The Life and Death of the Shopping City

"In 1937 a book entitled Problems of Town and Country Planning appeared, authored by an illustrious and influential civil servant, Sir Gwilym Gibbon. Gibbon had retired the previous year, but he had enjoyed a stellar civil service career for over thirty years. His biggest impact was in the field of local government and planning, where he spent over a decade as the chief civil servant dealing with planning matters at the Ministry of Health (then the main planning ministry). Here he was instrumental in advancing the case for broader and more systematic planning controls within government, as well as hammering out some of the finer administrative details. Gibbon had a reputation as a highly effective administrator (he organised conscription during the First World War), a rigorous thinker (he held a Doctorate in Economic Science), and an austere and intimidating character (he lived alone in a hotel in Richmond).4 Although he was sympathetic to the wider planning movement Gibbon was first and foremost a civil servant - a pragmatic and methodical administrator rather than a planning ideologue. On the opening page of his 1937 book Gibbon derided the simplistic way in which 'the general idea of planning has now become a popular panacea for modern ills ... advocated without sense of the complication of human affairs or the limits of human foresight'.5 He was at his most emphatic when setting out what he felt should be the ultimate aims of planning, where support for business, growth and prosperity should always take precedence. This, for Gibbon, was 'the first objective of good planning'"--