Design History Society

Non-Plan Revisited: Or the Real Way Cities Grow: The Tenth Reyner Banham Memorial
Lecture
Author(s): Paul Barker
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Design History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1999), pp. 95-110
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Design History Society
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Paul Barker

Non-Plan
Cities

Revisited:

or

the

Real

Way

Grow

The Tenth Reyner Banham Memorial Lecture

Thirtyyearsago, 'Non-Plan:An Experimentin Freedom'was publishedas a specialissue of New Society, the weekly
betweenthe urbangeographerPeterHall, the designand architecture
magazineof socialenquiry.It was a collaboration
historianReynerBanham,thearchitectCedricPrice,andPaulBarker,themagazine'sEditor.It attackedtheperverseandoften
futile effectof attemptsto imposecriteriaof urbanformandaestheticdesignfiromabove.Its ownapproachto popularchoice
butit
wassocial-anthropological.
PublishedthreeyearsbeforeLearningfrom LasVegas, Non-Planwashighlycontroversial,
its
consequences,
both
spells
out
some
of
has hada continuinginfluence.Thepaperexamineshow the conceptarose,and
and
its
surroundings,
and
of
a
shopping
mall
of NorthLondoninter-warsuburbia
ideological
andpractical.Twocase-studies,
associated
thatNon-Planis inextricably
areusedto illustrateNon-Planin therecentpastandthepresent.It is acknowledged
to design:
witha verypopularbutoftencriticizeddesignform,suburbia.Butthecaseis putforan essentiallyhumbleapproach
people'sown choicesshouldbe respected.Present-dayplanningand designdogmasmay beno wiserthanthoseof thepast.
Keywords:EdgeCity-Great Britain-Non-Plan-sociology-suburbia-urbandesign

One of these days, perhaps, a blue English Heritage plaque will be cemented on the outside of the
'Yorkshire Grey' pub in Holborn, at the corner of
Theobalds Road and Grays Inn Road. If the
plaque ever fights its way through the advisory
committees, it will commemorate the fact that
here the idea of Non-Plan-or, at any rate, the
word-was born, one day in 1967.
That day, the urban geographer Peter Hall and I
went out from the offices of the magazine New
Society-of which I was then the deputy editor
and he was a regular contributor-to have a glass
of beer and a sandwich. New Society was a magazine of social enquiry. One of its abiding passions,
from its launch in 1962 to its demise in 1988, was
to try to see the world as it was, and not how it
was supposed to be.' The magazine was usually
perceived as centre-left, but it was always fiercely
non-partisan. It was in the honourable tradition of
Dissent. One commentator said that, in its pages,
Journal of Design History Vol. 12 No.

'Ideas were always more important than ideology.'2 In Too Much,3 his cultural history of the
1960s, Robert Hewison wrote that New Society
became 'a forum for the new intelligentsia'. It
drew, especially, on the emergent disciplines of
sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, social history and social policy.
Peter Hall and I were talking together because
urban change was always one of my own, and the
magazine's, deepest interests. My approach was
then, and remains now, that of social anthropology, respecting popular choice. I was always
much influenced by the urban studies of Michael
Young and Peter Willmott,4 which focused on the
patterns people created for themselves. From the
other side of the Atlantic, I was influenced by the
writings of the sociologist Herbert Gans. In September 1967 I had run in New Society long extracts
from his study, The Levittowners,5 in which he
showed how a spirit of community flourished
95

within a despised form of American suburban

speculative housing. Earlier in the year, I had
also published Lionel March's analytical defence
of building in lines (including ribbon development) rather than clusters.6
At that date, Peter Hall and I had both grown
disillusioned with how urban planning often
worked out in practice. As Reyner Banham
noted in his book, Megastructures,7 Hall was to
be just about the first writer in Britain to blow the
whistle on tower blocks as a form of social housing.8 For my part, I had lived in Stepney for five
years, at a time when comprehensive redevelopment, masterminded first by the London County
Council and then the Greater London Council,
destroyed huge tracts of perfectly good terrace
housing. Later, I was proud to encourage Nicholas Taylor to write his path-breaking book The
Village in the City9 for a series I edited, defending
such streets. London boroughs like Southwark
and Lambeth were still pulling them down in
the 1970S, in order to erect such nightmare constructions as the Aylesbury Estate in North Peckham.
So often, and this continues to be true, an urban
plan was said to be fulfilled when it had only been
completed. No one checked whether it did the job
it set out to do. The same shortcoming pervades
much architecture: almost all interest ceases,
among the professionals, once the building is
built. The architecture journals re-cycle interminably what the building was intended to do, not
what it has actually done. Only the users continue
to worry about that. The journals keep on printing
all discussion accompanied by pristine photographs of the way the building looked the
minute it was opened. One honourable exception
to this approach is Stewart Brand in his fine study
How Buildings Learn.10
Over our sandwiches that day in late 1967, we
asked ourselves the question: could things be any
worse if there were no planning at all? America
seemed to offer an alternative view of what could,
or could not, be built. In particular, it seemed to be
less bogged down in questions of aesthetics,
which planners seemed then-and seem to me
now-ill qualified to judge. We were, in our own
way, striking a blow against notions of 'good
taste'. As a historical footnote, it is worth observ96

