Student snapshots of Britain’s planned communities show failed neighborhoods, idealism in action in the 1970s
Long-lost lecture slides document housing projects and the students who learned from them
The cities had sprung up like feral organisms and grown into ramshackle warrens of tenements that quickly crumbled. In the aftermath of The Blitz, the British government fast-tracked plans to raze entire districts of substandard housing and thin out urban populations by building entirely new planned communities. It was a new, thought-out, and modern nation. Towers climbed high above the streets and modernist utopias took root in the countryside.
It was a time of good intentions and an unflappable belief that blueprint theories could be seamlessly applied to real life. In 1965, the University of Sheffield established a cross-disciplinary department to create a top-notch program, made up of the nation’s sharpest minds. They even lured J.R. James, the former Chief Planner from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, to be their first professor of Town and Regional Planning.
Since the late 1940s, James had worked in government overseeing a variety of social housing schemes, from wholesale planned communities called New Towns, to tower-block mini-cities in the skies. He brought decades of experience to the university as well as thousands of slides highlighting the good and bad of housing across the country and beyond. But James wasn’t content to sit back and force a roomful of bright-eyed students to stare at his photos; he also orchestrated trips into the field so that the next generation of urban planners could learn from the successes and failures of the last.
For 10 years James shared his knowledge with optimistic acolytes in lecture halls and on the streets. Future urban planners toured blighted tenements and rundown neighborhoods left untouched by the wrecking ball, visited monumental concrete tower blocks and walked their causeways, and ventured to utopian enclaves throughout the country. Just building new homes for people wasn’t enough to create a cohesive community. Students needed to walk the public spaces where neighbors interacted and drive the local roads in order to get their heads around the underlying infrastructure that tied everything together. Some housing projects had devolved into drug-infested war zones, while some has succeeded as modest homes for those of modest means. Some New Towns had become isolated hellholes of disillusionment and poverty, while others thrived and prospered. Town and Regional Planning classes surveyed, researched, and devised schemes to improve upon outdated models of development.
James died in 1980 but his legacy lives on, although for 30 years a portion of it was boxed up in a basement and presumed lost. The unearthed archive of lecture slides, maps and assorted ephemera — documentation of planned communities or inspiration for the next generation — are a time capsule of utopian visions from an era when the concrete and glass were shiny and new, the idealism untested.
