Abercrombie, Patrick (Sir)

Abercrombie, Patrick (Sir) (1879-1957)
Town and regional planner. Abercrombie led the development of town and regional planning practice in the UK for 60 years. Trained as an architect, he joined the Department of Civic Design at Liverpool University. In 1915 he succeeded STANLEY ADSHEAD as professor of civic design there. For 20 years Abercrombie combined academic life at Liverpool with private practice as a town and regional planner. He prepared the first comprehensive regional plan (for the Doncaster area, 1922) and the Sheffield Civic Survey (1924) (which, like most of his work, showed the influence of PATRICK GEDDES) and the East Kent regional plan (1925). Abercrombie was a founder of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (see CAMPAIGN TO PROTECT RURAL ENGLAND) in 1926. His County of London Plan identified communities based on London’s villages and former market towns. His GREATER LONDON PLAN (1944, published in 1945) proposed dispersing a million people from the city’s inner areas. This would be accommodated, not in further suburban sprawl (a green belt would prevent further growth), but in new towns. Land values would be controlled. Abercrombie had become a professor at University College London. He completed his Clyde Valley Regional Plan in 1946. Abercrombie’s background as an architect showed in all his work. ‘To him a planning commission was very much like an architectural commission,’ Peter Hall (1994) writes. ‘He produced a one-shot, partly intuitive design solution to a problem. You will look in vain throughout Abercrombie’s work for forecasts, projections, generation and evaluation of alternatives; in other words, for all the paraphernalia of planning as we have known it since the 1950s. You will look in vain for any costings, let alone cost-benefit analysis … Nor will you find much reference to the need to monitor and correct the plan .. .’ Abercrombie was president of the Town Planning Institute and was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the RIBA.