ing that Learningfrom Las Vegas"1was not published until five years later, in 1972.
Between the two of us, the idea emerged of
advocating a public experiment in letting public
demand take its course, and seeing if it really
could be any worse than what was prescribed
by government or by local councils. A truly
contemporary style might then emerge. The
name Non-Plan was, I think, mine. But there
was the usual batting to and fro that always
takes place in such circumstances. I would not
want to claim sole credit (or blame).
The concept was very strongly influenced by
the essays which Reyner Banham had been writing for New Society-many of them reprinted in
the 1997 collection A Critic Writes12 -and by the
designs and conversations of the architect Cedric
Price, who had also appeared in the magazine."3
Since 1965 Banham had been the regular design
and architecture critic in New Society's 'Arts in
Society' columns. (It will help to give a context for
this if I note that the range of regular critics in the
magazine included John Berger, Peter Fuller and
Angela Carter.)"4When we wondered who our
other collaborators should be, Banham and Price
were the obvious names. Both of them agreed
immediately.
Our idea was to take various tracts of countryside and hypothesize what might happen if they
were subjected to Non-Plan. Naturally we chose
the rural tracts whose apparent despoliation was
guaranteed to cause most offence. We were trying
to make our point in the most forceful possible
way. The wider polemic would then be written
around these three case-studies.
With his East Anglian roots, Reyner Banham
opted for Constable Country (not the Stour valley,
but the area around Royston and Stansted, which
had no Foster airport yet). Cedric Price opted for
southern Hampshire, which for these purposes
we called Montagu Country. Peter Hall opted for
the East Midlands, on the edge of the Peak
District; to maintain the pattern of fancy nomenclature, we called this Lawrence Country. It was
my task to write an introductory overview. The
conclusions were written by Peter Hall and
myself. But every section contained something
from every writer, and we all agreed everything
that appeared.
Paul Barker

During 1968, some of the material was written:

in particular, drafts of the three case-studies. But
the idea marked time for several months. I had
taken over as Editor of the magazine. It was a year
of social turmoil: risings against the Soviet occupying forces in Czechoslovakia, the evenements in
Paris, anti-Vietnam and anti-establishment
campus and street protests in the United States
and Britain.(Non-Plan was a protest against the
taste establishment, something the Situationists Of
PasParsmg
.tihaven
sympathize wth. Finually, on
mban
20March 1969, I published a special issue of New
Society under the title 'Non-Plan: An Experiment
in Freedom'."5 It was illustrated mainly by specially taken night-time photographs of illuminated signs in and around London: signs for
petrol, launderettes, supermarkets, burger bars.
Non-Plan produced a mixture of outrage and
stunned silence. Not only professional planners,
but also Fabian socialists and many architects,
were furious. In 1969, Christopher Booker published The Neophiliacs,16 his attack on the passion
for change which had characterized Britain from
the mid-195os. He took virulent issue with a Price
design which New Society had published;"7 NonPlan itself appeared too late for inclusion in his
onslaught. It was certainly imbued with the desire
for change (neophilia); but it was hard to categorize. It argued that, in design and in planning,
what ordinary people wanted, rather than what
'experts' said they ought to want, was the best
guide. Was this conservatism or anarchism, or
both?
Ideologically, Non-Plan was the beginning of a
rollback against one variety of detailed prescription-peddling. It was perhaps ten years ahead of
its time. The environmentalist Colin Ward was to
write this about Non-Plan: 'If I were to choose an
article (endlessly cited by me) which most epitomized everything I believe in, in one particular
field, and which was valuable to me just as a
legitimation of opinions I seemed to be alone in
advocating, it was... "Non-Plan: An Experiment
in Freedom".'18
In our advocacy of Non-Plan, we opened with
an item from The Times, which, in its advertising,
was still able to call itself the Top People's paper.
It said: 'A dispute has arisen about a booklet,
Dorset Building in Rural Areas, just issued by
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

Dorset County Council, and aspiring to be a

guide to good design for people building houses
in the countryside.' So their Architecture Correspondent wrote. He was, in fact, J. M. Richards,
who was also the long-time editor of the Architectural Review and a fervent Modernist. He went
on:
Most of the examples that it illustrates and recommends as models are utterly commonplace,the sort of
house to be found in any speculative builder's suburestate. This view is shared by the Wilts and
Dorset Society of Architects, which, through its president, Mr Peter Wakefield, has asked for the publication to be withdrawn.
This news item, we felt, illustrated the kind of
tangle we had got ourselves into-and often find
ourselves in today, also. Somehow, everything
must be watched; nothing must be allowed
simply to 'happen'. No house can be allowed to
be commonplace in the way that things just are
commonplace. Each project must be weighed, and
planned, and approved, and only then built-and
only after that, more often than not, discovered to
be commonplace after all.
Professor Michael Hebbert, of the University of
Manchester, has noted recently that London, in
particular, has been saved from many disasters by
the absence of too much planning.19 The regular
trumpet-calls to turn London into a kind of Paris
would have resulted in disaster. London is essentially an anarchic city. Unfortunately, however, it
has not been saved from every such disaster. It
was often the Victorian suburbs, and their unfortunate inhabitants, who paid the price. In J. M.
Richards' report for The Times the word 'suburban' was used as an automatic sneer-word (even
though, almost aberrantly, he had once written a
delightful study of unplanned suburbia, The
Castles on the Ground).20 This is a standard feature
of most architecture criticism.
Yet the suburbs of London are one of its greatest
achievements as a city. In The Village in the City,
Nicholas Taylor reports on a visit to London by a
young Italian architect. His well-meaning hosts
took the visitor on a tour of those few isolated
examples in London of monumental architecture
that begin to match up with the best in Europe.
(As Taylor notes wryly, this list comes down to
97

Greenwich, Greenwich and Greenwich.) But such

excursions turned out to bore the visiting Italian.
He kept insisting on stopping the car, instead, in
perfectly ordinary speculative builders' avenues
and drives and crescents of the 1920s, and
exclaiming on their exquisite design. Continental
cities, once so much more compact than London,
have increasingly suburbanized themselves since
then. The most extraordinary example, perhaps, is
Paris beyond the peripherique.
In his great book, London: The Unique City,2"
Steen Eiler Rasmussen emphasizes that London
has always grown by adding suburb on to suburb.
Many of these houses-and some of them are very
attractive-have no known architect. In many
cases, even the name of the builder is a mystery.
Many were put together from a kind of kit of
parts. All the houses in the same neighbourhood
would share the same design of banisters or
cornices. They might, however, pay silent
homage to some distant original which counted
as Art-with-a-capital-A, in the same way as acre
after acre of English suburbia pays homage to the
houses that Voysey built. (Voysey's own houses
may be few and far between, and often rather
disappointing when you find them. But he and
Palladio are probably unique in the extent of their
influence. And if you were to tot up the actual
numbers of houses created in Britain under Voyseyian auspices-inglenooks,
gables and allVoysey would win the competition, hands down.)
The test of a house, after all, is not just its fitness
for the purpose for which it was built, but its
continued fitness and adaptability to the purposes
that will come along down the years. You might
call this the Non-Plan test.
Non-Plan had very practical consequences.
Peter Hall (now Professor Sir Peter Hall, of University College London) carried the thinking forward. In our Non-Plan special issue we had
acknowledged that our ideas might not be applicable in London. The problem of what to do with
Docklands undercut this argument. In 1977, Peter
Hall gave a paper at the annual conference of the
Royal Town Planning Institute which proposed
'enterprise zones' in the run-down parts of
cities;22 these were small Non-Plan zones. When
Non-Plan was first published, one of the few
friendly reactions came from Alfred Sherman, an
98

