Inscribing the past, looking at the future: The temporalities of Townscape

This chapter focuses on the Townscape movement, its perspective on history as precedent, and how history is a mode of social critique of the present. Concentrated around the magazine the Architectural Review, proponents of Townscape called for density, variety, individual-scale, and vernacular forms in a time of large-scale urban visions and planning in the forms of New Towns and renewal. Townscape’s supporters attempted to bridge the divide between tradition and modernity and in doing so exposed tensions, not just in ideas of modern architecture, landscape, and urban design, but also the political and economic priorities of post-World War II society. This chapter presents Townscape as an alternative vision of then-dominant conceptions of progress. Through the deployment of precedent, Townscape was an historical argument for the correct shape of urban settlements in postwar Britain and beyond. The sense that time was accelerating as modernization and reconstruction projects ramped up throughout Europe and the United States elicited unease in some who felt an impending sense of loss and a desire to manage contrasting temporal experiences. Using Townscape as an example, this chapter highlights the possibilities of architectural history to provide not timeless or transhistorical truths, but insights into the most pressing issues of an era.