The County of London Plan, prompted by the then Minster of Works and Planning, Lord Reith, was commissioned by the LCC from Mr J H Forshaw (LCC Architect) & Patrick Abercrombie (Professor of Planning at UCL) in 1941. England was at war, with no end in site, but there was sufficient intelligence to realise that a bombed city might offer an opportunity to create….’order and efficiency and beauty and spaciousness..’

Penguin published this smaller version of the ‘big book’ in 1945 in order to ‘explain’ the larger one. For this delicate task they commissioned E J Carter – librarian at the RIBA – and Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian Marxist architect with the snakeskin shoes who was to be more remembered for Willow Road and Trellick Tower. It is printed on cheap, wartime shiney paper, includes photographs by Bill Brandt, drawings by Gordon Cullen and in cost 3/6. A full colour folded plan of London is pasted into the back cover and there can found a Glossary of useful terms such as Architect (..traditionally makes his buildings not merely efficient but also beautiful), Period Planning ( ..a ‘’plan” without attention to the process of its achievement is just a “good idea”; period planning is not something extra to “the plan”, it is a fundamental element of the plan itself) and Civic Centre (the town centre in which the chief community and public buildings are grouped together in a planned order for the convenience and delight of the people.) The Penguin logo is in dancing mode on the front cover: heady days indeed.

Beautifully written and slightly patronising – the book appeals to the reader to pay attention and think – as this will affect their lives. The authors are clearly proud of the fact that the Plan was being published and not kept secret, and that it’s ears were open to comment. There is certainly a refreshing faith in the business of planning and what it might achieve: ‘every move in the planning business is to be reckoned in terms of human use, convenience and happiness”, and, when reading this, it is important to remember the appalling squalor of much of pre-war London with industry and the railways belching out chemicals, smoke and stink. Much of the emphasis here is about public health.

The London County Plan identified 4 major defects in the capital: traffic congestion, depressed housing, the inadequacy and maldistribution (sic) of open spaces and the undesirable jumble of houses and factories. These, together with ‘Sprawl and suburbanising’, ‘an absence of coherent architectural treatment of recent building’ and unplanned development of the (then still private) railways, all made for a city in crisis. The LCC planners saw London as a ‘ vast and terrific affair, large and largely out of control…..and only sick, not dead.’ The core of the Plan therefore suggests ways in which each of these could be tackled.

The proposals are radical: big arterial roads to keep the traffic separated and moving, re-locating people out into new towns to release more open space, adjusting of densities, applying ‘order.’ For us, with hindsight, it is easy to be amazed at the faith in this vision of the ‘ordered’ city: ‘There is a clean and tidy loveliness in a great new road which if we capture it for London will help to make London a city with some of the character of a new and modern metropolis’. Even if we remember the grey, chaotic, frightening and unpredictable environment within which this was written.

And it makes for a convincing read until we are shown what this vision might look like. Photographs of the diagrammatic model makes one grateful that, in the end, financial, legal, and bungling pressures prevented the wholesale flattening and ‘ordering’ of Shoreditch for example. Reading this is a useful reminder of how delicate this kind of thinking is: you miss a couple of factors – eg insufficient funds, mass car ownership, human selfishness, China, global warming – and suddenly the vision falls apart: city motorways don’t work – and are not lovely, bleak unloved ‘open spaces’ don’t work and architects are unable to deliver buildings that are beautiful.

But these ideas underpinned the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act that formed our cities and towns until 1987 when Mrs Thatcher said we could have our industry next to our housing after all. Most of the New Towns, designed around these principles were and are very successful which suggests that the layering of big visions onto an old, albeit battered, fabric is dangerous: unless you can do it properly; the results can be cruel.

But the brief for the book was for the thinking, or the ‘science’, behind the ideas to be explained. Apart from the beautiful maps, of which there are every sort, and stunning photographs – there are a number of pictograms that show how calculations are made, for example, for how many rooms are needed per family unit, how much space is required between different building types, how to project urban densities and the consequences of that, the rate of accidents set against the growth in car ownership. These anticipate the work of Tufte and are more than charming period pieces. They are layered with subtleties that offer more information as you dig for it, whilst the main message remains clear.

And what makes the maps so beautiful? They are hand drawn, the colours are delicate and careful, and each has atmosphere of its own. The dark cloud defining London for those showing population growth celebrate the city itself, somehow encouraging the idea that living within its boundaries is a privilege and one that all Londoners should sign up to. Tough, of course, if you are one of the families to be re-located.