ex-communist turned Tory. In 1974, he went on to

help Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph to
found a new Conservative think-tank. After the
first Thatcher administration was elected in 1979,
enterprise zones were introduced as a Non-Plan
experiment. Without enterprise zones, we would
have no MetroCentre Gateshead and no Canary
Wharf. These are design icons, accurately symbolic of social change.
In fact, ever since it was published, Non-Plan
has kept flowing along as an idea-a kind of
underground river. It has come to the surface
again recently, as witness the Architectural Association seminars on the subject in 1997. Is this
because we may again be falling into the trap of
over-detailed prescription, the English vice of
bossiness? Governments are again encouraging
planners to take aesthetics into account; that is,
they are being encouraged to prescribe what is
beautiful for you. Perhaps Non-Plan is, even
today, a counter-balance to the renewed misapprehension that planning will solve all our
troubles. How do we know which urban forms
and designs are really best? Environmentalists can
be very dogmatic, and very prescriptive for other
people's lives. But what makes us think that in
this we are that much wiser than those who, in the
past, were convinced they, too, had the monopoly
of wisdom?

There are, in Britain, thriving examples of NonPlan from the past. There are also examples of
something very close to Non-Plan in the present,
even outside the limited experiment of the enterprise zones. The inter-war London suburbs are the
most striking example of the former. The growth
of 'Edge City' around out-of-town shopping malls
is the prime example of the latter. In design, the
inter-war suburbs are unique to Britain and its excolonies. The malls are, in essence, an American
import. This change tells one something about
what has happened in Britain during the twentieth century, not only in design, but also socially.
Kenton is just such an inter-war suburb, and it
is fruitful to see how successfully it has evolved,
in spite of a design which has been as much
Paul Barker

1-2 The driving forces in old suburbia and new. Left: Kenton railway and Tube station. Without this, no North
London suburbia. Right: the mall at Lakeside (shopping centre postcard). Without this, no 'new community' of
Chafford Hundred, Essex

mocked, down the years, as the American Levit- in Wembley (now bundled into the London borough of Brent). The north side was, and is, in
town was. It was the Non-Plan of its day.
Situated at the meeting point of the London Harrow. For many years-long before anyone
boroughs of Harrow and Brent, Kenton is a place spoke about anything called an electronic vilthat few people, other than those who live there, lage-the offices of the Gramophonemagazine
have ever heard of.23 It is classic Mike Leigh were on Kenton Road. This was the Bible for
country: anonymous North London suburbia. I every aspiring Kenton householder who invested
would like to focus here on Mayfield Avenue, in a veneered cabinet in order to play shellac
Kenton, which dates from 1926. The London A to 78 r.p.m. records of Brahms or Al Bowlly.
Mayfield Avenue's spec-development semis are
Z lists thirty-two Mayfields in many varieties, to
suit an estate agent's imagination. There are May- now, perhaps, at the bottom of their fashionability
field Crescents, Closes, Drives, Gardens, Roads cycle. There is nothing smart about them. But they
and Avenues. Suburban land companies in the are amazingly adaptable containers. That is one
test of the Good House they pass with flying
first half of this century liked vaguely rural names
with undertones of Housman, Elgar and morris- colours. The beauty of them is that you can pour
dancing. There are suburban Mayfields all over into them whatever uses you want. They were
built for the first generation to have vacuum
England.
The avenue is a street of semi-detached houses. I cleaners and valve radios. They are now adorned
visited it most recently in February 1998. At that with lacy black satellite dishes. They are the kind
date, in some of the houses, the original black and of houses- not only in London but also across the
white gable was still intact. The avenue is handy whole of Britain-where many people live, much
for the Underground station which caused Kenton of the time. About a third of the houses in Britain
to burgeon and flourish like a leylandii cypress, or are semi-detached: the classic national balancing
euonymus, or pampas grass, or of course privet, act between privacy and price.
Take No. 40 Mayfield Avenue as a model of
the plant parexcellenceof the suburbs.
Like many such places, Kenton's location is Kenton suburbia. The grass in the front garden is
hard to pin down historically. The main road is neatly mown. There is a flowering cherry and a
lined with shopping parades. The south side was privet hedge, behind which lurks a plaster gnome.
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

99

ss~u Gm-'tAG't--as<<F
L
--I'hurrock LA.KFSIDE
3-4 Left: retail as an extra. The shopping parade at Kenton. Right: retail as central. The glass-sided crawler lift at Lakeside
(shopping centre postcard)

