, but in a much greater degree, does a city demand a designer. ”

“ The congestion and the waste of time, brought about at large centres of cross-traffic by the waiting of east and west for north and south and the returning of the compliment which goes on all day long, is enormous. ”

“ The fate of the shop centres is another symptom worth notice. Villages in process of absorption naturally grew. In fact, it was their growth that assisted the absorption by joining the ever increasing village group to the town group. The increased population made increased trade, and the village of Hackney for example turned its High Street into a bustling thoroughfare of shops. Though brought into closer touch with London it nevertheless developed its own trade resources and became a trade centre. ”

“ At such times the town's adviser, though he knows that his scheme of perfection may become imperfection to his grandsons, must act upon that scheme, for it is his best, and there is at least a chance that it may have in it the elements of permanent beauty and permanent worth. ”

“ I know one town in England where the shops suddenly end and the country suddenly begins. One sees many such abroad. But in England what do we generally find? By degrees, as you leave the town you discover that the good, gay shops give way to meaner shops mixed with mean residences. ”