London County Council :  A Plan for the Model Community

The aspirations set out in the publication of the County of London Plan in 1943 established the breath of the architectural challenges they aimed to address in building a new post-war society. The spatial and programmatic rationale underpinning the model communities proposed for the New Towns beyond the County boundaries to help alleviate the pressures of industry and residential congestion - and tested in the designated Redevelopment Areas such as Stepney and Poplar - aimed to produce “a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride… [with] a spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship.”

In their intentions to build a “good citizen”, they questioned how they could be good architects too. The ethos of building for the communal rather than the individual is apparent in both the dream and the delivery. Operating across scales and between disciplines, consideration was given for both the material (architectural and infrastructural) and the immaterial (economic and legislative) structures required to build a new form of society. The resulting specific agency with which the architects were imbued enabled them to implement aspirational strategies and develop experimental architecture beyond the capacity of private practice.

This paper questions the extent to which the interpersonal and spatial relationships the architects of the LCC sought to construct through architectural means were paralleled by the architectural practices put in place to deliver them. Drawing upon oral histories, bureaucratic documentation and contemporary publications, it seeks to reveal the processes by which their architectural practice was built, in order to better understand the architecture built as a result.