Annual UK Ireland Planning Research Conference, Oxford Brookes, Sept 10-11th 2014 [for Planning History track] ‘Land planning - F. B Gillie and the elusive middle way’ Michael Hebbert, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, London Introduction The mid-20C marked a high point in the history of Atlantic crossings as rising stars of American planning - Charles M. Haar, John Reps, Lloyd Rodwin, and later, Donald Foley and Daniel Mandelker - travelled to see for themselves the planning system established through the combined effect of the Town & Country (Interim Development) Act 1943, the Distribution of Industry Act 1945, the New Towns Act 1946, the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. Haar’s 1948 visit, funded by a travelling fellowship from Harvard, resulted in his book Land Planning Law in a Free Society; a study of the British Town and Country Planning Act. It was the most perceptive and searching evaluation of Britain’s ‘daring experiment in social control of the environment’ (1951, 1) Haar recognized the fundamental constitutional significance of the reforms: ‘the adoption of the Town and Country Planning Act by the country where a man’s home has long and loudly been proclaimed his castle represents a significant change in Western thought with respect to the balance struck between the individual’s rights in land as against those of society’ (1951, 2). But as Haar saw very clearly, the legislation, the orders, the setting up of legal and administrative machinery and the making of plans, some of them remarkably bold, were no more than the preliminary law job. ‘Paper statutes do not a reality make’ (1951, 169). The next and larger law job would be to implement the new technique of land planning through the reshaping of towns and countryside. Administratively, it would require a new generation of trained and qualified planners - as Lewis Silkin himself acknowledged, ‘the governing factor is that of staff’ (1951, 210). And politically, it would need the understanding and support of British people. Writing with the guidance of Charles Abrams and Catherine Bauer among others, Haar’s ultimate purpose in investigating the 1947 Act was to inform an American readership who he was sure would also at some stage need to reconsider the balance between private property rights and shared public interests in a free society. As with any sphere of public policy, the reinvention of mid-20C town planning depended less on the enactment of statutes than on the everyday bureaucratic practice resulting. 1 Planning in the war years had been dominated by the promissory rhetoric of reconstruction, putting a premium on boldness of vision, architectural visualization and expressive cartography. By the end of the decade the debate was all about planning practice and its implications for rights of private property owners, the operational adequacy of local councils, the seniority or otherwise of the Minister within Whitehall, and the availability or not of personnel competent to calculate land requirements and judge between competing uses. The transition to this new phase of invention was signaled linguistically by an emphasis on land, its use and regulation. Haar’s title and subtitle highlight the recognition that the statutory town and country planning system was essentially about land rights. The entire apparatus sprang from the ministerial duty to secure ‘consistency and continuity in the planning and execution of a national policy with respect to the use and development of land throughout England and Wales’. This paper considers two aspects of land discourse circa 1950, a book and a discussion club. Both were linked to a civil servant involved at the centre of the new planning system, F.B. Gillie. * * * * Francis Blaise Gillie was born in 1908 and died in 1981. Taking the civil service entry examination while an undergraduate at Trinity Hall Cambridge, he joined the Ministry of Health as Assistant Principal in the town planning sub-division in October 1931. Another recruit of the same vintage was Evelyn Sharp, and the two of them worked in the Ministry, first administering statutory schemes for suburban expansion under the Town Planning Act 1925, then seeing through the enactment of the Town & Country Planning Act 1932, with its enlarged scope for development control in rural areas (Sheail 2012). They were transferred to other tasks (initially administration of emergency hospitals) by the outbreak of war, but returned for the planning of postwar reconstruction, Sharp as Deputy Secretary and Gillie as Assistant Secretary in the dedicated Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Within Whitehall, the central executive of the British state, their task was to operationalize the remarkable legislative apparatus bequeathed by the wartime coalition and the Labour government of Clement Attlee, C M Haar’s ‘daring experiment’. Gillie rose through the civil service ranks to become Under-Secretary to Ministry