ABERCROMBIE, LESLIE PATRICK

b. 6 June 1879, Ashton-upon-Mersey, England;
d. 23 March 1957, Aston Tirrold, Berkshire, England

Key works
(1933) Town and Country Planning, London: Home University Library.
(1945) Greater London Plan 1944, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

   Patrick Abercrombie may appear a late developer: he was 63 when his County of London Plan (co-authored with J.H.Forshaw, chief architect-planner of the London County Council) appeared in 1943, 66 on publication of his even more celebrated Greater London Plan in 1945; he was knighted that year, retired from academia the year after, and died thirteen years later. But he was already the most celebrated British planner of his generation. Articled to an architect aged 18, lacking an academic degree, he had been appointed research fellow in town planning—and first editor of the Town Planning Review—in the new School of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool in 1912; when Professor Stanley Adshead moved to University College London (UCL) in 1915, Abercrombie succeeded him in the Liverpool chair; when Adshead retired in 1935, Abercrombie followed him to UCL at the ripe age of 56.

   Starting with his successful competition entry for the Dublin Plan in 1913, he became a highly successful planning consultant; in the 1920s and 1930s, he developed a specialty in regional planning—for the Doncaster region, for East Kent and Suffolk, for Sheffield, and for Bath and Bristol; he also acted as consultant on Manchester’s Garden City at Wythenshawe, where Barry Parker was the architect. He became chairman of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, which he helped found in 1926, and was on the Council of the Town and Country Planning Association.

   Abercrombie followed Patrick Geddes’s principle of survey before plan; he used experienced local collaborators to perform the survey work; his skill was to synthesize complex planning concepts in memorable cartoon-like diagrams. After Raymond Unwin’s death in the United States, in 1940, he was Britain’s pre-eminent planner, natural choice for the London plans.

   He was confident in his concept of planning: ‘Planning simply means proposing to do, and then doing, certain things in an orderly, pre-meditated, related and rational way, having in view some definite end that is expected to be beneficial.’ He argued that Town and Country Planning seeks to proffer a guiding hand to the trend of natural evolution as a result of a careful study of the place itself, and its external relationships. The result is to be more than a piece of skillful engineering or satisfactory hygiene or successful economics: it should be a social organism and a work of art’

   Those qualities were evident in his London plans—especially the Greater London Plan, which proposed that London’s physical growth should be stopped by a green belt and that over a million people should move out to new and expanded towns beyond it. Rather remarkably, the Plan’s key elements were implemented over the following quarter century, powerfully shaping the wider London region as we know it today. Within London, he was less successful: large parts of east and south London were rebuilt according to his prescriptions, with a mixture of high- and low-rise development at a density of 136 people per acre, but the process remained incomplete and the bold highway plans—five orbital highways, at least two of them expressways, and high-capacity radials—fell victim to political opposition and a change in Zeitgeist. Despite that, of few other planners can Sir Christopher Wren’s obituary seem so applicable: si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Further reading
Dix, G. (1978) ‘Little plans and noble diagrams’, Town Planning Review 49:329–52.
Manno, A. (1980) Patrick Abercrombie: A Chronological Bibliography with Annotations and Biographical Details, Leeds: Planning Research Unit, Leeds Polytechnic.

✍️ SIR PETER HALL