Background

There are many studies of the complex processes that contributed to nineteenth-century urbanization and the briefest survey of these provides ample explanation for scholarly interest. Population growth alone established the Victorian city as a proper object for attention, and yet growth represented much more than a quantitative increase.Footnote ⁵ Accounts of the history of urban growth can reasonably take as their focus economic or industrial factors, shifts in social and political cleavages, patterns of consumption or cultural taste, but underpinning these emphases, and central to understanding the historical background of the civic movement, are the profound spatial transformations that affected the landscapes, architecture and infrastructures of urban areas. Towns and cities in nineteenth-century Britain were transformed by, and facilitated, industrial capitalism and they registered the physical manifestations of this new mode of production. Among the primary appetites of industrial capitalism was the circulation of people, goods and vehicles. New streets were cut and railways, ‘the most important single agency in the transformation of the central area of many of Britain's major cities’, displaced local residents and created new kinds of spaces, like cuttings and tunnels, as well as the stations and tracks that carved through urban landscapes.Footnote ⁶ The increasing affluence of the urban middle classes also supported the development of new spaces. Arcades and department stores created spectacles of artificial light and theatrical displays that reflected the increasing consumerism characteristic of the nineteenth-century city.Footnote ⁷ Cultural sophistication was signalled by galleries, libraries and museums. These, built in considerable numbers over the century, were significant for their architecture and spatial organization, as well as for their collections.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, spatial differentiation was an important aspect of urban development. It occurred on the scale of building design and organization, and it was also a feature of the wider geography of urban growth, evident in the increasingly apparent distinctions between the centre and periphery of cities.

Attempts to reflect upon and engage with these spatial changes were clearly visible among the various responses to urbanization. Transformation in the urban landscape was, for example, accompanied by an increasingly specialized repertoire of spatial representations, such as surveys, maps, plans and directories that enabled residents and visitors to negotiate the geographically and socially complex terrain of cities.Footnote ⁹ The desire to gaze upon urban complexity was a popular fascination fed by panoramas and dioramas, elevated viewing points and aerial photography.Footnote ¹⁰ These ways of seeing were in important respects a continuation of earlier preoccupations with expanding the field of vision, but they proliferated and changed form during the nineteenth century. Thus, in London there was an acceleration of attempts to render the vast capital available to the eye. Journalistic investigations, like those of Henry Mayhew, produced textural representations of the city's social life. However, it was Charles Booth's remarkable project that yielded the most influential early graphic engagement with urban space. Showing the socio-economic, and implying also the moral, landscape of London through a detailed colour-coding of the city, Booth's map created a public sensation at the end of the century.Footnote ¹¹

The observations that resulted from such early investigative and mapping projects suggested that health and community were degraded by a poor environment and, despite the spatial separation of the middle classes from the worst urban problems, Britain's associational culture consistently concerned itself with efforts to improve the landscape of towns and cities. Associations and campaigns pressed for parks and gardens, better housing, land reform and the protection of old buildings that were threatened by the voraciousness of urban growth. Reformist movements placed their emphasis variously on public health, evangelism or education, but behind their contrasting emphases there was often a shared focus on the built environment. Wohl has pointed, for example, to the tendency of churchmen ‘to move away from a strict emphasis upon salvation and the after-life to a genuine awareness of the importance of physical environment’.Footnote ¹² He has argued that such a move was indicative of the increasing prevalence of ‘environmentalist theories’ which directed attention towards the importance of the quality of urban landscapes.Footnote ¹³ Action undertaken on the basis of this concern included large-scale enterprises, such as City Improvement Trusts, but it also found expression in a multitude of works undertaken on a smaller scale.