The pebbledash facade is painted white. The gable

has lost its black stripes, but the door has its
original stained glass. In the driveway stands a
battered B-reg. Volvo 340.
At first glance, Mayfield Avenue looks as if it
had been stamped out with a template. In this, if
in nothing else, it resembles a Georgian terrace
(or, you could argue, a Barratt estate of 198os or
19905 executive homes). In another living tribute
to Voysey, all the houses in Mayfield Avenue are
bow-fronted semis with gables. The houses face a
front garden and a grass verge of uniform width.
But if you walk alone, you see that, over these past
seventy-three years, it has become a design theme
with innumerable variations,
It is important, for example, to mark off your
territory as your own. No. 40 is in fact the only
house in the avenue that still uses privet, fronting
the pavement, for this purpose. The alternatives
include a brick wall (perhaps covered with vaniegated ivy) or wrought-iron fencing. Evergreen
euonymus is another solid barrier. A pre-cast
concrete balustrade, from a builder's catalogue,
can add a classical touch.
Even the street numbers tell a story, differen100

hiating owner from owner. The most casual tactic

is to stick on the door-side those slanting grey
rhomboid numerals from DIY stores. Other
owners go to town with their house numbers,
like an arithmetician on a spree. No. 8 Mayfield
Avenue, for example, has two sets of numerals.
One set, in brass, is screwed on to the door itself;
the other set forms part of a cast-iron plaque,
decorated with little flowers, and fixed on to the
wall, between a ceramic squirrel and a ceramic
fruit basket. Underneath, there are three miniature leylandii cypresses, one of them planted in an
imitation boot.
The door here is a sort of neo-Gothic. Other
doors have become neo-Georgian. Doors matter in
the design-and-variation pattern of Mayfield
Avenue. One house has a brand-new door,
which makes a deliberate gesture to 1926 with
leaded lights and stained glass. For the spirit of
1926 still hovers over Mayfield Avenue. No. 10
still has the classic front garden, with probably the
same layout as in 1926: a square of grass with a
single standard rose in the dead centre. But few
gardens survive in their original form or with
their original purpose. There is a wild proliferaPaul Barker

5-6 The designs are similar, across the years; but space is now much dearer, hence greater compression. Left: Mayfield
Avenue, Kenton, looking across to the slightly superior Becmead Avenue. Right: Barratt houses at Chafford Hundred

hionof crazy paving. No two layouts are the same.

It may be all one plain colour, or there may be a
licorice-allsortsmixture of pink, white, blue and
grey.
The crazy paving is highly functional. It is for
parking on. Mayfield Avenue is a paradise for
cars.Everyhouse was originallybuilt with double
wooden doors alongside. Behind these, the
owners could keep their Bulinose Morris or
Austin Seven, which they only took out at weekends. Now, proper garages have been constructed, in a dozen baroque styles. But most of
the time, most cars-perhaps because many of the
households seem to own two or even three-sit
out in the open. At No. 22, aLondon taxi parkson
the crazy paving. At No. 39, four cars are parked
on the crazy paving; no front garden is left at all.
Vehicles are, by now, central to the look of Mayfield Avenue, as of almost all other streets in
Britain.You may like this, or you may not. But it
is a fact of visual and social life. Even where
householders have integral or separate garages
(as in Mayfield Avenue) they are more often used
for table tennis or for storage-a first move
towards the American 'rumpus room'-rather
than for putting cars in.
The semi-detached house, of course, gives you
neighbours;but not too many of them. As a social
and design invention, it is an extraordinarysuccess story. Messrs BerryBrotherssell a wine they
call 'Good OrdinaryClaret'.Mayfield Avenue is a
Good OrdinaryStreet.
Non-PlanRevisited:or theRealWayCitiesGrow

But the retail invention that accompanied the

rise of the semi, the shopping parade, has not
survived so well. In the early days of Kenton
Road, after the husband went off to the station
to catch his commuter train into work, his wife
went out with her Silver Cross pram. She chatted
with the shopkeepers and her fellow-shoppers.
They compared their children's growth and
health. They had a polite cup of tea and a buttered
scone. All that has gone. In Kenton, as almost
everywhere else, shopping is done at evenings
and at weekends.
Mayfield Avenue runs straightout into Kenton
Road. If you turn right, you go up a slight rise
towards the railway bridge. On the Mayfield
Avenue side of the tracks, there is still a roadhouse type of pub. But things are going downhill,
in every sense, on the other side of the railway
bridge. The 'Railway' fish and chip shop symbolizes this.
On the 'best' stretchof Kenton Road, it is Asian
shops that have kept the main shopping parades
from total collapse. In the nearby streets, including Mayfield Avenue, many houses now belong
to Indian families, most of whom were thrown
out of East and Central Africa by the new black
regimes after independence. For Kenton this was
a social version of Non-Plan. When the British
government accepted the arrival of these refugees, it did everything it could to make sure they
were spread out nation-wide-this was the conventional anti-ghetto wisdom of the day-rather
101

7-8 Directhomage:neo-Tudorthen and now, doffing the cap to Voysey. Left:MayfieldAvenue. Right:ChaffordHundred

than concentrating in Leicester and London,

which is what eventually happened, regardless.
In Mayfield Avenue, the only element this has
introduced into external design is the occasional
Indian motif in new stained glass. For the shopping parades, however, the demographic change
has been crucial.
On Kenton Road, Asian shops (and other
Asian-run services, such as estate agents) flourish.
Their owners worry about the future. But the halal
butcher, for example, still offers 'goat mix' at 98p a
pound, and leg of mutton at ?1.39. The facade of
the 'Kasturi' restaurant has bright white Ionic
capitals. Every service is here, from cradle (an
Asian-run toyshop) to grave (an Asian undertaker). But when I counted them in early 1998, I
found that the Kenton Road parades had twenty
empty shops. Ben's Bakery, the Dallas Supermarket, Jim's Fruiterer's, even a small Waitrose: all
these have gone. They have been killed off by the
new Sainsbury's which has opened on the old
railway coal-yard. The tree planting around the
new store may be intended as a small environmental gesture, but it also clearly echoes the style
of a Kenton suburban garden.
102

This is Non-Plan 1926 and its evolution since.