of Local Government and Planning (1954), Secretary to the Welsh Office (1957), and then in 1963-1970, an OECD consultant and UN Advisor in Turkey, Afghanistan and Ireland. Thereafter he lectured on planning to international students first at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague then at the American University of Beirut, publishing textbooks on two scales: Basic Thinking in Regional Planning (1967) and An Approach to Town Planning (1971). In his later years he attended the 1977 conference of the Planning History Group, and corresponded with Gordon Cherry about planning history, circulating personal recollections of the inter-war Ministry of Health that recently provided the basis for a Planning Perspectives paper by John Sheail (2013). The present paper draws on two as yet unarchived boxes of drafts, minutes and correspondence relating to postwar planning. Here I focus particularly on the launch in 1950 of the Land 2 Use Society and the 1951 publication by Liverpool University Press of Gillie’s treatise on ‘land planning‘. * * * * Some Principles of Land Planning (1951) was written by Gillie in his time as Assistant Secretary with the Ministry of Town and County Planning. His co-author Patrick Lawrence Hughes - a fellow-official based in the Ministry’s North West office in Palatine Rd Didsbury - contributed principally as a reviser and editor. Some Principles of Land Planning seems to have been written in 1948 and springs directly from the authors’ experiences on the administrative front line within the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. In stark contrast to the richly documented Land Planning in a Free Society, Gillie & Hughes is devoid of footnotes, references, illustrations, case-studies and appendices. When the typescript was submitted to the publisher John Murray his anonymous reviewer advised rejection on the grounds that it was neither detailed enough for specialists nor attractive to lay readers - it needed illustrations, photographs, and examples ‘to humanize the subject and bring it home visually’. The reviewer added: ‘Naturally I have wondered too about the title on account of the tendency of “planning” to become an unpopular word. I wonder if some more catch-phrase title might be devised, such as “Your Land and Mine - Some Principles of Planning It”. I do not suggest that this is very good, but it conveys my feeling that the present title may be slightly repellent to the layman’. The authors responded to Murray that they had no intention of making the book more attractive and accessible, since too much planning literature was already of that ilk. Liverpool University Press accepted the manuscript soon after. It was cleared for publication by the Secretary to the Ministry, whose notes and comments on the manuscript indicate the revision of just a few phrases about the difficulties of implementing the 1947 Act that might be seized upon with joy by ‘the die-hard antiplanners’. The text defnes planning unequivocally as the management of competing demands for land. Its art lies not in opposing but in harnessing those forces and driving them skillfully. It may not necessarily require a plan as such but it does require knowledge and skills, which are the topic of Some Principles. The book is an attempt at ‘working out basic conceptions and fundamental principles. Any kind of planning must involve taking thought for the future, but the literature of town and country planning [a literature which, by the way, gets no acknowledgement or citation in the book] has given little attention to the nature of the thinking which the subject requires’ [1951 3]. The book begins with an administrative definition: planning is a system of public control, established to resolve land use conflicts in the manner that best serves the public interest. To resolve land use conflicts is the essence of planning control, and primarily determines the form which planning control takes. Many current misconceptions derive from failing to understand this fundamental point, and from the idea that planning control aims at promoting the welfare of a 3 particular type of use which has greater virtue than others. Planning control can never be wedded to any single interest. Its object must always be the promotion of all land using interests which are of value to society, necessarily subordinating one to another in particular circumstances, but never giving any one interest an automatic predominance’ [1951 4]. Having set up this quasi-judicial definition of planning control, the authors proceed to examine ‘Those Who Are Controlled’ and ‘The Controlling Agents’. The former category include public agencies as well as private interests of every kind, the essential question being always whether development offers satisfactory use of a site in the light of other foreseeable claims upon it. This decision-making function is exercised primarily with local authorities, especially at county scale, subject to greatly-increased