Notable among these more discrete activities were those of the Hill sisters. A significant figure in the housing reform movement, Octavia Hill's work was intended to improve the living conditions of the poor in London. She placed an emphasis on small and gradual improvements, and on the personal relationships she and her workers established with tenants.Footnote ¹⁴ Hill's strong beliefs about the value of the qualitative aspects of an environment made her a pioneer, Whelan has argued, of ‘cultural philanthropy’, convinced, following the lead of John Ruskin, that beauty was an essential counterpart to a good life and should be a part of the daily experience of the poor, as well as the wealthy, in urban society.Footnote ¹⁵ Hill emphasized the importance of colour and of nature, recalling in a letter to fellow workers written in 1896, the year after she contributed to the formation of the National Trust, how she realized the importance of these in the lives of poor Londoners through direct experience of their living conditions: ‘It is from the narrow space in rooms and crowded alleys that I first learned how the small garden near the narrow court or huge block was the necessary complement of the home . . . it was in their colourlessness and unloveliness that I learnt how the colour and music brought by the Kyrle Society were needed.’Footnote ¹⁶ The Kyrle Society mentioned here by Octavia was an organization initiated by her sister, Miranda, in the mid-1870s. Miranda's first suggestion was for a ‘Society for the Diffusion of Beauty’ that would work towards ‘making beautiful places for the poor . . . since our towns are growing so enormously . . . there is less and less possibility of beautiful country objects being within the reach of the poor in their daily lives’.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, when her ideas took organizational shape in the Kyrle Society, the chief aim was to provide beauty through art, music and access to garden space; in this, the group exemplified the spread of a ‘missionary aestheticism’ during the later nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ The agenda represented a development of interests beyond the concern with physical health and adequate sanitation, towards an emphasis on aesthetic and cultural needs.

The aesthetic agenda was closely allied with the cause of architectural preservation. John Ruskin's treatise, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), provided an important statement in favour of age in the built environment, but his arguments were not new.Footnote ¹⁹ Interest in the physical legacies of the past had strong roots in the previous century. Sweet has shown that eighteenth-century urban improvements that led to the gradual disappearance of many medieval townscapes in Britain had an impact on the awareness of connections with the past; she has argued that the extent of the physical change caused concern among local inhabitants who viewed the material losses as damage done to their communities.Footnote ²⁰ In the nineteenth century, these shifting sensibilities found organized expression in the clubs and societies of urban voluntary culture. Thus, Miele points to York where the ‘heritage industry began to trade in the 1820s’ in the form of local learned societies which took on a museum of antiquities and the maintenance of an ancient ruin in the town.Footnote ²¹ Likewise, Levine's research has demonstrated the prevalence of interest in the past gathering pace over the nineteenth century through the growing number of antiquarian, archaeological and historical associations.Footnote ²² Many of these provincial groups placed a firm emphasis on the tangible legacies represented by buildings, monuments and distinctive landscapes, and in the final third of the nineteenth century, this interest became visible in a number of significant bodies. The Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London, for example, was established in 1875 in response to the demolition of old buildings, while the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was formed by William Morris, with Ruskin among its members, in 1877.Footnote ²³

One final thread to pick out here concerns the active interest in locality evident in nineteenth-century towns and cities. Levine has shown that, alongside the rising interest in the past, there was an emphasis on local pride which motivated and shaped historical concerns. She explicitly connects this interest in locality with the growth of civic pride in the later nineteenth century:

For the growing towns and cities of Britain claiming a distinctive local past provided some of the social cement necessary for establishing at least a patina of cohesion and longevity in rapidly growing and sometimes diverse communities. Thus, the concern for local history and heritage and that for the civic status and identity of cities began increasingly to coincide as the century matured.

The emergence, growth and membership of civic societies

When civic societies emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century, many of their concerns were closely connected to these earlier ideas and activities. With their focus on a particular town or city, they continued the emphasis on localism. Indeed, the desire to maintain the local distinctiveness granted by an old and beautiful townscape was often an important element in the formation of early groups. In Guildford, for example, the formation of a society in 1896 was a response to a series of proposed alterations to the town's High Street that were felt to be insensitive to local architecture and motivated by commercial interest

This extract gives an indication of the direct connections that existed between the first civic groups and earlier initiatives in the field of architectural preservation: the letter was part of a dialogue between the founders of the Guildford Society and the established Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Such points of continuity also existed in other places. In both Liverpool and Bristol, for example, local Kyrle societies either became civic societies or were partly merged with the civic society when it was formed.Footnote ²⁶

