A Liverpool Exemplar - Sir Patrick Abercrombie

Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie was born on the 6th of June 1879 at Green Bank, Ashton upon Mersey, Cheshire. The son of a Manchester stockbroker, he was one of nine children with his younger brother Lascelles becoming a noted poet and critic. In 1887 the family moved to a new home 'Lynngarth' built in Brooklands Road, Sale. The arts and crafts interiors were to leave a strong impression on the young Patrick Abercrombie who was educated at Locker's Park preparatory school, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire (1891–3), before attending Uppingham School, Leicestershire (1893–6), and the Realschule, Lucerne, Switzerland (1896–7). On the 11th of May 1897 he was articled to the Manchester architect, Charles Henry Heathcote, for four years, at a premium of £300, at the same time attending evening classes at Manchester School of Art. On completion of his articles he worked for three years in the Liverpool office of Sir Arnold Thornely. His Liverpool post prompted his move to the village of Oxton, Birkenhead, which he described as 'a complete break, possibly the most complete in my life'. He lived in 18 Village Road, Oxton for twenty years whilst working at Liverpool University and cited his daily journeys across the river and walks through Wirral and North Wales as formative to his vision of a harmony between 'town and suburb, industry and countryside'. It was on one of his ferry journeys to work that he met the woman who was to become his wife in 1908, Emily Maud Gordon. The area remained his home until 1936. In 1907 C. H. Reilly, head of the Liverpool University School of Architecture, offered him an appointment as junior lecturer and studio instructor which proved a defining moment in Abercrombie's career, and began his long involvement with civic design and town planning.

He worked at the University under (Sir) C. H. Reilly and Stanley Davenport Adshead, and earned notice as the first editor of the Town Planning Review, producing a series of reports on the growth and condition of several European cities. His planning career really began in 1914 when he was co-winner (with Sydney and Arthur Kelly) of an international competition to redesign Dublin in 1916. During his tenure at Liverpool, he co-founded the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in 1926 which led to the formation of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). During the twenty years here he produced a multitude of studies and reports on many areas in England and Wales, such as Sheffield, Doncaster, Bristol, and Bath among others. After Stanley Adshead was appointed to the Chair of Town Planning at University College London, Patrick became Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool in 1915. He rapidly became a leading authority on national UK planning matters and garden-city initiatives. Influenced by Geddes, and the cultured Liberal tradition of his time, he was opposed to state intervention. He went on to be Lecturer at Liverpool; Professor of Civic Design; Editor of Town Planning Review; President of the Town Planning Institute and Member of Council RIBA. In 1935 he succeeded Adshead as Lever Professor of Town Planning at University College London. Here the Cheshire born planner and architect, the most celebrated British planner of his generation, was responsible for redesigning London following World War Two.

Blue Plaque erected at 18 Village Road in 2002

From 1935, he lived in Egerton Gardens, South Kensington, where he would produce his most prominent work. He is best known for the work he did with J H Forshaw on the Country of London Plan and the Greater London Plan as he devised postwar reconstruction plans for London and its environs. They contain perhaps the greatest landscape and open space strategy ever formulated for a capital city, and certainly the best that London has had. The idea was to create a web of open space leading from the city centre, through green corridors, green ways and green wedges to a green belt on the periphery of London. Beyond the Green Belt, Patrick proposed the layout of New Towns. The fullest expressions of his vision are the Lea Valley Regional Park and the South Bank Thames Greenway. With the County of London Plan (1943; co-authored by John Henry Forshaw) and the Greater London Plan (1944), he sought to combat urban sprawl by resettling the population into a number of distinct, self-sufficient communities connected by an improved network of roads. Their Greater London Plan not only set the pattern for conurbation planning the world over, but was a pioneer in giving landscape a place of importance in town planning. He became an internationally acclaimed figure in town and regional planning contributing to the redevelopment of other war-torn English towns, including Plymouth, Hull and Bournemouth and cities outside England like Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Many of his former students rose to positions of authority.

A 1943 map showing how London would look based on 'social and functional analysis', which Patrick Abercrombie helped to draw up

In 1945 he was given a knighthood and in 1948 became the first president of the International Union of Architects, which now annually awards the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize for excellence in town planning.The University of Liverpool's Department of Civic Design also continues to award an Abercrombie Prize annually to its top-performing student. Sir Patrick died suddenly on the 23rd of March, 1957, at his home in Aston Tirrold, Berkshire aged 77 and was buried at St Gwenfaen's church, Rhoscolyn, Anglesey. He had designed and organised the building of the cottage called Borth Arian (Silver Bay), Rhoscolyn for himself as a holiday cottage probably due to his love of nature and unspoiled countryside. He continues to be internationally recognised as the pioneer of town and country planning, and is celebrated as someone who placed people at the heart of the planning process, a principle that is preserved today.

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