coordination and policy direction from Whitehall. The authors express doubts about the ability of local decision-makers to exercise their control powers: The present situation is remarkable, not so much for ambitious ventures by local planning authorities into new fields, as for evidence that some local authorities find it difficult to adjust themselves to the increased important of their planning function’ (1951 13]. ‘Some find it difficult’ was a diplomatic understatement of Gillie’s belief that neither the personnel nor the administrative structures of the postwar planning system were equal to the tasks set up for them by the 1944 and 1947 Acts. The point is developed through consideration of each of the major land uses - agriculture, mineral working, industry, housing, transport, ‘amenity’ and urban renewal. In each case the authors emphasize the complexity and inter-relatedness of the policy issues, the risks of localism, and the need to consider the short-term requirements of production as well as long-term improvements when determining the national interest. The concluding chapters return to general observations about the need for planning to be pragmatic, realistic, aware to the need for ‘earning the nation’s daily bread here and now’ [1951 76], and in designing the future city not to progress too far ahead of public opinion, the perceptions and values of the man in the street: ‘Overcoming the Briton’s innate conservatism must be recognized as one of the main problems of all planning work. It is part of the planner’s job to gauge how far he can convert opinion to his view within the time at his disposal . . . The discussion of pros and cons is always a laborious process which it is natural for technicians to avoid. It is natural, too, that they should wish to avoid their plan being compromised by the ebb and flow of public opinion. It is however part of the fundamental conception of land planning that any changes made should be reasoned ones. [1951 44-5] The book is puzzling in its level of generality and lack of reference to specific literature, plans, cases, places or named individuals. The style was repeated in Gillie’s later texts on regional and town planning, and may explain why none of his three books was widely reviewed or noticed. Pierre Merlin’s brief note on An Approach to Town Planning in the Annales de Géographie (1974) deplored that work’s dry off-putting format, adding that 4 its generalized perspective made it ‘vague but not synthetic, theoretical but not vigorous’ 1. Generalism, however, was the basic currency of Gillie’s work as a senior administrator and a writer of official reports. Written explicitly for ‘the serious student of the subject’, Some Principles presented planning as a sober administrative task of balancing multiple claims on the nation’s limited supply of land. Its severest critique was of lightheartedness and airy-faeryism, characteristics presumably of the ‘plan boldly’ school of reconstruction plans. As Planning Outlook’s book reviewer observed (1951, 89), there could be no better text for anyone wishing to understand the approach adopted by government officials responsible for the town and country planning. However, the book’s mandarin emphasis on the discernment of the generalist administrator could be misconstrued. The Economist of March 3rd 1951 greeted the publication with a leading article, ‘The Town Planners’ Dream’. The editorial asked what had gone wrong with planning, a system producing the minimum of results with the maximum of friction. It characterized the 1947 Act as a legislative blunder that had imposed rigid bureaucratic scrutiny over private developments - down to the last hencoop ‘while Ministers and public corporations engross whole stretches of countryside for their pet projects, cheerfully handing off the local planning authority with talk of national necessities’. The Economist drew the conclusion that since Government was incompetent to determine the ‘best’ use of land by administrative action, it should allow freer play of the economic factors which the 1947 Act had smothered. A degree of deregulation did follow the Conservative election victory of 1951: but as C M Haar correctly foresaw, the fundamentals of the 1947 Act proved irreversible. So the planning process remained as described in Some Principles, an administrative balancing between numerous competing claims on land use - agriculture, house-building, industry, quarrying. The concept of inviting the players to a select discussion club flowed naturally. * * * * The Land Use Society was a discreet London-based club where eminent consultants, academics, business leaders and civil servants could meet to discuss planning matters on a confidential basis. Founded in 1950, the society seems to have continued until the late 1970s, but little is known either about its origins or its demise. We learn from the Gillie archive that in 1977 the society’s Treasurer, the property developer Leslie