neW urBan environmenTs, C.1860–1950^169Health Boards – replaced in 1894 by the District Councils – or the new
County Councils, established in 1888, decided on a strategic basis which
areas could or could not be built over. Their involvement in the oversight of
development was initially limited to the enforcement of bylaws concerning
such things as the width of building plots. In 1909 The Housing and Town
Planning Act established that District Councils could prepare planning
schemes for any land in the course of development or likely to be developed,
in order to ensure proper sanitary conditions and to prevent harm to owners
of neighbouring properties.^39 But it was only in 1919 that the Housing and
Town Planning Act made such schemes compulsory, and even then only
for places where the population was above 20,000. In 1932 the Town and
Country Planning Act extended planning schemes to rural land but local
authorities were not obliged to draw them up, and were anyway obliged to
compensate owners for any financial losses incurred by a refusal to grant
development permission.^40 Attempts were also made to control low-density
sprawl through the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act of 1935, which
made all new building within 220 feet of classified roads subject to the
control of the Local Authorities, although again with limited effects. Only
with the passing of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act were local
authorities able to zone areas for development and allocate particular tracts
as ‘green belt’ or otherwise retained as open space.
Late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suburbs took a variety of
forms but – simplifying somewhat – we might envisage a spectrum, at one
end of which were streets composed of rows of terraced houses – the homes
of the lower middle or working classes, generally located towards town and
city centres; and at the other, the more spacious roads of larger detached
or semi-detached houses.^41 In general terms, the larger the house, the larger
the garden, the greater the number of trees and shrubs, and the better the
opportunities for wildlife to adapt to the new conditions: affluent areas also
usually possessed more parks and other open spaces. This distinction is a
little misleading, however, because by the start of the twentieth century the
idea that urban landscapes should be laid out so that they included spaces for
both recreation and nature was beginning to become established, especially
through the writings of Ebenezer Howard. In his book Tomorrow: a Peaceful
Path to Real Reform – published in 1898 but republished as Garden Cities
of Tomorrow in 1902 – Howard not only urged an intensification of the
existing tendency for homes to spread more widely and thinly across the
landscape, so that there was ‘a migratory movement of population from
our overcrowded centres to sparsely-settled rural districts’, but also that
towns should have numerous green spaces in the form of private gardens
and public parks, and be planned in such a way that ‘all the fresh delights of
the country – field, hedgerow, and woodland – not prim parks and gardens
merely – would be within a few minutes walk or ride’.^42 Howard’s ideas
were put into practice most effectively in the development of Letchworth
Garden City, which began to be laid out in north Hertfordshire in 1902.