But what of Non-Plan now? In 1969, we were not
attempting to make predictions. Thirty years later,
it is striking how much change has taken the
direction we were advocating, in spite of what
the planners decreed. (This is true internationally,
also. There are close parallels in the growth of
cities, in spite of wide disparities in their planning
regimes.) In Britain, two main forces have driven
us far more in the direction of Non-Plan than
anyone else foresaw when we wrote in New
Society.
The first is the ever-expanding passion for
moving around. Railway passenger travel in Britain has scarcely declined at all in the past fifty
years (recently, in fact, it has edged up slightly).
But car travel has accelerated upwards, faster and
faster. Nor is this likely to halt, in spite of governmental finger-wagging. The continuing increase
in car ownership is not due to a higher proportion
of the population getting cars. It is due to the rise
in the number of second cars. And these second
cars, which tend to be slightly smaller than the
other, are usually driven by the woman in the
house. Those who speak of cutting back on second
Paul Barker

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-:io The car-scape.Left: multiple parking on the crazy paving which has increasinglytaken over Mayfield Avenue front
gardens.Right:free-standingBarrattgarage(rareexample)at Chafford.Note that,in both cases, the carsare left outside.Garages
aremore often used for generalstorageor tabletennis than for cars:an approximationto the Americanrumpusroom

cars ignore the gender aspect of car ownership. If

a young mother is to continue to juggle her job
(often part-time), her children (including the
school run) and her shopping, it is very hard to
do it without a car. Or, come to that, without a
one-stop shop, like Sainsbury's or Tesco.
This retail revolution is the second force for
change. The two, of course, are linked. Frank
Lloyd Wright once said: 'Watch the little filling
station. It is the agent of decentralization.' I
quoted this in the preamble I wrote for NonPlan. At the time, we went on to guess that:

increasingly built a petrol station into what they

offer. The little filling station has now grown up.
With its shed-like roof and its standardized
design, it has become one of the most obvious
contemporary design features of the landscape.
No one ever intended it to be so. But it is so.
Ever since the first out-of-town regional shopping centre opened in Gateshead in 1986, these
Non-Plan tendencies have been propelled forwards like a Formula One car. Being set up in
enterprise zones, both MetroCentre Gateshead
and the Canary Wharf complex were exempt
from planning controls as well as having many
tax advantages. No one had expected the London

Like all focuses of transport,the filling station could

be a notable cause of change. Self-service automats, Docklands to have anything other than low-key
ahing
. No r
up housing, worhops and
dispensing food and other goods, tcould spring
.~u housing, workshops and warehousing. Nor
.
around the forecourt; maybe small post offices; holiuld the po
i
a
day-gear shops, too; telephone kiosks; eateries (not wo
and Wearside ever have contemplated anything
restaurants).
like MetroCentre, which might undercut NewThe language has dated, but all this has even- castle city centre or push Sunderland even further
tually happened. Planning officers tried to hold downhill.
I have become fascinated by the new shopping
the changes back, but they failed. In many villages, the petrol station has become the local shop, malls which, in Britain, Gateshead MetroCentre
open most hours and selling everything from launched. They are living examples of Non-Plan
fruit-flavoured condoms to sliced bread. It is in the 1990s, crushing planning intentions underalso, of course, the local National Lottery outlet. foot. I was helped to understand them by reading
Moreover, supermarkets and retail parks have Joel Garreau's remarkable book, EdgeCity:Lifeon
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

103

11-12
The importance of the entrance. Left: private version. A Mayfield Avenue semi, with its
numerals, ceramics and miniature cypresses. Right: public version. The 'Lillywhites of Piccadilly
Circus' entrance to the Lakeside mall, many miles from Piccadilly

the New Frontier,24which examines the impact the

shopping mall has had on the shape of the
traditional American city. American cities have
been turned inside out, like an old glove. The
malls have become the heart of new Edge Cities.
Around the mall grow houses, offices, warehousing-all far away from the old city centre. In
effect, the city centre is shifted closer to the most
vigorous sector of the city, its suburbs. This has
recently been happening in Britain, however
many hands are wrung, regulations drafted, and
editorials written in opposition to it.
Like inter-war suburbia, it is Non-Plan in
action, evolving the style of our time. Like those
suburbs-arguably, like all suburbs-Edge City
cries out for an anthropological perspective on
design. We must try to understand, not just
condemn it. If these designs did not work, they
would be discarded. No one is building them as a
design experiment, or because of a wish to put a
personal design stamp on the landscape.
104

The concept of the British malls may be American but, in many ways, their design flows directly
from, on the one hand, Victorian arcades and, on
the other hand, from the enclosed fun-fair, like the
old Fun House at Blackpool. MetroCentre Gateshead, for example, has a section where you can
leave the children to play on rides and watch
entertainers. It is called Metroland. A huge
dragon floats up above. A roller-coaster whooshes
along. A ferris wheel revolves. The bell clangs
constantly on the toy train ride. The noise is
deafening and the colours are blinding. All very
satisfactory.25
The East London version of Edge City is Lakeside Thurrock, which opened in 1990. I first went
to it in 1993, and then again in 1998 for this paper.
The postcards they sell at the information desk
show the mall lit up by night, with fireworks
exploding up above it. This is how the management would like you to remember it-as something very much in the Blackpool, Margate or
Paul Barker

13-14 The classical touch. Left:Indian restauranton Kenton Road shopping parade. Right:pediment high up on Lakeside's
Marks& Spencerstore

Clactontradition.But, externally,most of the time

it looks much bleaker:the main design feature is
car parks, both ground level and stacked.
I went into Lakeside from a car park through
the glass doors of 'Lillywhites of Piccadilly
Circus'. This is a symbolic perception-shift.This
store is, of course, several miles from Piccadilly
Circus itself. It has a fine East London display of
white trainers.The various Britishmalls are not as
alike as they first seem. They all have a local,
almost vernacular twist. After all, very different
people use them.26
In his American research,Joel Garreaurapidly
discovered it was no use talking to architects
about shopping malls. They mostly despised
them, and knew nothing about them. The people
to talk to were the developers. But this was not to
say there was no design to the malls. Garreau
gives an entertaininglist of the design principles
of American malls and their surroundings. You
can see their equivalents at Lakeside, which was
designed by ChapmanTaylorfollowing American
models.
Garreau begins with A for Animated Space.
This is the place in which an attempt is made to
overcomebarrennessand sterilityby the addition
of anything that suggests life, especially flats. I
passed a set of flags on my way into Lakeside.A is
also for Active Water Feature: any man-made
body of water from which you are not supposed
to drink. A fountain bubbles up next to the Lakeside flags. At Lakeside'slake, there is some more
Active Water:a high-rising jet. But if you move
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

