The arrival (and departure) of the expert planner

The years during and immediately after the Second World War are often seen as the ‘golden age’ of British town planning. Planning as the regulation of private initiatives in suburban expansion was seemingly transformed into planning for national reconstruction. For the first time town planning seemed to be a major arm of a new, more egalitarian approach to social policy. Town planners became charismatic figures, men of vision whose expert designs would usher in the New Jerusalem. Then the early 1950s saw these hopes dashed. Planning was just an appendage of the local government bureaucracy, presiding over the spread of subtopia and wire scape. The planner had been reduced to a mere administrator.