Railways, Urban Development and Town Planning in Britain: 1948–2008

Russell Haywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754673927
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317071648
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a critical overview of the relationships between planning and railway management and development during the key period in the 20th Century when the railway was in public ownership: 1948-94. It assesses the strength of the relationships when working in collaboration with the private sector. The book then focuses on the interplay between planning and railway since privatization in 1994 and points to best practice for the future in institutional structures and policy development to secure improved outcomes.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Birth of an idea

There has to be a moment in time when the idea at the core of a book first crackles into life. In this case the catalyst was a phrase in ‘This Common Inheritance’, the seminal White Paper published in 1990, during Chris Patten’s time as Secretary of State for the Environment. This marked a turning point at the end of a decade during which the government had ignored the basis of much land-use and transport planning policy developed since the mid-1960s. The phrase followed a discussion of the proposed use of planning to guide development into locations which would reduce the need for transport and/or permit use of public transport, as an alternative to the motor car:

However, not enough is known about the relationship between choice of housing and employment location and transport mode to allow the Government to offer authoritative advice at this stage (Secretary of State for the Environment et al. 1990, 87).

This marked a welcome resurgence of commitment to policies which would seek to bring about a planned relationship between land-use and transport networks, rather than just bending to market forces to produce development patterns dominated by the demands of the motor car and lorry. However, the statement seemed to deny decades of work by academics and practitioners to understand relationships between land-use patterns and transport networks and, on the face of it, this seemed odd. So a review of this work was timely.

But why write a book with a focus on the relationship between land-use planning and the railway network? The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly the railway network is a product of the nineteenth century and, from the 1920s onwards, had tended to be seen as old fashioned and not very relevant to the lives of most people. Although, post 1955, modernisation had clearly taken place, there was a continuing air of decay and dereliction around much of the network and the ‘railway problem’ was, seemingly, a constant feature of post-war Britain. But, and this is the second reason, the economic boom of the second half of the 1980s had been accompanied by increased demand for travel and the result was growing congestion on the road network. In turn and especially in the south east, this had led to growth in ridership on the British Rail (BR) and London Underground networks: ‘This Common Inheritance’ noted the nine per cent increase in rail’s market share for commuting into London. Even outside the south east, steady work by local transport authorities and BR had produced some remarkably positive results: new stations and the reopening of passenger services on lines which had lost them, years previously. It was noted in ‘This Common Inheritance’ that:

The major public transport operators do extensive research into areas where they can expand their markets … British Rail’s reopening of local stations for commuters is one result of this work. The Government will continue to support efforts like these (Secretary of State for the Environment et al. 1990, 76).

Initial research in the early 1990s showed that town planners were centrally involved in these developments too, with regard to strategic policy development and local matters, such as station location (Haywood 1992). Suddenly the railway network had come to be seen in a different light; there was talk of a renaissance and a more central role as part of a more holistic approach to transport planning, despite a falling off in rail traffic in the recession of the early 1990s. From a planning point of view there would be challenges though, if there was to be a move from a paradigm of relative decline to one of growth and expansion. A critical review of the relationships between land-use planning and railway planning over previous decades would therefore be a valuable contribution to the new dialogue. An additional factor was that, just as this research started, the privatisation of BR began to look increasingly likely, so a review of the relationships between land-use and railway planning, during the period of public ownership, would be timely.

The shift in planning and transport policy in the early 1990s

The road congestion issue had been brought to a head by publication of revised National Road Traffic Forecasts (Department of Transport (DoT) 1989a), which projected increases in traffic over 1988 levels of between 83 and 142 per cent by 2025. The DoT responded to this, and the accompanying political pressure from the road lobby,¹ by announcing an expanded and very ambitious programme of motorway building (DoT 1989b). This typified the single-minded support for ‘the great car economy’ and lack of enthusiasm for state backed public transport characterised by previous ‘Thatcherite’ governments. During his term as Secretary of State for Transport (1983–86), Nicholas Ridley, one of the leading free market theologians, had symbolised this approach with his 1985 Transport Act which deregulated stage bus services outside London, thereby flying in the face of historic aspirations to secure integration between different forms of public transport through public sector control.