The names of civic groups varied. Sometimes they were called Preservation Trusts (as in St Andrews or Cambridge), sometimes they were named after their city (the London Society or the Warwick Society), and often they were called civic societies.Footnote ²⁷ They can be grouped by their focus on a specific urban centre and by their shared aims. The wording of objectives varied over the first half of the twentieth century, but they typically refer to a concern for ensuring high standards in planning and architecture, the preservation of historically or aesthetically significant buildings and sites and the education of the public in the history, geography and architecture of the locality. Estimating the number of societies operating at any given point is not a straightforward calculation and, therefore, the cases and numbers given here cannot be exhaustive or definitive, but, by the time Abercrombie called for the formation of civic societies across the whole country, groups had been established in Glasgow (1896) Guildford (1896), Bangor (1902), Liverpool (1909), Farnham, (1911), London (1912), Birmingham and Leeds (both 1918).Footnote ²⁸ In the inter-war period, there was consistent growth in numbers: societies appeared in Norwich, Nottingham, Cheltenham, Chipping Campden, Brighton, Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon, Cambridge and Southampton during the 1920s; others followed in Hove, Coventry, Rugby, Leicester, Bath, Manchester, St Andrews, Bournemouth, Colchester, Cardiff and Newport in the 1930s.

There was contact between early civic groups. The first conference was held in 1923 at the Le Play House in Westminster.Footnote ²⁹ However, it was not until the late 1930s that a more sustained network was established. In 1938, the Merseyside Civic Society wrote to other groups suggesting that contact be formalized between associations.Footnote ³⁰ The body that was established as a result was the Central Council of Civic Societies. It declared its aim as the support of local autonomy, a counter to what was perceived as the increasing centralization of policy, but reaction to this first national organization was mixed. The Birmingham Civic Society, for example, chose not to affiliate, believing that the council would ‘not serve any useful purpose’.Footnote ³¹ Yet, regardless of concerns, and despite the escalation of World War II, the number of societies affiliated to the council began to grow. In early 1942, the annual report recorded 20 societies represented on the council.Footnote ³² By the end of the decade, there were between 70 and 80 affiliated associations and the number continued to rise further.Footnote ³³ In 1960, approximately 130 local urban organizations shared similar concerns and undertook similar activities.Footnote ³⁴

Although Abercrombie's comments about the sphere of work to be undertaken by civic societies were ambiguous, he left no such question mark over their ideal membership. He suggested that councillors and aldermen should serve alongside ‘Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Town Planners, Doctors and Sociologists’. ‘For the remainder’, he counselled, ‘it would be advisable to have business men.’Footnote ³⁵ There are difficulties in researching the memberships of civic societies at this early period in their history. Where biographical information is available, it does not shed light on the whole, or even a large sample, of the full membership, and information is skewed in favour of those that held other notable positions. It is, however, accurate to observe that those serving on the councils and executive committees of civic societies, and those leading significant programmes of activity, have tended to be among the local and professional elite and that Abercrombie's suggested cast of politicians and professionals can indeed be readily found. In Glasgow, for example, among the founding members in 1896, there were elected lord provosts and councillors, prominent local businessmen, medical officers and university professors.Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, the London Society's membership lists yield the names of well-known planners and architects, members of both houses of parliament, businessmen and artists.Footnote ³⁷ This pattern is repeated for other civic societies during the period. Where societies were formed in smaller towns, the pattern remained, though the scale differed. Thus, the Warwick Society, formed in 1950, listed six councillors and aldermen, a former and a current mayor, the borough surveyor, county archivist, the curator of the local museum, the principal of the local School of Art, an academic from Birmingham University and, as vice-presidents, the earl of Warwick and Anthony Eden.Footnote ³⁸

