Design in town and village.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
Date:
1953
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Design in town and village. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    degree of additional .activity which it under- takes. Though the small country town may house many people who work on the land, it is also a market, a trading centre, for far more than its own inhabitants; it will probably also be a manufacturing centre in a small way. In the old days it would have a brewery, a flour mill or two, perhaps a tannery: and even though all these activities were related to the land in that they dealt with the products of the land, they brought about a complicated social structure that was different from the simple social structure of the village, and they produced a complexity of purpose very different from the singleness of purpose which, in my opinion, characterizes the true village. The fishing village which has become a popular holiday resort is perhaps the most striking example of the change that can be brought about by taking on new activities. Note the absence of front gardens to the houses. The further point of difference lies in mere size.* As a place becomes more complicated in its activities, so generally though not inevitably, it tends to grow bigger. This necessarily brings about complexity in its physical form. But size in itself, even without complexity of activity, is a deciding factor. Even a purely agricultural settlement that was very large would be almost bound to have complexity of form. And that complexity, I believe, is alien to true village * The Scott Report (Cmd. 6378: 1942) defined “‘ any compact grouping of over 1,500 people as a town’’, as distinct from a village. But an overgrown village will not easily acquire country-town character in the traditional sense. ‘That character, in the central parts of the town especially, is quite distinctively its own and is even more difficult to define than village character—partly because of the great range in size of country towns. One essential difference besides that of complexity of form lies in the larger scale of the buildings themselves, especially in the main streets. But there are many far more subtle differences than that.