Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 4th Edition

The City of Towers

Ye towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame,

With many a foul and midnight murther fed.

Thomas Grey, The Bard (1757)

The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working people do not take kindly to flats; even when flats exist they are contemptuously named “tenements”. Almost everyone will tell you that he wants “a house of his own”, and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more “their own” than a flat situated in mid-air.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

… the solution of the housing problem in any great English city does not lie in the provision of High Barbicans or High Paddingtons. They may be physically and theoretically possible but they are completely alien to the habits and tastes of the people who would be expected to live in them.

Harold Macmillan, Internal Memorandum as Minister of Housing and Local Government (1954)

7The City of Towers: The Corbusian Radiant City: Paris, Chandigarh, Brasilia, London, St Louis, 1920 – 1970

The evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him; the good is perhaps interred with his books, which are seldom read for the simple reason that most are almost unreadable. (The pictures, it should be said, are sometimes interesting for what they reveal of their draughtsman.) But the effort should be made, because their impact on twentieth-century ...