Britain’s Growth Problem MUST THE LONDON OF OUR HISTORY AND HEARTS GO?

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30398, 24 March 1964, Page 16

Britain’s Growth Problem MUST THE LONDON OF OUR HISTORY AND HEARTS GO?

[By

JOHN ALLAN MAY,

European Economic Correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor.’’)

(Reprinted from the “Christian Science Monitor”)

Must we tear it down, this London we love? Must we rebuild it? Must all the winding alleys go, as much of the view of St. Paul’s has gone already? Must this multistoried town go inultistoreyed, history be overshadowed by great offices, and Wren’s spires dwarfed by the ruthless pinnacles of commerce?

Must we give up parks to roads? Must we gaze up at great tiered highways overhead instead of the tops of plane trees and our London sky ? Must we burrow ever more busily underground as well? Listen only to the music of the concrete mixer?

The answer is, yes. We must, unless. . . . There are truly only two alternatives: To destroy our southern countryside, almost from the Cotswolds to the sea: To go on haphazardly toward industrial stagnation. For so enormous is the growth problem that confronts Great Britain, and particularly southern England, that to accommodate the extra people who are going to want to live and work here in the next 20 to 50 years will mean if London is not rebuilt and rebuilt high, taking half of all the acres of countryside that still remain to us in the south-east and building factories and offices and flats and shops upon them. And then linking them all together with a great network of superhighways and perhaps monorails. Not to do either that or rebuild London would be to accept defeat —to accept homelessness, unemployment, and a negative rate of economic growth. For it would be to deny people homes, workplaces, jobs, cars, and indeed the wherewithal for modern living. It is unthinkable. There is no escaping the choice. The car provides one part of the challenge. But only one part. Traffic Problems The number of vehicles te> going to double within 10 years, treble within 20 years, and quadruple within 40, according to the best estimates. “The increase in the useage of vehicles [i.e., traffic] may well be in a greater proportion than this,” says the famous Buchanan Report on Traffic in Towns. It is an illusion to think that road vehicles can be kept out of cities. They are, says Buchanan, “a function of buildings.” They service the buildings.

Few cabbages are sent by underground, somebody once remarked. And, where time is money, to enforce the widespread use of public transport when it is inconvenient would be to accept the compulsory loss of money (to accept a brake on the rate of national economic growth). But even if it were possible for everyone to travel by rail or bus or taxi, traffic problems would for servicing reasons still re-

main. So would necessity to rebuild. But for all to go by public transport is not possible anyway. The point of the actual situation bursts the bubble of the daydream that the problem can be ignored because such a large and efficient network of suburban railways, city undergrounds, and buses is in existence. According to the Standing Conference on London Regional Planning—and the region takes in not only Greater London but all the counties round it from Cambridgeshire to Sussex, Kent to Hampshire —even by 1971 the number of commuters wanting to use the trains from beyond the London “green belt” is sure to double. (So, of course, is road traffic.)

It is unlikely that all these extra commuters can be taken by the train's, the conference reports. It says, in fact, that in some areas—Kent particularly—the saturation point has been reached already. But, it adds, “there appears no prospect that current programmes of road improvements can keep pace with [road] traffic growth” either. Population Pressure For traffic reasons alone then a crash programme of construction of one kind or another, road or rail or both has clearly become imperative. But traffic is only a part, and a small part of the story. The bigger story is the growth of population. Great Britain as a whole expects to grow by the time the next century comes around to be a country of 74 million people. It is certain that in the next 50 years the equivalent of three new cities the size of Greater London will have to be built somewhere in the islands, or 17 more the size of Manchester, or else much of the countryside be swallowed up by smaller towns.

London itself is going to grow still further, even if all emigration to it from the north is stopped. (And if emigration merely continued at its present rate new jobs would need to be provided up north at three times the present rate.)

The area of the London conference had a population of 13,283,000 in 1961. By 1981 it is expected to have an extra 2 to 3 million people in it, not counting immigrants’ Before 50 years have passed there are likely to be an extra

5, 6. or 7 million people in it. The population might even double. Besides this, the number of households is increasing faster than the population. Twice as ■ many women and four times as many men now marry before the age of 21 as did before World War 11. In the next seven years alone the I stock of dwellings must be increased by at least 750,000. This is almost twice the average rate of building achieved over the last 20 years. In addition to this, old buildings have to be replaced. “Even if this task were spread over a hundred years, it would call for a demolition and replacement rate of 40.000 [extra dwellings] a year,” the conference notes. Then besides houses, all these millions need jobs. Many hundreds of thousands may be provided jobs in decentralised offices. But this does not remove the constructional challenge; it only relocates it. Open Areas Squeezed In the countryside around London, in “subtopia” and the county, for every acre of developed land there still remain at least eight acres of countryside. However, even with building densities on a suburban scale, another 700 square miles of building land must be provided anyway by 1971. For every acre of developed land there are then likely to be less than four acres of open countryside—whatever is done to decentralise offices—the conference declares. But the conference makes no calculation for the extra requirement of roads. All these new developments, whether in new towns or enlarged towns or new suburbs or enlarged “subtopias,” will need to be interlinked. It is almost impossible to imagine a rich and modern country that makes no provision for road traffic at all, even though the busy conference achieves it in its latest report.

Considering the explosion of population and of traffic, decentralisation therefore must lead to the virtual disappearance of farmland in the south-east. This would be the price of preserving as intact as possible the lovely low-built London of our history and our hearts. Can we pay it? Or must we brace our shoulders, summon up our pride, and rebuild, rebuild, rebuild?