Bilsby, wrote to founder-members asking for their recollections, since records were very incomplete. Gillie replied with a narrative which can be supplemented with his own set of the first five years of the society’s papers and minutes. The context was that an elaborate new planning system had been started but there were very few ideas to give it life. ‘A number of us had become increasingly depressed at the low standard of thinking that was prevalent in planning by 1950’. Gillie was at that time Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government and Planning, and J R (Jimmie) James was Research Officer. His diary entry for October 13th 1950 reads: ‘Lunch with James to discuss with him my idea of a dinner of heretical planners. Found him depressed and warmly sympathetic to the idea’. 5 Curiously, Gillie’s idea coincided with a slightly earlier initiative by the lawyer Frank Layfield. On September 15th 1950 he had convened at Brown’s Hotel Albermarle Street a Formation Committee meeting for ‘A New Society for the Study of Physical Planning’. As explained in Layfield’s memorandum to attendees, of whom Gillie was one: ‘The establishment of a comprehensive system of planning has given rise to many new and sometimes unforeseen problems. The enormous increase in its scope and jurisdiction is a far cry from the days when planning meant little more that suburban layout. The technical skills which are now involved are many and various and much thought has yet to be given to the way these skills can contribute to the task and their relation to each other. . . It is felt that there is a clear and urgent need for a new body which would have as one of its first objects the task of uniting all those working in or for physical planning, On this foundation it should be the aim of such a Society to promote the study and development of a new broad, adaptable and realistic policy for contemporary physical planning, based upon a National Plan’. Layfield envisaged this ‘Proposed New Planning Association’ as a broad membership organization capable of accommodating the many different professional groups (Table 1) and specialized interests involved in the planning system. Its activities might include conferences, publications, discussion groups, reports, and the provision of a library and information resource. He suggested three classes of membership: ‘ordinary’; ‘associate’, for active professionals in the field, perhaps carrying the right to employ suitable letters to denote membership; and ‘fellowship’ as a mark of genuine distinction. However, the organization that emerged was very different in character - a select, confidential discussion group, its brief minutes marked ‘Confidential’, with an explicit understanding that the names of members would not be published, discussion would be off the record, and any publications and statements anonymous. Frank Layfield, Blaise Gillie, the landscape architect Sylvia Crowe, and the government’s chief cartographer Christie Willatts formed a Scrutiny Committee to identify potential founder-members: as Gillie noted in his diary for October 24th 1950, ‘vital to keep out people who waffle’. Thirty persons were to be invited by personal approach. Table 2 gives the membership as it stood by the time of the society’s third meeting, held at the House of Commons on March 1st 1951. Numbers increased only slightly, reaching 36 by the time of the first Annual General Meeting, held in the School of Planning Library, 35 Gordon Square, on June 10th 1952. By now it had been agreed that the society should stick to what the valuer Bryan Anstey called the ‘intimate and powerful’ model, and the title of ‘Land Use Society’ had prevailed over alternatives such as ‘Planning Society’ and ‘Planning of Land Use Society (PLUS)’. Members comprised a cross section of professionals, public officials, developers, consultants and experts, all based on London or the Home Counties. They included E.F. Mills of the Estates Department of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. (ICI), and W.A. Duke, gravel quarry owner, of Thames Ballast (Shepperton) Ltd. Among the academics David Glass and Dudley Stamp of LSE had only a fleeting involvement. Regular academic participants from 1952 onwards were Gerald Wibberley of Wye College, a founder member; Gunther Hirsch (Agricultural Economics Institute, Oxford); Otto Koenigsberger (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine); the geographer Sydney Wooldridge joined and offered his chambers at King’s 6 College London as the Society’s meeting place; and the economist Nathaniel Lichfield (UCL), whose obituary in the Guardian described the society as ‘a discussion and dining club of civil servants, academics and private sector developers which encapsulated the new attitudes’ . Blaise Gillie’s file of Land Use Society papers covers the first three years to the end of 1952, resuming with partial coverage from March 1955 to the Annual General Meeting in July 