Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other western province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer. In London, within the limits of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the course of any Roman street, though Roman roads that lead up to the gates are still in use. At Colchester the Roman walls still stand; the places of the Roman gates are known; the masonry of the west gate is still visible as the masonry of a gateway. But the modern and ancient streets do not coincide, and the west gate, which has so well withstood the blows of time, can hardly be reached by road from within the city. At York the defences of the legionary fortress have still their place in the sun, but the 'colonia' on the other bank of the Ouse has vanished wholly from the surface, walls and streets together, and the houses of the citizens of Eburacum are known solely by finds of mosaic floors. At Lincoln the Roman walls and gates can easily be traced and one gate rears its arch intact, but the Bailgate alone follows, and that erratically, the line of a Roman street. The road from the Humber, thirty miles north of Lincoln, runs to-day, as it has run for eighteen centuries, under the Newport arch and through the modern town and passes on southwards. That long straight road has given a feature to Lincoln, but it is a feature due to the Roman highway outside the town, not to the streets within it. Lincoln itself is as English as Cologne and Trier are German.

II. But if Roman streets have seldom survived continuously to modern days, if Roman town-planning perished with the western Empire, it has none the less profoundly influenced the towns of mediaeval and modern Europe and America. Early in the thirteenth century men began to revive, with certain modifications, the rectangular planning which Rome had used. Perhaps copying Roman originals seen in northern Italy, Frederic Stupor Mundi now built on a chess-board pattern the Terra Nova which he founded in Sicily. Now, in 1231, Barcelonette was built with twenty square 'insulae' in south-eastern France. Now, too, the 'Bastides' and 'Villes Neuves' of southern France and towns like Aigues-Mortes (1240) were built on similar plans.[[122] ]

FIG. 35.
PLAN OF A BASTIDE TOWN, SAUVETERRE-DE-GUYENNE NEAR BORDEAUX (A.D. 1281)
(By Dr. A.E. Brinckmann.)

Soon after, the chess-board pattern came to England and was used in Edwardian towns like Flint[[123] ] and Winchelsea; then, too, it was adopted at the other end of the civilized world by German soldiers in Polish lands. Cracow, for example, owes to German settlers in the mid-thirteenth century that curious chess-board pattern of its innermost and oldest streets which so much puzzles the modern visitor.[[124] ] It is unnecessary here to follow further the renaissance of town-planning. By intervals and revivals it continued to spread. In 1652 it reached Java, when the Dutch built Batavia. In 1682 it reached America, when Penn founded Philadelphia. In 1753, when Kandahar was refounded as a new town on a new site, its Afghan builders laid out a roughly rectangular city, divided into four quarters meeting at a central Carfax and divided further into many strangely rectangular blocks of houses.[[125] ]

But in growing, the old town-planning has passed into a new stage. The Romans dealt with small areas, seldom more than three hundred acres and often very much less. The town-plans of the Middle Ages and even of modern times affected areas that were little larger. Only the last days have brought development. Till the enormous changes of the nineteenth century—changes which have transferred the termination of ancient history from A.D. 476 to near A.D. 1800—the older fashions remained, in town-life as in most other forms of civilized society. Towns were still, with few exceptions, small and their difficulties, if real, were simple. Save in half a dozen abnormal capitals, they had, even in relatively modern days, no vast populations to be fed and made into human and orderly citizens. They had no chemical industries, no chimneys defiling the air, or drains defiling the water. Now, builders have to face the many square miles of Chicago or Buenos Ayres, to provide lungs for their cities, to fight with polluted streams and smoke. Their problems are quite unlike those of the ancients. When Cobbett, about 1800, called London the Great Wen, he contrasted in two monosyllables the ancient ideal of a city with the ugly modern facts.

It is not, therefore, likely that modern architects or legislators will learn many hints from plans of Timgad or of Silchester. There are lessons perhaps in the growth of Turin from its little ancient chess-board to its modern enlargement, but such developments are rare. The great benefit to modern workers of such a survey as I have attempted is that it shows the slow and painful steps by which mankind became at last able to plan towns as units, yet inhabited by individual men and women, and that it emphasizes the need for definite rules and principles. Nor is it perhaps quite superfluous to-day to point out how closely, even after the great upheaval of the nineteenth century, the forms of modern life depend on the Roman world.

Footnotes:

[ [1] ] For example, by Beloch in his volume on the cities of Campania, by Schulten in various essays, by Barthel in a recent inquiry into Roman Africa, and by others, to be cited below. Dr. J. Stübben in his Städtebau (Darmstadt, ed. 2, 1907) and Mr. Raymond Unwin in his Town planning in practice (London, 1909) have given interesting notices and illustrations of the subject for modern builders.