Ideas and activities

The appearance of sociologists on Abercrombie's list of suitable professional members was interesting and significant for two reasons. First, it pointed to Abercrombie's acceptance and encouragement of the methods and approach of sociology in town planning work. Secondly, it reflected the emergence and spread of a sociological sensitivity that had modified ideas about the relationship between space and society, making explicit the environmentalism of the earlier period, and combining it with an argument about the constitutive role of the built environment in the social life of a community. Thus, the objective of the Glasgow Civic Society at its formation in 1896 was to ‘promote . . . the better understanding of social subjects’, and Edward Caird, who gave the inaugural lecture to the society, expressed his hope that the body ‘may do a great deal to help the development of sound and comprehensive ideas on social subjects’.Footnote ³⁹ In Glasgow, the ideas underpinning the society's sphere of interests were most clearly articulated and developed by its academic members, notably by Henry Jones, a professor of moral philosopher at the university. Jones spoke out about the ‘Science of Social Life’ arguing that ‘it would not be difficult to show that great as ha[s] been the progress in natural science in the century just closed, the progress in ethical and social thought and practice ha[s] been not less great’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In his public lectures, he pressed for the engagement of Glasgow's citizens in the life of their city, basing his argument on the interdependence he perceived between individuals and their social environment:

The influence of social science on ideas about urban space came also through the work of Patrick Geddes. He had presented his formulation of sociology as ‘civics’ over three lectures to the British Sociological Society between 1904 and 1906. He was highly active in the networks of Britain's associational culture and enmeshed in the ferment of ideas circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also centrally involved with early attempts to spread and systematize town planning. Indeed, Meller has suggested that he became the ‘guide and advisor’ to the individuals who established town planning as a professional activity in Britain.Footnote ⁴² Furthermore, though he left Britain for India in 1914, a year earlier he appeared among the first members of the London Society and for a while, as the notion of civics began to structure activity, the distinction between civics and the interests of civic societies became blurred. Thus, from 1916 the Civic Education League ran a Summer School for Civics, advertised through the publications of civic groups, and emphasized the importance of direct social study through surveying techniques;Footnote ⁴³ the Journal of the London Society advocated civics, ‘the science of city making and management, compris[ing] every detail from street lighting and drainage to communal kitchens’;Footnote ⁴⁴ the Civic Arts Association was formed to ‘promote the utilization of Arts and Crafts for Civic purposes’ and to ‘support all efforts to embellish our cities, towns and villages’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Geddes’ proposed methods of study, the civic and regional survey, also featured in the work of civic societies and those associated with them. Early civic surveying work was conducted between 1915 and 1918 by a group of architects and planners, some London Society members, working at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), with secondary centres of collection in Lancashire and Yorkshire.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1920, the RIBA held an exhibition of this work, defining the method as the ‘collecting and recording in an easily accessible manner, such data . . . as are required in order to attain a complete knowledge of the whole of those interests upon the preservation or enhancement of which depends the welfare of the inhabitants’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Lancashire part of the wartime civic survey project was directed by Abercrombie, and the method was the first listed among the suggested activities of civic societies in his 1920 article. As was noted in the Town Planning Review, probably by Abercrombie himself as editor at the time, ‘civic survey [wa]s in the air’ and there followed other examples of civic societies undertaking such work.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Ireland, the civic survey of Dublin was conducted by a Civic Survey Committee appointed by the Civics Institute of Ireland, while the civic survey of Southampton was conducted by the local civic society.Footnote ⁴⁹

The civic surveys conducted in the early twentieth century must be set against the background of earlier developments in cartography. They drew on and extended the techniques of urban cartographers who had sought to provide thematic representations of the social landscape, topography and infrastructure of towns.Footnote ⁵⁰ An important point of separation, however, was the motivation for conducting surveys: they were intended as a preliminary step in town planning work. Planning was a recurring topic at societies’ meetings and an important aspect of their work. The formation of the London Society, for example, was motivated by a concern among planners, architects and politicians about traffic routes across the city. While the statutory planning powers granted in 1909 improved the status of planning, they also resulted in problems since they created no framework for planning across large urban areas. Thus, early planning schemes were often conceived by urban district councils without any mechanism for, or obligation to, consider the larger urban geography beyond district boundaries. George L. Pepler, a key figure in early planning history, had called for the formation of a voluntary body to address this problem in 1910 and he was among the founders of the London Society in 1912.Footnote ⁵¹ During World War I, under the direction of the architect Aston Webb and planner Raymond Unwin, the London Society produced a Development Plan for Greater London, which represented their consultations with local authorities across the region and an attempt to tackle the problem of planning a road infrastructure across Greater London.Footnote ⁵²

