SECTION V.
SOCIAL SERVICE.
[Of Town Planning]—[The Mission of Music]—[The Real Social Reformer]—[Where Charity Fails]—[Landlordism Up-to-date]—[The Church and Town Planning.]
OF TOWN PLANNING.[[1]]
By Mrs. S. A. Barnett.
January, 1911.
[1] From “The Cornhill Magazine”. By kind permission of the Editor.
Much has been said lately about town planning. Conferences have been held, speeches have been made, articles have been written, papers have been read, and columns of newspaper-notices have appeared, and yet I am daring to occupy eleven pages of the Cornhill Magazine to try and add a few more remarks to what has already been so well and so forcibly put forth.
But in apology for the presumption, it can be said that what I want to say does not entrench upon the province of the architect, the surveyor, or the artist. The questions of traffic-congestion, density of population, treatment of levels, arrangement of trams, water or gas, relation of railway termini or docks to thoroughfares, organization of periodic excess of street usage, relative positions of municipal buildings, harmony of material and design, standardization of streets and road grading, appreciation of scale; on these matters I will not write, for on them contributions, interesting, dull, suggestive, or learned, have been abundantly produced, and “are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles” of the great Conference held last month under the auspices of the Royal Institute of British Architects? And are not their potentialities visible beneath the legal phraseology of Mr. John Burns’ Town-planning Act of last Parliament?
It is so delightful to realize that some of the best brains of this and other countries are turning their thoughts to the solution of what Mr. T. S. Horsfall (who for many years was a voice crying in the wilderness) demanded as the elemental right of every human being, “the conditions of a healthy life”. It is comforting to know that others are doing the thinking, especially when one is old, and can recall one’s passionate, youthful indignation at the placid acceptance of stinking courts and alleys as the normal homes for the poor, when the memory is still vivid of the grand day when one portion of the network of such courts, in St. Jude’s parish, was swept away, and a grave, tall, carefully planned tenement building, erected by the public-spirited kindness of the late Mr. George M. Smith, arose in its stead, “built to please Barnett as an experiment”.