This article provides the first account of key texts and concepts in the theory and criticism of Arthur Trystan Edwards. Edwards's notion of ‘civic design’, which emanated from the Liverpool School of Architecture in the second decade of the twentieth century, was part of a broader international trend (particularly in the US and Europe) towards formal, axial and monumental planning. Edwards imbued civic design with a philosophical and political sophistication that set him apart from many of his non-Modernist contemporaries. The article discusses the underlying precepts — such as ‘subject’, ‘form’, ‘urbanity’ and ‘manners’ — in some of Edwards's critical texts, including Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (1924). The final section traces his pioneering interest in high-density, low-rise housing, which culminated with the establishment of the Hundred New Towns Association in 1933–34.

Domestic interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement have often been interpreted in terms of the ideas of aesthetic autonomy associated with Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans. This essay takes a different tack by analysing the aesthetic interior in light of concerns with health reform. It focuses on the writings and designs of architect E.W. Godwin (1833–86) who pursued interior design as part of an effort to foster a healthy life, one that consisted of hygiene, relief from urban stress, and an enlargement of the aesthetic responsiveness of his clients. He conceived of spare and calm interiors that were healthful alternatives to dust-infested Victorian clutter while concomitantly offering psychological respite from the ‘high-pressure, nervous times’ endemic to metropolitan life. This goal accords with Godwin's related interest in dress reform, a preoccupation that led to his participation in the Health Exhibition of 1884. By unpacking Godwin's specific contribution to the sanitary discussions that prevailed in Victorian Britain, I align the aesthetic interior with the central imperative of sanitary reform: promoting health through ameliorating Britain's urban environment.

Graeme Shankland (1917–84) conforms in many ways to the popular image of a 1960s planner with his lyrical advocacy of inner city motorways and his suggestions of enormous programmes of renewal in ‘outworn’ Victorian city centres. As an advocate of the belief that ‘our problem in Britain is that it is our generation which must completely renew most of the older parts of our larger towns and cities’, Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’. Simon Jenkins’s antipathy towards planners developed after viewing Shankland’s Liverpool plan: ‘I was looking at Bomber Harris. This was the end of the beautiful city and that reaction has infused everything I have thought since about planning and architecture.’ At best, Paul Barker saw him as misguided: ‘I think, for example, of the destruction of the centre of Liverpool by well-meaning planners like Graeme Shankland.’

Among the many architectural splendours of Sevenoaks, it would be easy to overlook the Sevenoaks Tenants estate. The houses are small and unpretending, varying in manner from ordinary ‘Edwardian urban vernacular’ to low-key arts-and-crafts. They are also spread out over a wide area, from the centre of the town to the villages of Shoreham and Kemsing to the north and Sevenoaks Weald to the south, and so do not form what we would immediately recognize as an ‘estate’. Yet, in their way, these houses are as remarkable as Knole or Ightham Mote. They are the last ‘working’ survivors of a housing movement that before the First World War aspired to transform not just the way housing was provided for the working classes, but also the way they lived, and by extension, wider society beyond.

The definitive historical study of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the village of Nuneham Courtenay, a few miles south-east of Oxford, was published more than thirty years ago. In a wide-ranging essay Mavis Batey recounted how the first Earl Harcourt, founding President of the Dilettanti Society, embarked in 1761 on the creation of an appropriate landscape garden to complement the setting of his newly completed classical villa. An essential preliminary to the landscaping was the necessity to remove the medieval village out of sight of views of the house, and as early as 1760 work had already begun on building a new settlement outside the confines of the park. Progress was rapid, and by the autumn of 1761 the new estate village placed astride the Oxford-Henley turnpike was a going concern (Fig. 1). There is little to add to Mrs Batey’s account of the controversy that accompanied this arrogant display of the power exercised by eighteenth-century landlords over the lives of their tenantry apart from taking the opportunity to record that her own further research has confirmed the tentative identification of Nuneham with Oliver Goldsmith’s critical poem The Deserted Village. An entry in the manuscript notebooks of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, recording a visit to Lord Harcourt on 20 August 1800, reads:

An association between clinical and civic design has long been suspected — and indeed occasionally explicitly invoked — by commentators on architecture and urban design. Certainly, Mumford is not the only historian to have proposed a symbiotic relationship between hospital and town planning over the last two centuries or more. Yet the twentieth century has surely witnessed an intensification of this relationship, an intensification which points to a definite qualitative — if not even quantitative — shift. This article seeks to reconsider this relationship as it manifested itself in Britain after the Second World War, to investigate the similarities and points of contact between what are often considered by their practitioners to be two quite distinct discourses. It aims to do so through a consideration of a single major project, one which clearly exhibited characteristics of debates which manifested themselves in a more diluted form across numerous other schemes. This building, Greenwich District Hospital (1962–74), was one of two ‘heroic’ hospital projects undertaken in Britain during the 1960s and evidences a plethora of concerns prevalent at the time. Whilst flexibility was a fundamental desideratum, a consideration of the project’s zoning of functions and circulatory logic also reveals a profound affinity with the concerns of modernist urbanism. Moreover, it was not simply a case of hospital design plundering town-planning models for its own use; British urban theory may itself have owed a debt to clinical planning, each discourse involved in processes of specialization, separation and sanitization indicative of capitalism’s need to order and render controllable the phenomena of everyday life. Furthermore, this equivalence of architectural intervention at the level of both the hospital and the city plan raises important questions about modern society’s conception of safety, health and the environment.

Strangely, the ideal city of the Renaissance was promoted not so much by Venus, but by Mars — not by an abstract appreciation of beauty but by the necessities of war. Here was surely one of the great ironies made by the peculiar Renaissance belief in the intrinsic power of geometry. To Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, and others who imagined ideal cities, geometry was a comprehensive ordering system to which streets, walls, and public buildings alike might be subordinated.