1958. The earliest meetings discussed general aspects of the planning system such as the problem of land values and the role of local government. Presentations of original research were found to offer the best stimulus to discussion. Gerald Wibberley, agricultural economist of Wye College, presented a paper on rural communities that was debated paragraph by paragraph over two meetings in July and September 1952. A paper on the challenges of urban renewal and economic strategy in Sheffield by the civil servant J. R. James, future founder of the Sheffield University school of planning, provided meat for three evenings of discussion from October to January 1953. Subsequent meetings addressed the planning problems of Tyneside, Manchester and Glasgow. Desmond Heap spoke on ‘Land Use and its Control by the Executive’. William Holford presented a paper on the need for a three-dimensional approach to design and his UCL colleague Nathaniel Lichfield spoke on the economics of development. For the November 1953 meeting architect Sergei Kadleigh joined the valuer Bryan Anstey, a founder member of the Society, to present the theory of ‘multiple land use’, incorporating diverse activities in different levels of mega-structures. Their ‘High Paddington’ project never left the drawing board but ‘High Barbican’ very soon would. Other contributions included papers from sand and gravel industry and a brilliant exposition by Sylvia Crowe on the necessary but non-existent concept of landscape planning. Blaise Gillie was transferred from London to Cardiff late in 1954. Before departing he gave a last contribution to the Land Use Society on ‘The Role of the Administrator in Recent Developments of Town and Country Planning’. The paper offers a succinct summary of his theory of the planning process. On the one hand, the administrator faces the political sphere, with its economic interests, its single-issue bodies, its idealistic reformers and its ‘emotionally charged’ and ‘easily inflamed’ public opinion. On the other hand the administrator faces his technical specialists - the platoon of ‘geologists, planning technicians, architects, valuers, lawyers, landscape designers etc.’ whom it is his task to co-ordinate. As in all his writings, Gillie is at pains to establish a critical distance from the specialists: ‘The administrator must depend very heavily on his experts, but his attitude towards them cannot be a purely passive one. Besides understanding what they say to him, he must understand the nature and potentialities of their special disciplines, since otherwise he cannot question them intelligently. Unless he is stimulated to questioning he will never take in the full meaning of what they tell him’. While acknowledging that this characterization reflected the dichotomy between an élite administrative grade and technical levels within British civil service culture, Gillie asserted that any planning system must depend upon a sceptical and questioning treatment of expert knowledge: ‘specialist advice always needs a good deal of digestion 7 before it can be made a practical part of community policy’. It was for this reason that we find him on many occasions questioning the concept of ‘survey before plan’ : problem-definition and data-collection were too important to be left to experts. G.P. Hirsch of Oxford University’s Agricultural Economics Research Unit thought otherwise. Joining the Land Use Society in October 1952, he argued strongly for the autonomy of expertise: ‘the planner has to leave the controversy to the administrators and politicians, but he must provide for the controversy the simple objective facts as they exist’ 2. Hirsch favoured Lewis Mumford’s five-stage model of the planning process: ‘(a) Survey - the facts; (b) Analysis - elucidation of the needs; (c) Plan - the solution; (d) Acceptance of plan; and (e) Implementation of the plan’. Gillie commented: ‘I believe it is a serious error to consider survey as the first stage, because you cannot survey intelligently till you have formulated certain questions in your mind. . . Facts are not the objective stable things that they are sometimes believed to be’ 3. * * * * Blaise Gillie’s writings and papers give insight into a theory of planning centred on the role of the generalist administrator, a ‘person of broad education and knowledge’. It was exactly the definition advocated by the Schuster Report on Qualification of Planners, submitted to Parliament in September 1950. Sir George Schuster (1881-1982) - lawyer, soldier, banker, colonial administrator, industrialist, educationist - epitomized the ideal of the talented, versatile amateur in British public service and most of the committee shared his Oxbridge background (Eversley 1973, 315). The Schuster report differentiates the routine sphere of planning regulation from ‘work requiring very high qualities at the top’ (1950, 23). This work is not in itself a specialism, since it embraces multiple specialisms - and (quoting Professor