London: The Biography

Other elements of Abercrombie’s plans were also implemented, most notably in the Town and Country Act of 1947. He proposed that London become a “circular inland city” composed of four rings-the Inner Urban Ring, the Suburban Ring, the Green Belt Ring and the Outer Country Ring. It was a way of containing the “inner city,” as if it were some dangerous or threatening organism which could not be permitted to grow. On most maps it is painted black. It was also important to remove industry and people from this inner darkness as if the act of so doing would render it less dangerous. In order to expedite the migration of a million people another part of Abercrombie’s report suggested the development of new “satellite towns” in the Outer Country Ring. Eight of these were built, and prospered, but the effects upon London itself were not exactly as had been anticipated and planned. As any historian of London might have told the various urban boards, neither schemes nor regulations would be able to inhibit the city. It had been proposed to check its industrial and commercial growth, by siting new industries in the “satellite towns,” but London’s commercial prosperity revived after war. The manufacture of cars, buses, trucks and aeroplanes rose to unprecedented levels; the Port of London handled record numbers of goods, and employed 30,000 men; the “office economy” had restored the City of London so that it experienced a property boom. The population of the capital had dipped slightly, after the dispersal of many of its inhabitants to the suburbs and to the new towns, but the effect was mitigated by sudden and unexpectedly high fertility. Nothing could withstand the ability of the city to rejuvenate itself, and continue its growth.

The new “satellite towns,” such as Stevenage and Harlow and Basildon, became part of an historical process which was also too powerful-too instinctive-to be “reversed.” London has always grown by taking over adjacent towns or villages and cradling them in its embrace. It has been a feature of its development since the eleventh century. And so it overtook the newly created towns.

So powerful is the historical imperative that Patrick Abercrombie and his colleagues were instinctively creating just the same patterns of habitation as the seventeenth-century builders of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden. The “new towns” ineluctably became as much part of London as their predecessors; instead of restricting the size of the city, the postwar planners immeasurably expanded it until the whole south-eastern area became “London.” The Outer Metropolitan Area represented the latest manifestation of urban life, characterised by endless movement. But that was always the condition of London. Whenever the opportunity and location are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments of planners or politicians-except, as we have seen, when they offer further prospects of growth.

The Green Belt did not then act as a barrier or inhibitor of urban life; in certain respects it simply became a large open space fortuitously situated within the outer Metropolitan Region. But it did have one effect, in checking the physical development of the inner city and its immediate suburbs which had to leap over the greenness in order to continue their ineluctable life. Yet as part of this phenomenon there was also a curious sense in which the city recoiled upon itself. It fed back into itself. Deprived of any room for immediate local extension, it began to re-explore its own patterns and possibilities. The construction of the great Inner London estates, the resurgence of interest in restoring old dwellings, the process of “gentrification,” the growth of “loft” living, the whole emphasis upon renewal, are the direct consequences of the Green Belt which forced London and Londoners to look inwards rather than outwards.

The imperatives of London’s history had one further consequence. The postwar planners had also envisaged a great network of orbital and ring roads, with much the same intent and significance as the wide avenues proposed for London by Wren and Evelyn after the Great Fire. But, like the earlier designs, they came to nothing; they were defeated by political pressure, economic constraints, and vehement local opposition. London, almost alone of English cities, has withstood the edicts of rational planners and “highway management”; it was part of its ability successfully to frustrate any general or grandiose plan. General structural change did not, and could not, occur. The city has preserved its character ever since the first Tudor proclamations concerning “town planning” were ignored.