your eye from these pleasant frivolities, you see

again the stacks of car parks.These are a reminder
that, in the gospel according to Garreau,A is also
for Ample Free Parking. This is, he argues, the
touchstone distinctionbetween Edge City and the
old downtown. It is also why 'Lillywhites of
Piccadilly Circus' is at Lakeside.
Garreauworks his way through the alphabet.
He offers a handy vade-mecum for Lakeside
design. B, for example, is for Blue Water. This is
what is put into the fountains of malls, Garreau
reports,to offset the unsightliness of the coins that
people throw in, as well as the grout that washes
off from the tiling. All the decorativewater inside
the Lakeside mall is blue.
Let me move furtherdown the alphabeticallist.
E is for Epaulets.These are highly characteristicof
the malls. Horizontal stripes, in a contrasting
colour of brick, are inserted at the corner, or
'shoulder', of a building to make it look less big
and less bleak. At Lakeside they feature, for example, on the exterior of Mark & Spencer's
'anchor' store. (This store also nods in the direction of a specifically Britishdesign. On the top of
one end of the Marks& Spencerbrick shed, there
is a classical pediment. It is a historicalgesture to
all those high-streetneo-classicalM&Sstore fronts
designed by Edwin Lutyens' son, Robert.It is also
a clue that this particular entrance may be
intended as the facade. This is a strange notion
at Lakeside,or any mall, where the retailfronts all
face inside. Even here, you would not pick up the
clue unless you looked straight up in the air. The
105

15 i6 Dividers as decoration.Left:balustrade(instead of the more usual hedge or brickwork)mnfront of a Mayfield Avenue

semi. Right.the fountain ('activewater feature')markingoff a Lakesidecar park

pediment does not leap to the eye. No other

formal classical elements lead up to it across the
brickwork.)
And so Garreau continues, all through the
alphabet. The biggest of all the British malls has
now opened in an old chalk quarry outside
Dartford in Kent. It is actually named after one
of Garreau'slisted features:Bluewater.
The impact of the various malls on concepts of
urban design is profound. To combat Lakeside,
the Oxford Street Association has seriously
thought of coveringOxford Streetover, and mannmngit with private security guards. In his counter-attack against the easy critics of the malls,
Garreau quotes the patron saint of inner-city
regeneration,Jane Jacobs.In The Death and Life of
Great American Cities,27she stated that 'The bedrock of a successful city district is that a person
must feel personally safe and secure on the street
among all these strangers.'In a mall, you meet no
alkies, beggars or pickpockets. Shoppers do not
need to wear their handbags slung across their
chests. One of the characteristicdesign featuresof
the malls-the glass-sided crawlerlift-was introduced in the United States,not because of the view
out, but because of the view in. Women, it was
thought,would not fearbeing groped or raped in a
glass-sided lift. In Britain,this may no longer be
the argumentused, but they are in~every design. If
it is a mall, the design must include a glass-sided
crawler lift. Customers expect it. By now, it has
become part of the fun-fair.
106

With theirNon-Plan impetus, the malls destroy

some town centres but not others. MetroCentre
Gatesheadhas not, in fact, destroyed the centre of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne,which on the whole relies
on a better-off group of customers and on customers who want to slip out to shop during their
lunch hour, or on their way home from work.
MetroCentrehas, however, undercut many other
places. And this is no surprise. If the alternative
were Sunderland's miserable high street, or the
dismal shopping precinct in Peterlee New Town,
you too would prefer to go to MetroCentre.
Peterlee New Town is a sad failure, in spite of a
first master-plan by Lubetkin, and subsequent
aesthetic control by Victor Pasmore. It is a living
(or, rather,half-dead) lesson in the advantages of
Non-Plan over planning and design from above.
At Dagenham, the London County Council
built its dreary inter-war Becontree estate. The
design of the houses is a diluted version of Arts
and Crafts. It would be fine if there were not so
many of them. Becontreecovers four squaremiles,
with hardly a pub or a decent shop. Building
began in 1923. Seventy years later, and five
miles away, Becontree acquired a substitute
centre:Lakeside Thurrock.
Campaignersweep for dying high street shops.
But these were a nineteenth-century invention
which has often had its day. Before that, general
goods were bought at markets, not shops. A
different kind of market has overtaken them: on
the one hand, places like Lakeside; on the other,
Paul Barker

car boot sales-a favourite Sunday leisure activity

in Britain.
Down the years, architects' drawings of their
urban projects have always included little
sketches of happy citizens enjoying a glass of
wine and an interesting conversation at a cafe
table, beneath a brightly coloured umbrella. This
is, they are certain, the good life. It is what they
themselves always enjoyed in Urbino or Arezzo.
In reality, you seldom see this paradisal scene in
Britain. The weather does not encourage it. But
you do see this scene, for example, at Romano's
Italian restaurant, in the themed area called
'Mediterranean Village', at MetroCentre Gateshead. The customers share a bottle of wine
before their lunch. Their unopened linen napkins
are folded into neat triangles. There is the happy
murmur of gossip. The umbrellas duly complete
the picture-though,
up above, the only light
comes from electric bulbs in the grey roof of
MetroCentre. The sun never shines on Romano's.
But then it never rains either.
Though MetroCentre was the first of its kind in
Britain, you have to come much further south
than Gateshead to see Edge City in full vigour.
In and around Lakeside (or Bluewater, or Cribbs
Causeway, Bristol), the economic pressure is
much stronger. In Garreau's alphabetical list,
one crucial component is E for Executive
Homes. These gravitate towards the malls, like
bees towards nectar. They began building them at
Bluewater, even before the mall opened. Lakeside
has its 'new community' of Chafford Hundred,
which is springing up about 300 yards from the
mall. A primary school, a family pub and a Safeway's are already in place. A private health and
sports club and creche are promised soon.
In 1998, all the big house-builders had their own
plots in this East London creation of Edge City.
The car is as cherished as in present-day Mayfield
Avenue. Fashion has moved away from semis.
'Executive homes' are always detached, but only a
few feet apart from one another. At Chafford
Hundred, however, the designs often evoke
inter-war suburbia. There is, for example, Wimpey's 'Tudor' style. Or there is what I think of as
'Barratt Conventional', a style in which houses
(with garages) with steeply pitched roofs are
tucked up in line. Here again the resemblance to
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