Eva Taylor) practically no branch of learning is completely irrelevant to planning - but it requires first class intellectual qualities: ‘Everything else that we have to say is secondary in importance to this’ (1950, 44) In the years after 1950 British planning education and qualifications would follow a path very different from that envisaged by Blaise Gillie and mapped out by the Schuster Report. Another American sabbatical visitor, Lloyd Rodwin an MIT economist, put his finger on the weak point of the system, its Achilles Heel: ‘Rigorous socio-economic analysis and systematic research rank among the key weapons of the planners. They have been neglected, partly because many planners do not yet know how to use them. If this is true, and not soon recognized, the results of planning policies may not be significantly better than those of the free market; and the reaction may be as decisive as that which overtook laissez-faire.’ (1953,34) Rodwin observed a general absence of systematic research, lack of interest on the part of universities, almost complete neglect of the social sciences, and a Town Planning Institute clinging to a narrowly technical qualification requirement, ‘aided and abetted by the traditional British civil service distinction between policy makers and administrators, and the technical staff’ (1953, 25). 8 Further reinvention was needed, and Land Use Society members such as Nathaniel Lichfield, Otto Koenigsberger, L.S. Jay, Michael Wise and Christie Willatts would play an active part in it. But that is another story. * * * * ‘C.F.R.’ (1951) [book review] ' SOME PRINCIPLES OF LAND PLANNING.' By F. B. Gillie and P. L. Hughes’ Planning Outlook Series 1, 2, 2, 87-89 Economist (1951) ‘The Town Planner’s Dream’ The Economist, 3, 3 Fahy E M (1972) [Book review] ‘The Cork Sub Regional Planning Study’ Irish Geography 6, 4, 508-509 Gillie F B and Hughes P L (1951) Some Principles of Land Planning Liverpool: Liverpool University Press Gillie F B (1967) Basic Thinking in Regional Planning The Hague & Paris: Mouton Gillie F B (1971a) An Approach to Town Planning The Hague & Paris: Mouton Gillie F B (1971b) The Cork Sub-Regional Planning Study Dublin: An Foras Forbartha Haar C M (1951) Land Planning Law in a Free Society: a study of the British Town and Country Planning Act Cambridge: Harvard University Press Hebbert M (1983) ‘The Daring Experiment: Social Scientists and Land Use Planning in 1940s Britain’ Environment and Planning B 10 3-17 Larkham P (1997) ‘The Continued Rise of Conservation’ Built Environment 23, 2, 88-91 Lichfield N, Adams D, Needham B, Teitz M, Wenban-Smith A (2003) ‘The Concept of Planned Development: a Presentation and Commentaries on the Contribution of Nathaniel Lichfield’ Planning Theory & Practice, 4, 1, 45-71 McKie R (1972) [book reviews] ‘Urban Residential Patterns by R. J. Johnston; An Approach to Town Planning. by F. B. Gillie’ The Economic Journal 82, 327, 10931096 Merlin P (1974) [book review] ‘Un ouvrage sur l'urbanisme An Approach to Town Planning, (Publications de l'Institut of Social Studies, The Hague) by F. B. Gillie Annales de Géographie, 83e Année, 458, 464 9 MTCP (1950) Report of the Committee on Qualifications of Planners (Chairman Sir George Schuster) Ministry of Town & Country Planning, and Department of Health for Scotland, Cmd 8059, London : HMSO Moran P (1968) [book review] ‘Basic Thinking in Regional Planning (Publications of the Institute of Social Studies, Series Maior, vol. XIV) by F. B. Gillie’ L'Année sociologique, Troisième série, 19, 523-524 Rodwin L (1953) ‘The Achilles Heel of British Town Planning’ Town Planning Review, 24, 1, 22-34 Scott, Lord Justice Leslie (1948) ‘Principles and Practice of Land Use’ Journal of the Town Planning Institute 34, 84-92 Sheail J (2012) ‘British inter-war-planning: the recollections of a government official’ Planning Perspectives 27, 2 285-96 ___________________________________________________________________________________________ MH 17.vii.14 10 Table 1 ‘Principal professionals concerned with Planning’ source: Memorandum for Formation Committee Meeting 15th September 1950 (a) Sociologists and Demographers (b) Economists and Statisticians (c) Geographers and Geologists (d) Architects and Landscape Architects (e) Engineers and Surveyors (f) Lawyers and Administrators The Planning Society, Membership Spring 1951 source: Minutes of the Third Meeting 1st March 1951 G. Bell Barker (chairman) J W R Adams Bryan Anstey Brian Bell C D Buchanan W H Corrie Sylvia Crowe F G Davidson Desmond Donnelly W A Duke Miss W M Fox Blaise Gillie D V Glass R Goodman D P Kerrigan Frank Layfield William Luttrell H T MacCalman Godfrey Samuel Dr Dudley Stamp A E Telling Noel Twedell G P Wibberley E C Willatts ‘Le parti pris de généralité conduit à être vague sans être synthétique, théorique sans être vigoureux’ (Merlin 1974, 464) 1 Letter of G.P. Hirsch to F. B. Gillie, November 8th 1952 3 Letter of F.B. Gillie to G.P. Hirsch, October 8th 1952 2 11