The elusive green background: Raymond Unwin and the greater London regional plan

Decentralization of population and industry from the London County Council (LCC) area began before the end of the 19th century; it significantly gathered momentum in the 1920s. The 1909 and 1919 planning legislation proved unequal to the task of controlling and directing this suburban growth. Although a number of ad‐hoc joint regional plans concerned the Greater London Region, there was little sense of co‐ordination. Consequently, the Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain set up the Greater London Regional Planning Committee (GLRPC), made up of local authority representatives, in October 1927. In January 1929, Raymond Unwin, who had been a principal officer with the Ministry since 1919, was appointed Technical Adviser to the GLRPC. Since 1912 he had developed Howard's Garden City cluster to regional scale; and a strategy of planned decentralization to satellite communities, within a protected green belt, was advocated by the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association and Unhealthy Areas Committee. Unwin prepared the two GLRPC Reports (1929, 1933). The first presented alternatives indicating planned development on a protected ‘green background’ against a lesser measure where ‘green girdles’ were protected within a development area potentially spreading outwards over the region. In 1933 the first alternative was developed in the context of the 1931 Census returns. The Committee was reconstituted a year later and the LCC took a dominant role, with the green belt concept given statutory backing in 1938. Decentralization to New Towns was enacted in 1946, following the recommendation of Abercrombie's Greater London Plan (1944).