'A folk memory of industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,' Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, 'and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.' What happened, they ask, to 'the English love of cities'? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the love affair with suburbia that replaced it? Howard imagined that the problem of London could be solved only by its extinction. He hoped that the development of new satellite suburbs - clusters of interconnected, self-sufficient, 'slumless, smokeless cities' - would slowly empty out the capital. London's property bubble would burst; rents would fall; and the slums would be pulled down to make way for parks, gardens and allotments: 'the country,' Howard wrote, 'would invade the city.'

LRB 6 September 2001 | PDF Download