World War II gave us better fire brigade services and better residential schools for the disabled. It also led to the filling in of canal basins when the piles of debris from bombed buildings blocked London streets, and it concentrated ministerial and local government thinking on comprehensive planning for the first time. Only the last of these is a familiar subject.
Suzanne Cowan questions whether the Blitz created public support for new land-use planning legislation. Did this matter, however? The need for town planning had already been shown by Patrick Abercrombie with his plans for Doncaster, Sheffield and the Kent coalfield, and the public had showed they wanted better housing. Arthur Greenwood's Town and Country Planning Bill was emasculated by the succeeding National Government, and as enacted in 1932 was largely permissive. In the 1930s, power lay with a central government anxious to protect traditional interests, although the appointment of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population in 1937 marked a realization that more needed to be done. The war revealed the power of comprehensive planning, and showed that it was possible to think big. But in 1941, articles, interviews and commissioned plans fostered the idea that Britons were fighting for a better future at war's end. Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay show more clearly how little say the public had in the formation of a plan in their more detailed study of Plymouth. In contrast to British cities, the rebuilding of Sendai in Japan was rapid, but Junichi Hasegawa reveals a mix of public protest and allegations of corruption, with smart new buildings being erected at the expense of corresponding infrastructure as new roads proved controversial.
Many essays lose their argument in detail, a problem with many of the essays and an unfortunate one since each is only some 10 pages long, including formal introductions and conclusions that add repetition. David Adams and Peter J. Larkham struggle to fit the story of Birmingham's post-war Birmingham into these pages, so that the results of 22 interviews with local residents seem superfluous.
The core essays are those by Catherine Flinn and Mark Clapson, which look respectively at inner city rebuilding and the dispersal of population to new towns and suburbs. Flinn charts the restrictive practices of the Investment Programmes Committee from 1947 in regulating capital investment, mainly through the allocation of building materials as an example of government bureaucracy; only after 1952 did the situation ease. This stark picture of administrative procrastination between local and central government was true of most blitzed cities, but does not explain the relatively rapid rebuilding of Plymouth, due perhaps to the drive of the city engineer, James Paton Watson, and the bringing in of commercial clients. Authorities that tried to develop their own buildings for retail and commercial letting, such as Coventry, faced longer delays. Flinn's was the most frustrating essay in terms of length, a bigger story imperfectly truncated – thankfully readers are directed to longer articles by her. Better known is the new town story, where the dispersal of London's working-class population during and after the war was the fulfilment of a longer movement. London's politicians favoured dispersal at the risk of losing power through the loss of their voters, unlike many industrial cities of the north that strenuously built tower blocks to keep the population within its boundaries.
This is a curious collection of short essays drawn from the byways of archival research that were first presented as papers at a conference held at the University of Westminster in 2010. It must have been an exciting event, and the result is very attractively produced. The book serves as a splendid window for talented, often young, historians whose previous works are mainly in journals devoted to history rather than architecture and town planning. Such a wide-ranging group of essays has no obvious market, caught between historians and planners, and with a fascinating yet incongruous essay on the origins of modernism in Japanese architecture, and one on the choice of reconstruction or new building facing those rebuilding West Germany's town halls. The Japanese government declared no less than 115 ‘blitzed cities’, in contrast to England's seven. What is an appropriate architectural form for conquered countries trying to dispel memories of their recent past? Hugh Clout's article describes the complex problem of rebuilding in Alsace Lorraine, an area of contrasting traditions decimated by ground as well as aerial warfare in 1940 and again in 1944–45. Strasbourg and parts of Alsace chose the reinstatement of old properties rather than new buildings, while prefabricated dwellings in Lorraine marked the revival of the coalfields as the French economy was re-established. Despite post-war reconstruction in France being centralized at ministerial level, unlike in Germany, the results were remarkably varied. Variety is indeed the spice of this collection.
