VIEW FROM THE ROAD: UPDATING TOWNSCAPE

(LECTURE TO THE SEVENOAKS SOCIETY, 7 October 2020)

VIDEO INTRODUCTION

Peter Davey, Editor of the Architectural Review, was absolutely right when he pointed out that “when architecture is dominated by object buildings and urbanism by traffic engineers, Townscape’s humanism and respect for context deserves re-appraisal”. When your broadband is losing its connection more frequently whilst we, as grandparents, are given ever shorter time we can spend with our grandchildren, E. M. Forster’s dystopian tale The Machine Stops(1909) becomes frighteningly alive as the world all over begins to “feel” the same. Vashti, the heroine of this tale, can only speak to her son via the Machine’s audio-visual system. But thanks to the advances of science, she no longer needed to travel for Peking where her son now lived, for it looked pretty much like Shrewsbury.

But the leviathan, where she lives underground, begins to malfunction as the few remaining technicians, that had serviced this great Machine for so long, begin to die and her world begins to crumble as few know how to maintain the failing parts of the Machine anymore.

This stark tale was written between the publication of A Room with A View (1908) and Howard’s End (1910), both novels with their warnings of a future with roads packed by cars. A similar threat to the one posed Charles Robert Ashbee, resident of Godden Green (and where he had met his wife, Janet Forbes, in the late 1890s), in the last twenty years of his life (slides 63 and 64) when confronted with plans to run a by-pass through the grounds of Knole Park in the 1920s. His response was to organise the Sevenoaks and District Council and Town Planning Association in 1924. Their fight was successful and in a letter to The Times (1927), he wrote “that our lovely countryside is being transformed into a vulgar and unintelligent suburbia”, later, writing to a friend he confides that “the enemy to all architecture is the car”.

William Lethaby (founder of Brixton School of Building where I taught for many years) was the first Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Ashbee and Lethaby were the two architects whom the Americans most wanted to hear speaking about the English Arts and Crafts in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it is another, equally remarkable resident of Sevenoaks, who perhaps opened up the best and worst in our Townscape endeavours after the Blitz (slides 19 and 20). This Sevenoaks resident was Sir Desmond Heap (1907-1998) a British lawyer and expert in town planning law appointed in 1947 as City Solicitor of the Corporation of London. As part of his duties, he was asked by the ministry of Town and Country Planning to provide a guide book to new legislation on town planning. He was responsible for co-ordinating the re-building of the bombed area of the City after the War, which resulted in the “tabula rasa” or “clean slate” planning of these years with the urbanism of Lord Holford, Lesley Martin and others, offering a totally anti-townscape approach to planning over much of which Heap had no aesthetic control.

At this time, pavements were treated as part of the highway and, as such, tables and chairs were not allowed. His proposed changes to the various laws allowing this to happen were hugely beneficial to the humanist and proposed convivial character of townscape. I met Desmond Heap, Lesley Lane, Roy Worskett, etc. when I was working as a Senior Planning Assistant at the Corporation of London in the 1960s. And, from time to time, I found myself sitting next to Desmond Heap on the fast train back from Cannon Street to Sevenoaks where I have lived since 1947 when my father, a former War Correspondent, moved our family down from Manchester when he began working at the News Chronicle after the War.

Desmond Heap was also the man who sold London Bridge to a new town in Arizona, Lake Havasu, in 1967. I was given the piece of stone, illustrated, by the Corporation of London on the eve of my departure to take up the Rome Scholarship in Architecture. The Americans thought they were buying Tower Bridge as, at that time, Fisher Price had a musical box with “London Bridge is Falling Down” illustrated by Tower Bridge!

Kenneth Browne (1918-2009) who became Townscape Editor at The Architectural Review in 1957 and author of West End (1971) and co-author of Civilia the same year, lived in the Sevenoaks area most of his life. Ken had trained as a painter and in the War he was involved in one of the camouflage units, as was Sir High Casson. Qualifying as an architect in the months after the War, he was selected to join a group studying the town planning of the Romans in North Africa led by my later mentor at The British School in Rome, John Ward Perkins. The group included a young Sevenoaks architect, recently qualified at the AA, Herbert Morell, who built a number of inspiring buildings in the area and who is, himself a fine artist and still busy, painting the landscapes and townscapes on his travels.

Colin Boyne (1921-2006), also from the Sevenoaks area was one of the longest serving editors at The Architectural Press. Three years before he died, he wrote that from about 1956 onwards, “Post-war architecture as a social art started to be replaced by a return to the traditional form of architecture as conspicuous display which worried him considerably but delighting architect, client and, of course, the media”. One of Boyne’s finest moments as a journalist was, after the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 (which a college friend of mine, Sam Webb, had already alerted the press to) resulting in a wonderful measured article. The sensitivity and skills of townscape were intended to resolve such problems.