Mersey Civic Society donates generous centenary gift to CPRE Lancashire

We received a wonderful 100th centenary gift at the weekend from David from the Mersey Civic Society – who just happen to be a year younger than CPRE!

Our regional chair Lindsay was presented with an original copy of the Lancaster & Morecambe Regional Planning Scheme – led by Patrick Abercrombie and written by John Henry Forshaw.

Why are these names so important to our branch?

Abercrombie believed a ‘National League for the Preservation of Rural England’ could unite ‘the existing specialised societies’ and ‘focus attention upon the destruction of the beauty of the English Countryside which is not only robbing the country of one of its most precious assets but is uneconomic’.

Calling for the regulation of building across the whole country, Abercrombie wrote: ‘It is high time to drop the clumsy word “town-planning” as applied to the country. The term therefore proposed was ‘Rural Planning”.’

His manifesto was subtitled ‘The control of development by means of Rural Planning’. It proposed the basis for the ‘town and country planning’ system which has done so much to save what he called ‘the normal English countryside’. Abercrombie’s manifesto also suggested ‘a bold and wide policy should be pursued towards the creation of a series of national parks for the preservation of “wild country” with universal appeal for civilised man’. CPRE formed on 7 December 1926 as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, with Abercrombie its honorary secretary.

John Henry Forshaw worked briefly in the office of the Birmingham architects Harrison & Cox, before moving to Ormskirk in Lancashire. He then enrolled for an MA in civic design at Liverpool University while working in the surveyor’s department of Liverpool Corporation from 1923 to 1926. He subsequently played a pivotal role in the post-war planning of London, working closely with Patrick Abercrombie who had been his tutor at the University of Liverpool. Forshaw was co-author, with Abercrombie, of the County of London Plan, prepared for the London County Council (1943).

And that is why these names are celebrated by CPRE members today.