But the political mood towards transport was changing. The 1980s had also seen growing public concern over the environmental impacts of rising road traffic and loss of countryside from road building and sprawling new development. This led to development of the ‘new realism’ (Goodwin et al. 1991) in transport policy, whereby the view that ever rising volumes of traffic could be accommodated through road building, characterised as ‘predict and provide’, was to be fundamentally challenged. The negative environmental impacts of transport were thoroughly explored in another seminal publication, the Eighteenth Report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1994). Amongst a whole range of recommendations, this called for significant modal shift from road to rail for passenger and freight traffic. It was the resultant political pressures from these transport related environmental issues, and concern over others such as acid rain, marine pollution and global warming, which led to the wider changes in government attitudes towards the environment, transport and the planning system. In the early 1980s planning had been seen by Thatcher’s Tory government, first elected in 1979, as a brake on enterprise and economic growth which;

imposes costs on the economy and constraints on enterprise that are not always justified by any real public benefit in the individual case (Department of the Environment (DoE) 1985, 10).

By 1986, when Ridley moved to become Secretary of State for the Environment, an Enterprise and Deregulation Unit was operating which was looking at reducing the ‘unnecessary burdens’ of planning control through reducing its scope and developing a positive approach to development:

recognising that there is always a presumption in its favour, unless that development would cause demonstrable harm to interests of acknowledged importance (DoE 1986, 21).

Although it was the threat of widespread housing development on greenfield sites across the south east which led to a political furore around Ridley and placed limits on this deregulatory stance, the wider environmental debate had its impact too. Publication of Patten’s ‘This Common Inheritance’ was a crucial part of the move away from it, towards seeing the planning system as playing a positive role as part of what eventually became the ‘Strategy for Sustainable Development’ (DoE 1994a), marking a major policy U-turn as compared with the early 1980s. So, in the early 1990s, there was an expectation of change with regard to the planning system and the railway network.

An important component of this change was a desire to lessen the growth and environmental impact of road traffic through what came to be known as ‘demand management’. In light of the claimed lack of a firm knowledge base for offering authoritative advice about relationships between transport demand and land-use, the DoE sponsored research (DoE 1993a) which informed the development of planning policies aimed at reducing demand for travel and facilitating travel by a variety of modes other than the car. These became a central part of the government’s sustainable development strategy and reflected a major shift away from the deregulatory policies of the 1980s towards a more prescriptive regime. With regard to the relationship between land-use and transport and the desire to reduce car dependency, this culminated in publication of the revised version of Planning Policy Guidance Note 13 (PPG13), which stated that:

… local authorities should adopt planning and land use policies to:

• promote development within urban areas, at locations highly accessible by means other than the private car;

• locate major generators of travel demand in existing centres which are highly accessible by means other than the private car (DoE DoT 1994, 3).

One important goal of these new policies was the promotion of patterns of urban development to increase the utility of the railway network: after years of being marginal to the concerns of land-use planning, there was to be an attempt to integrate the two. The optimism around rail, coupled to the policy shift towards better integration between land-use planning and transport planning, formed the rationale for the research which would eventually lead to publication of this book.

A gap in the literature

A literature review carried out at the start of the research in the early 1990s revealed a great deal of material that dealt with the post-war history of the railway system, with Allen (1966) and Gourvish (1986 (and later 2002)) as outstanding examples, and land-use planning, with Cherry (1974) and Hall (1989a) as outstanding examples. However, there were few publications which focused on relationships between planning and transport, with Tetlow and Goss (1965) as significant, and very few which looked specifically at contemporary relationships between the railways and urban development, as Kellett (1979) did with regard to the Victorian period. Only Hall has researched the latter consistently over the post-war period, and that was often as part of more broadly based research into strategic planning and decentralisation, largely focused on the South East (Hall 1971; Hall et al. 1973a and b; Hall 1988; Hall 1989b), with only one significant publication which looked at railways and land development in provincial cities (Hall and Hass-Klau 1985).

There has been a fairly continuous stream of literature concerned with the economic impacts of new urban transit systems. This is dominated by North American publications (as reviewed in Cervero and Landis 1995, and Giuliano 1995) and is not directly relevant to the UK situation. However, one strand of it was concerned with using land-use change as evidence of property impacts and for considering its impacts on transport behaviour. For example, Heenan (1968) highlighted the concentration of high-rise apartments and office developments within a five-minute walk of stations on Toronto’s Yonge Street subway. The importance of policy and institutional contexts was emphasised by Knight and Trygg, who pointed out that:

… the achievement of major land use ‘impacts’ around transit stations must require the concerted action of other powerful forces in addition to transit-induced accessibility increases (1977, 233).