Mayfield Avenue is striking, though space is

much tighter. There is less space. Land in and
around London is now much dearer, thanks
partly to the invention of the Green Belt. There
are terrace houses at Chafford Hundred. These
may be an 'East Anglian Vernacular', with appropriate flint and tiling. But these are simply a
transit zone. A terrace, here, always means 'starter
homes': the bottom-rung option, before you move
up to an executive home with overtones of Mayfield Avenue.
Edge City, following in the Non-Plan footsteps
of Kenton, adds up to the final suburban triumph.
Malls move everything nearer to suburbia. A
recent retail index gave national trading ratings.
The top four locations, judged by turnover and
profitability per square foot, were England's first
four malls, in this order: MetroCentre Gateshead;
Meadowhall Sheffield; Lakeside Thurrock; and
Merry Hill, at Dudley in the West Midlands.
Oxford Street was in eleventh place, and Princes
Street, Edinburgh, came twelfth.
The Continuing Significance of Non-Plan
Edge City is only the most extreme example of
what is happening. Everywhere has been suburbanized, both town and country, both socially and
(often) in design. Non-Plan unashamedly implies
suburbanization. Few English villages, for example, now contain many inhabitants who have
anything to do with agriculture. The villages are
stuffed either with second-home owners, or commuters, or both. Around the village edges, you
find two new kinds of dwelling: yet more executive homes and the mobile homes park. Of the
two, the mobile homes park is the harder to find.
It is nearly always hidden behind a discreet
hedge. But it is always there. Mobile home
parks, which are Non-Plan incarnate, cry out for
further study. They are amazingly ingenious, and
always very suburban. The wheels are hidden by
little modesty screens of brickwork. Baskets of
flowers hang beside the front door. Plastic windmills turn, and cement rabbits gambol, on every
patch of grass.
Everywhere in today's Britain you see suburban pride of ownership. There is further evidence
in any council estate-of houses, not flats. A
107

personal version of Non-Plan has chipped away

at the planned design certainties and monotonies.
Front doors tell the story of right-to-buy. The
council's doors have been removed. The suburbanite replacements vary between Costa Brava
(the heavy Spanish style, with bright varnished
panels) and Barbara Cartland (neo-Regency, with
a glazed fanlight). Both versions are tougher than
the old doors. There is no glass you can easily
knock in. The woodwork is stronger. But the
main point is to say: this is my house, not
anyone else's. The message is rubbed in by the
carriage lamps, the new paint, even (sometimes) a
little oriel window above the front door.
The Non-Plan imagery of suburbia can crop up
in rather surprising places. In Brussels, for example, they have built a Gargantuan new home
for the European Parliament. But, looking at its
cliff-like glass sides, and its mini-Crystal Palace
roof, you would think it was a particularly illdesigned shopping centre, if you had not been
warned first-ill-designed because there is absolutely no element of fun, or frivolity, about it.
Again: in many inner-city regeneration schemesam
beginning with the London Docklands-I
struck by the fact that much of the housing, so
far at least, follows a suburban model. Sir Lawrie
Barratt was, at first, one of the very few developers who thought it was worth taking a bet on
the eventual success of Docklands. Docklands'
role as a postmodern playground came later. In
any architectural or design history of Britain in the
late twentieth century, Barratt will deserve as
many pages as Sir Norman Foster.
To reflect on Non-Plan and on its suburban
manifestations is inevitably to reflect on the cyclical nature of fashion. These manifestations may be
attacked as un-aesthetic, even anti-aesthetic, and
the very opposite of good taste. But it is a safe
prediction that, in the normal course of things,
suburban semis like Mayfield Avenue's, and even
executive homes like Chafford Hundred's, will
come to be cherished aesthetically, just as induswere also once
trial terrace houses-which
mocked, and destroyed, as slums-are now cherished. By the same token, I await with confidence
the first Grade II listed regional shopping mall.
Since 1996, I have done a great deal of walking
around British cities, towns and villages-partly
108

for a weekly column I had been writing in the New

Statesman magazine. And I have increasingly
come to endorse the conclusions we came to, all
those years ago. Growth that happens without too
much prescription is best. It is, of course, fine to
lay down some very basic negative rules, and NonPlan was never hostile to this; for example, this
belt of land shall not be built on; or no building in
this city centre shall be higher than ten storeys.
But, outside that, as little should be done as
possible. Positive planning is all too often a disaster. For a start, it is usually based on incorrect
forecasts about the future. No one is clever
enough to know, in advance, how cities will
grow. You cannot tell which innovation will
germinate and multiply a thousandfold (like the
mobile phone), and which hopeful idea will just
die (like Reyner Banham's beloved Moulton
bicycle). Nor can we tell how people will decide
to organize their lives, or how their tastes in
patterns of living will develop. A city is not a
computer program. It has a life of its own.
Non-Plan, as a concept, is essentially a very
humble idea. At the heart of Non-Plan, in both
social and design terms, is the thought that it is
very hard to know what is good for other people.
Notoriously, few architects live in the kinds of
house they have advocated for others to live in.
Few planners have hung around to see the effect
of the plans that looked so delightful on the
drawing board. I think, for example, of the
destruction of the centre of Liverpool by wellmeaning planners like Graeme Shankland.
Nor has this stopped. I was tempted into thinking back about the significance of Non-Plan by a
walk I took around Bedford. The town has been
turned into a rancorous system of one-way roads,
interspersed with desolate pedestrian precincts. It
is a pleasant town, destroyed by planning. A long
list of such towns could easily be drawn up, from
every region of Britain: for example, Derby, Bradford, Coventry. All have been destroyed by an idee
fixe of planning. Contrariwise, there are towns like
York which have been destroyed by obsessive
conservation-a later idWefixe, York has become
a theme park with medieval trimmings. The
conservation obsession has this advantage: it is
reversible.
Bedford was John Bunyan's town. But it is now
Paul Barker

a very long way from being the House or the City

Beautiful. As I made my own Pilgrim's Progress
around it, I wondered again if things could conceivably have been any worse if there had been no
planning at all. They might even have been better.
As an idea, as a form of liberation, Non-Plan (I
decided) was still very much alive and kicking.
PAUL BARKER