Similar attempts to shape planning can be seen in the work of other societies. In Birmingham, for example, the civic society had strong concerns about the form of the planning schemes being developed in the city. Despite having two potentially influential figures among their members – George Cadbury Jr was chairman of the city's Town Planning Committee when the civic society was established in 1918 and Neville Chamberlain was a former chairman of that committee and recently elected to parliament – the society chose to intervene directly, buying land to secure its use as open space and seeking a consultative role in future decision-making.Footnote ⁵³ Likewise, in the late 1920s, the Cambridge Preservation Society was formed as a response to house building that was, they argued, having a deleterious effect on the character of the area surrounding the town. Their opposition to ribbon development along road frontages led to similarly direct intervention: individual members contributed funds to support land purchases that totalled 590 acres by the early 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁴ In addition, from its formation in 1928, the group pressed the borough council to join a Joint Regional Planning Committee and when the project was slow to move, the Preservation Society engaged W.R. Davidge, architect-planner and member of the London Society, to begin work in earnest. The resulting publication, the Cambridge Regional Planning Report (1934), was funded by the society.Footnote ⁵⁵

Civic societies exhibited little sense of an opposition between the agenda of planners and that of preservationists. Indeed, interest in planning was often combined with a concern for preservation, as in Cambridge where the rationale for the regional plan was the desire to preserve the character of the town and its surroundings. Like planning, preservation, both of specific buildings and of the more general urban landscape, was a primary concern among civic groups. In their language, they characterized the cause as the protection of a valuable inheritance, or vigilance against vandalism, and they were early in pressing for practical and organizational measures to secure preservationist objectives. Early exercises in compiling lists of scheduled buildings were undertaken by local groups in Bristol, while in a lecture to the Civic Society of Glasgow in 1905, Sir John Stirling Maxwell, society member, Conservative MP for the city and later chairman of the Ancient Monuments Board and founder of the National Trust for Scotland, suggested that a body formed to consider architectural preservation would be a useful addition to the city's institutions. What he termed a ‘building censorship’

Thus, the civic agenda was indeed, despite the apparent vagueness, accurately identified by Abercrombie as an interest in ‘the physical side of the community's life’. The material and built environment of towns and cities formed the focus for civic concerns and activities regardless of whether the particular case demanded support for planning or preservation. In Birmingham, the projects of the civic society were wide-ranging, routinely stepping beyond an easy classification as part of either agenda, and might be better investigated as part of an attempt to secure a particular vision of orderliness and beauty in the city's material culture and built landscape. Their work included initiatives like designs for street furniture and park improvements, but they also put forward designs for the city's telephone directory, made numerous detailed specifications about the spatial distribution of elements of the urban landscape (lamp standards should be ‘spaced if possible at equal distance apart’),Footnote ⁵⁷ and even articulated design standards for tombstones.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Birmingham Society expressed its ‘sensitiv[ity] to the need for a more orderly arrangement’ in their city, while a speaker at the London Society criticized the ‘lack of discipline’ in the embellishment and ornamentation of streets.Footnote ⁵⁹ Recommendations such as these could easily be viewed as later manifestations of the micro-processes of socio-spatial management identified by Patrick Joyce in the techniques of nineteenth-century liberalism, but here they appear as elements in a more generalized, though nevertheless prescriptive, patterning of urban space with strongly aesthetic overtones.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, the work of civic groups was firmly rooted in an argument about the role that the aesthetic quality of urban space could play in the social life of a community:

In this assessment, the Birmingham Civic Society articulated an agenda that was widely shared by similar bodies. It was, for example, repeated almost verbatim in the Report of the Dublin Civic Survey.Footnote ⁶²