However, even British publications in this area, as reviewed in Grieco (1994), were not specifically focused on the role of town planning. The absence of a strong thread in the literature with regard to the relationships between British town planning and management of the nationalised railway meant that the rationale for the book came into view: an historical overview of the relationship between urban development and the railway network, with a focus on evaluation of the impact on this of the planning system created by the 1947 Town and County Planning Act.

Initially the likely product of the research seemed self-evident: the railway system was, at best, a marginal influence on the land development process during this period, and land-use patterns were permitted, or promoted, to develop in ways which largely ignored the potential utility of the railway network. This view arose from a consideration of official transport statistics. These showed that relative patronage of the railway system for the carriage of passengers, and absolute patronage with regard to freight, declined from a position of dominance to a relatively marginal position when compared with the huge growth in road traffic (see Table 1.1 for passenger data). In addition, whereas the road network had grown in length as well as in the volume of traffic it carried, the railway network was considerably smaller in 1994 than it was in 1948; it had been ‘undeveloped’. Popular consciousness about planning and transport was dominated by images of burgeoning suburbanisation characterised by road-oriented patterns of development, typified by the ‘edge city’ of the 1980s (Sudjic 1992).

But more careful consideration of the interrelationship showed that it merited closer study because:

• although rail transport had been overshadowed by road transport, it was still significant, and this significance was very variable spatially;

• although certain parts of the railway network had been undeveloped, other parts had received significant investment, new railways had been built, closed railways and stations had been opened, some lines had experienced real growth in traffic;

• although land development had been dominated by road based transport considerations, there were some notable exceptions wherein the transport properties of nodes on the operational railway system had been an important consideration and there had been a clear intention to integrate land development with rail access;

• land and buildings had been released for development as a result of the contraction of the railway industry and had presented significant opportunities for the planning process; evaluation of the way these were treated was a significant element of any overall evaluation of postwar planning, as well as being of special significance in considering the relationships between land-use planning and the railway network.

Table 1.1 The growth of passenger travel in Great Britain: 1952–1994

The relationship between the railway and land-use planning sectors in the post-war period was therefore, perhaps, not as clear-cut as it first seemed and further study was justified. Also the commitment from the early 1990s to bringing about a closer relationship between urban development patterns and the railway network through integrated planning, meant this research held the promise of informing contemporary policy making.

Methodology and structure: thirteen steps

The research was concerned with the railway and planning sectors and it was clear from the outset that, before any analysis could take place, it was necessary to establish the basic facts and chain of events in each sector post-1947. As these were fundamentally bound up with public policy making, as opposed to the sorts of subject matter which other kinds of transport research might be focused upon, it was clear that the research was policy oriented. The literature on research methodology showed that it would be likely to focus on ‘actionable factors’, to be ‘multi-dimensional’ in order to obtain a well rounded and balanced picture, and to be ‘nationally representative’ (Hakim 1997). It was also clear that the research would be primarily qualitative, concerned with describing, analysing and evaluating the institutional structures in which policy was developed, policy itself, and the outcomes from the interaction between institutional structures and policy i.e. the juxtaposition of urban development and the railway network. As the research was essentially historical, source material would be archival, primarily contemporary official documents. As the book aims to explain the findings, it was also necessary to review publications which offered analysis of and commentary on the subject matter, particularly contemporary publications, as it was important to differentiate between comment and criticism which was made at the time, and that which was made with the benefit of hindsight. The overall development of the methodology can be presented as a serious of steps.

Step one. This was to fix the scope of the research with regard to space and time. Given that the vast majority of railway lines in the country, referred to as the ‘main line railways’, had been operated by the state owned industry since nationalisation under the 1947 Transport Act, then it was this network which was central to the research. However, where it has been fruitful with regard to understanding the subject matter and developing arguments to consider other railway systems, such as the London Underground, then these have been considered too. Given the fact that the nationalised railway operated in England, Wales and Scotland, then Great Britain was the geographical context for the study. Under the respective legislation, the main line railways came into public ownership and the planning system came...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Railway Network, Urban Development and Town Planning: 1830–1947
• 3 Institutional Arrangements: 1948–68
• 4 Policy: 1948–68
• 5 Outcomes: 1948–68
• 6 Institutional Relationships: 1969–94
• 7 Policy: 1969–94
• 8 Outcomes: 1969–94
• 9 Case Study: The Manchester City Region 1830–1994
• 10 The Post-Privatisation Period 1994–2008: Institutional Relationships
• 11 The Post-Privatisation Period 1994–2008: Policy
• 12 The Post-Privatisation Period 1994–2008: Outcomes
• 13 Postscript
• Appendices
• References
• Index