Instituteof CommunityStudies,London
Notes
This paper is a revised version of the tenth Reyner
Banham memorial lecture which was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 13 March1998.
1 For a fuller account of the ethos and history of the
magazine, see Paul Barker,'Paintingthe portraitof
"The Other Britain":New Society1962-8', ContemporaryRecord,vol. 5, no. i, Summer 1991.
2 MelaniePhillips, 'Commentary',Guardian,
26 February 1988.

15

3 Robert Hewison, Too Much: Art and Society in the

Sixties,Methuen, London, 1986.

4 Michael Young and Peter Willmott's collaboration
began with Family and Kinship in East London,Rout-

i6

ledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957.

5 Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and

17

Politics in a New Suburban Community, Allen Lane,

i8

Penguin Press, London, 1967. Extractspublished in

New Societyas 'An anatomy of suburbia', vol. 10,
19

no. 261, 28 September 1967.

6 Lionel March, 'Let's build in lines', New Society,

vol. lo, no. 251, 20 July 1967.

20

7 Reyner Banham, Megastructures:Urban Futures of the

RecentPast, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976.

8 Peter Hall, 'Monumentalfolly', New Society,vol.
no. 317, 24 October1968.

21

12,

9 Nicholas Taylor, The Village in the City, Temple

10
l1

Smith, London, 1973.

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens
After They'reBuilt, Viking, New York, 1994.
RobertVenturi, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cam-

bridge, MA, 1972.

12 MaryBanham(ed.), A CriticWrites:
Essaysby Reyner
Banham,
Universityof CaliforniaPress,Berkeley,1996.
An earlier New Societyselection appeared in Paul
Barker(ed.),Artsin Society,Fontana,London,1977.
13 CedricPrice,'Pop-upParliament',NewSociety,vol. 6,
no. 148, 29 July 1965; 'Potteries Thinkbelt', New
Society,vol. 7, no. 192, 2 June 1966.
14 Some of John Berger's and Angela Carter'sessays
Non-Plan Revisited:or the Real Way Cities Grow

22

were included in Arts in Society, op. cit. Others of

John Berger's New Society essays were in John
Berger, Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of
Things, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972; a wider
collection was Lloyd Spencer (ed.), The White Bird:
Writings by John Berger, Chatto & Windus, London,
1985. Several of Angela Carter's essays appeared in
Angela Carter, Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings,
Virago, London, 1982; for a fuller collection, see
Angela Carter, Shakinga Leg:Journalismand Writings,
Chatto & Windus, London, 1997. Peter Fuller's
essays were reprinted in Peter Fuller, Beyond the
Crisis in Art, Writers & Readers, London, 1980, The
Naked Artist, Writers & Readers, London, 1983,
Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions,
Chatto & Windus, London, 1985, and elsewhere.
Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall & Cedric
Price, ' Non-Plan: an experiment in freedom', New
Society, vol. 13, no. 338, 20 March 1969. The introductory section is reprinted in Andrew Blowers,
Chris Hamnett & Philip Sarre (eds.), The Future of
Cities, Hutchinson, London, 1974, and in Jonathan
Hughes & Simon Sadler (eds.), Non-Plan: Essays in
Freedomand Choicein Modern Architectureand Urbanism, Architectural Press, Oxford, forthcoming.
Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs, Collins,
London, 1969.
Cedric Price, 'Pop-up Parliament', op. cit.
Colin Ward, quoted in ContemporaryRecord, op. cit.
See also Colin Ward, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response, London School of Economics, London, 1997.
Michael Hebbert, London: More by Fortune than
Design, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1998.
J. M. Richards, The Castles on the Ground, Architectural Press, London, 1946.
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, London: The Unique City,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, abridged edn. 1960.
Peter Hall, 'Greenfields and grey areas', paper presented at Royal Town Planning Institute annual
conference, Chester, 15 June 1977; reprinted in
Peter Hall, The EnterpriseZone: British Origins, American Adaptations, Berkeley, Institute of Urban and
Regional Development Working Paper No. 350,
1981. Colin Ward followed up Non-Plan from a
different perspective with his concept of a 'Do-ItYourself New Town' (first proposed in 1975). This
linked the experience of the pre-war 'plotlands' in
the English countryside with 'the post-war adventure of the self-built settlements that surround every
city of Latin America, Africa or Asia.' See Colin
Ward, 'The unofficial countryside', in Anthony Barnett & Roger Scruton (eds.), Town and Country,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1998.
109

23

24

110

Kenton is touched on in the classic study of London's twentieth-century spec-built suburbia: Alan
A. Jackson, Semi-DetachedLondon:SuburbanDevelopment, Life and Transport, i900-39,
Allen & Unwin,
London, 1973.
Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,
Doubleday, New York, 1991. For a longer historical
perspective, see Kenneth T. Jackson, CrabgrassFrontier: The Suburbanizationof the United States, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1985.

25

26

27

I have visited MetroCentre Gateshead twice. Examples in this paper relate to my most recent visit
in July 1996.
In 1998, after this paper was delivered, BBC Television broadcast a documentary series about the Lakeside Thurrock mall, called 'Lakesiders', which
underlined my East London point.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities: The Failure of Town Planning, Random
House, New York, 1961.

Paul Barker