Escaping the Coffin

Its industries booming, its citizens more prosperous than ever before, Britain is surging into the 1960s with a self-confidence unmatched since Edwardian days. Yet last week from every side Britons found themselves assailed by Cassandras crying that today's growth was likely to prove tomorrow's ruin.

Already, with a population density of 550 per sq. mi., Britain is the West's most thickly settled big nation.-- "If you in the U.S. had our population density," Transport Minister Ernest Marples recently remarked in Los Angeles, "you could accommodate the entire population of the world--white, yellow, black, the lot. And all the present population of both the U.S. and the United Kingdom could be accommodated in Texas."

As all hands from Tory Marples to the Fabian Socialist intellectuals agree, Britain's prime social problem is not too many people but too many people in the wrong places. Like the U.S. itself, but more acutely, Britain in 1960 is a victim of "urban sprawl," the planless mushrooming of cities. Says Oxford Economist Colin Clark: "There is an area in central England, an oblong, coffin-shaped area, which includes more and more of our population ... If things go on as they are, we shall soon all be in the coffin."

Telegraph Poles & Tin. Partly because of its long postwar austerity, when most of its automobiles were made for foreign markets. Britain was one of the slowest of Western industrial nations to discover the mixed blessings of the age of the Common Motorist. Even yet. there is only one six-lane British superhighway--the London-to-Birmingham M1. And in traffic-congested London, a race between a sports car and a sedan chair staged last week by the magazine Lilliput ended in a win for the sedan chair.

Today, the outskirts of Carlisle, just south of the Scottish border, are almost indistinguishable from the outskirts of Southampton 400 miles away, and along the highways between the two cities, William Blake's "green & pleasant land" of 150 years ago has been transformed into latter-day Poet John Betjeman's "dear old, bloody old England of telegraph poles and tin." All told, more than 40% of the British population lives in seven monstrous conurbations surrounding London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.

The Exporters. In 1947, spurred on by the Attlee government's Town and Country Planning Act, local authorities throughout Britain began to corset the nation's expanding cities with "green belts"--strips of unspoiled country in which no new housing or industrial construction is permitted. More drastic yet, the cities themselves began organized relocation of their citizens, either to smaller cities eager for labor and industry or to the "new towns"--self-contained communities complete with factories, such as Stevenage (pop. 30,000), which were thrown up by the planners' decrees. So far, 420,000 Britons have been resettled in the 15 new towns already built. In the next ten years, Glasgow alone plans to export 300,000 slum dwellers, many to towns clear across Scotland.

Last week, under the planners' pressure, British Motor Corp., Ltd., the nation's largest auto manufacturer (Austin, M.G., Morris), dropped its dreams of gobbling up 51 acres of the Birmingham green belt for plant expansion. Instead, B.M.C. now plans to spend $59 million building new factories in Scotland, South Wales, Merseyside and North Staffordshire--mostly outside Economist Clark's crowded coffin.

History for the Tourists. Chief opposition to the new towns--and to the spreading urban sprawl--comes from Britain's highly vocal agricultural conservationists. Watching schools, roads, factories and homes swallowing more than 35,000 acres of choice farm land every year, British farmers say that the nation's food production is threatened. Top British Agricultural Economist Gerald Wibberley disputes their findings, but the farmers make a convincing emotional appeal to all people who subsisted in two world wars largely on what crops their beleaguered island could grow.

The planners are further bedeviled by the fact that almost any aged building in Britain, however dubious its historic or esthetic interest, can usually raise a band of impassioned defenders. Currently, a hassle rages over the Coach & Horses, a run-of-the-mill pub near London Airport scheduled for demolition as part of a plan for development of the Bath Road. It has been seriously argued that the Coach & Horses is "a historic monument of educational value to arriving and departing American tourists."

Mortgage on the Future. To overcome such opposition, Britain's bureaucrats are invested with almost unlimited condemnation powers and do not hesitate to use them--sometimes with a self-righteous lack of consideration rarely matched this side of the Iron Curtain. In Birmingham, Mrs. Elizabeth Adams, an 81-year-old widow, is still waiting for a government ruling on her refusal to accept $2.80 compensation for seven houses that the City Corporation took by eminent domain two years ago; in the meantime the corporation has collected--and kept--$1,232 in rent from the houses.

In the face of regular outcries from the press over such "land grabs," Britain's urban planners almost to a man argue that what is needed in overcrowded Britain is not less authoritarianism in planning but more--all of it preferably vested in a single Ministry of Town and Country Planning. "The future development of Britain is not related only to our lifetime," argues Economist Wibberley. "It is a mortgage on unborn generations."

* But Belgium (768 per sq. mi.) and The Netherlands (832) are more crowded.

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