as depicted in the county of london plan. you can see it all coming - the huge clearances of city fabric, the tower blocks, the urban motorways. of course, after the depression and the war much of london was in a terrible state. many people had lost their homes, many lived in overcrowded conditions with poor sanitation. the war had shown what centralised planning could achieve, and people expected great things in peacetime. the affluent consumer society was not foreseen, so the only way you were going to get a bathroom was by government provision. industry was smoky and polluting, so it had to be separated from housing. open space and sunlight were a public health requirement in an age when slum children had rickets. so goodbye shoreditch, and all those other chaotic areas that we all love now.
it was a socialist vision. private enterprise had made a terrible mess, and only the state acting on behalf of ordinary people could muster the resources to clear it up. it was a modernist vision, rational and scientific, collectivist. people would all have the same, and all have enough, and be content with that. people would be decent and community-minded and not vandalise the common areas or attack you just because there was no-one around. nobody would be goaded into such actions by inequality, unemployment or family breakdown. the eventual architecture brought its own problems, but still these wartime visions pose uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we have become.
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