Text 12. Plan of the Modern British Town
It is easy to distinguish from one another the market-town, the country town, the industrial town because the main work carried on in each of them is so different. But in any town all these tasks are being carried on, each by at least a few people. Every town has some banks and some offices, some workshops and some police stations, some dealers in local produce.
Most British towns have long histories. They have seen many changes in the way people live and the ways they make a living. And all these changes have brought about changes in the streets and buildings of the town itself.
In every town one can find sections where old buildings have been torn down and replaced by new ones. There are also other sections where the old buildings still stand but are used today for quite new purposes.
In many towns there is some old part which has stood for the main roads leading into the town from the country winding streets and its tiny shops.
The town centre has probably changed more than any other part of the town. It was always the meeting-place for the main roads leading into the town from the country round. But these roads have now become the busiest and most important streets, so they have had to be widened and straightened to carry the traffic. The old narrow streets and the shops which bordered them have all vanished.
In the central area will be found the commercial centre of the town with its banks, insurance offices and business houses, the offices of the local newspaper and the principal theatres and cinemas. As the town grows its centre also swells and pushes out the other quarters of the town.
In most cases the town centre was already established when the first railway was built, so the town station and the tracks leading to it lie just outside the centre. But railways and industries in most towns developed about the same time and each helped in the growth of the other.
Where the town has continued to grow in recent years and has extended its old industry, or developed a new one, the more modern factories will be found still further from the town centre. They are very different from those of the older and more central industrial area.
The new residential districts are between the main roads and away from the factories. Each has its own shopping centre and often its own cinema and playing fields as well. The coming of the motor-bus and the motorcar has made it possible for the residential part of the town to spread far out into the country into suburbs.
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The general use of electricity has enabled the industries to move out too.
Text 13. The Practice of Town Planning
Before attempting to describe the processes of modern Planning in practice it is necessary to inquire with some precision what are its main objects and in what direction it is leading.
The main objects of modern Planning are: Beauty, Health and Convenience. There can be little doubt that beauty should stand first as it is the quality which must run through the whole in order to lift sanitation and engineering to the level of civic design and the dignity of city life. It is of course quite understandable that for strategic reasons the word beauty was hidden under the forbidding chill of «amenity» and placed second in order. If town planning is to be complete and to avoid lopsidedness a just equipoise must be attained between these three.
Nor will beauty without health do. In many of the old towns and villages which we most heartily admire picturesque beauty is to be found, but at the expense of health. There is a gloomy grandeur about the grime of Manchester or the pall of smoke over lower Sheffield, which is comparable to the eruption of a volcano or the burst of a thunderclap, and is thoroughly typical of the strength of these cities. But though smoke may produce wonderful sunsets, we can safely say that beauty which is the cause of a higher death-rate is wrong and must be blown away by the planner at the cost of artistic obloquy or commercial grumbling.
Some of the nineteenth-century Continental Town planning was too much concerned with boulevards and public places and too little with the living conditions behind the fine facades. Conditions as to air space and light were below the English level; and yet the dreariness of our externals has produced more drab urban conditions, and even tended to affect the interior of the houses. One of the chief advantages of the lower density in modern suburban planning has been the possibility of introducing beauty, which here stands for the preservation of trees and greenery, an improved type of domestic architecture, the avoiding of monotony and the planning of the whole site to group houses together, so that besides being individually pleasing they may make attractive compositions. This aspect of beauty is so modest and so comparatively easy to be got that it should not terrify the most hardened philistine.
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Beauty and health stand condemned if they prevent commercial Convenience; and it will be realized that convenience is the most clearly demonstrable of town planning advantages.
Town planning, in a word, intends to make the city in every way a more convenient place to work in, aiming at designing and remodelling its business quarters, manufacturing districts, railway facilities and water front.
Supplement II
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