In the 1960s we were promised jet-packs. The chief planner of Leicester suggested the city should have an underground, a monorail, a helipad, eight floors of car parking and a system of electric rickshaws to replace taxis. And, according to “Traffic in Towns”, the 1963 government report that sought to plan for a future in which everyone used cars, we should also have hovercraft, helicopters and conveyor belts, all “as possible substitutes for the motor car”. Elon Musk can do one.
Otto Saumarez Smith's detailed and engrossing book about the mid-20th-century boom in urban redevelopment is as much a history of what might have been as one of what actually happened. The built environment bequeathed by the 1960s, he writes, has been “denigrated in books such as Crap Towns and Martin Parr's Boring Postcards”: they document a “gimcrack modernism of tacky pedestrian precincts, grim underpasses, budget mega-structures, and gargantuan car parks”. What we ended up with was a long way from the bracing visions of architect-planners, working against constraints that were mainly social, historical and political, but increasingly financial as the decade wore on.
The book starts, as did the Sixties, in a rush of optimism and enthusiasm for a generation of architect-planners whose epic schemes to remould Victorian cities for the late 20th century were led by a collective social conscience rather than individual megalomania. They were influenced less by Le Corbusier than by the concept of “Townscape”, which advocated “urban forms that privileged the pedestrian” and designs which, while often bracingly modern, complemented, rather than obliterated, existing buildings such as churches.
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