This kind of rhetoric argued that aesthetic judgment should find a privileged place in the decision-making processes of local planning authorities. Abercrombie, arguing that a civic society should function as ‘an arbiter of taste’, suggested that groups in Britain follow the lead set by American city institutions and press for the formation of art juries, ‘department[s] charged by law with the duty of passing judgment upon the design and location of all buildings, bridges, arches, fountains, sculptures, tablets, paintings, lamp-posts, electric and other fixtures, whether erected by the City or private persons or companies’.Footnote ⁶³ In Birmingham, the civic society made concerted attempts to establish such an organization. It first made the suggestion in late 1919, proposing that the body would bring together members of the civic society with the lord mayor, the principal of the university, the president of the Birmingham Architectural Association and the director of the School of Art. The society argued it was seeking no more than an advisory role for the jury, but it took ‘persistent advocacy’ to persuade the city council to accept the proposal.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1922, an Advisory Art Committee was formed and reportedly made recommendations on over 360 items submitted to them over the following 15 years.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is clear from these examples that civic societies sought, and sometimes achieved, influence in the political processes that were evolving to govern urban development over the first half of the twentieth century. As the opening comments of this article indicated, Abercrombie began his 1920 article by arguing that the planning work of local authorities should be supported by the professional expertise of civic societies. Civic societies, therefore, were intended by one of their most high-profile advocates to function as parties to the statutory planning process. Yet, their existence and role has been little accommodated by existing planning histories that depict Britain's associational culture withering to anachronism as the welfare state extended its powers. Indeed, in some instances, the narrative developed presents the apparently smooth shift of planning activities away from the voluntary sector and into the sphere of local government, emphasizing the separation of reformist and voluntary work on the one hand, and the professionalizing expertise of local authorities on the other.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, the timing of the emergence of civic societies is indicative of both political context and their intent. Civic associations began to emerge in numbers as the statutory responsibilities of local authorities evolved to encompass more fully the spatial elements of urban life. Their early history suggests a high degree of interconnection between reformist agendas, voluntary organizations, professional development and local authority planning in the first half of the twentieth century, interconnection that was cemented by overlapping memberships among local elites and secured by the advocacy of some high-profile figures.Footnote ⁶⁷

Civic societies did call for greater control over urban development and were keen for planning and preservation to achieve a firmer legal and institutional footing; however, they were also often insistent that both local and professional interests be represented, accommodated and perhaps even prioritized in the development of planning and urban design. The frequent conflation of the local and the professional raises a difficulty that existed within the civic movement. The local and professional did not necessarily coincide. Indeed, on the contrary, the significant role played by civic societies in the advancement of professional approaches to planning, architecture and preservation inevitably led to a movement whose core membership, if local, was also elite, highly integrated into existing structures of power and authority, and thus separate in their interests and milieu from many local residents. Furthermore, there are clear residual traces of the paternalism that fostered and shaped earlier urban experiments, such as Port Sunlight or Bournville, in the confidence with which civic bodies felt able to determine the best standards of design or embodiments of beauty.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, there are direct lines of connection to be traced between civic groups and these earlier models: the funding used by the Birmingham Society to purchase land came from the Cadbury family, while Lord Leverhulme was a member of the London Society.Footnote ⁶⁹

However, there are also points of connection between civic societies and more radical and egalitarian ideals from the earlier period. Links can be found, for example, between William Morris and many of the artists who were members of civic groups; Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, associated early in their careers with Octavia Hill and deeply motivated by a commitment to improving urban conditions, were members of the Bristol Kyrle Society (which became the Bristol Civic Society); the demonstrable influence of Geddes implies a commitment to ambitious civic ideals explicitly intended to enable local residents to take their place in the ‘drama’ of city development.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, the commitment to aesthetics and the development of civic consciousness, here as earlier most often pursued by a core of professional and elite figures, nevertheless represented a commitment to humanitarian ideals regarding the future of urban space and society. Nascent sociological sensitivities grounded these ideals in the early twentieth century in a narrative built on the dialogic relationship between landscape and community; the built environment was seen as formative of both individual and social character and, in its turn, reflected the vitality of urban citizenship in the quality and beauty of its architecture and design. The rallying call for the promotion and development of civic consciousness was, of course, sounded with most deliberate force by Patrick Geddes, but civic societies should be seen as a part of a movement for civic consciousness in the first half of the twentieth century. At a point when the political climate of Britain was changing substantially and rapidly, their notion of localism and participation was seen as the way to secure a stronger foundation for citizenship.