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People and Planning The life and work of Max Lock Contents 1909-39 Diversity and Integration 1940-43 Civic Diagnosis 1944-45 Applying Diagnosis 1946-49 Plans as Tools for Administration 1950-64 Contesting Plans 1950-64 Planning Overseas 1965-67 Best of Both Worlds 1968-72 Protagonist and Antagonist 1973-88 Planning for Rapid Growth A Retrospective View - A Legacy of Planning Insight 1909-39 Diversity and Integration Family Background Cecil Max Lock was born in 1909, with a twin brother Donald, into a middle class home in Watford. His father, Cecil, was a chartered surveyor. Max had a strong relationship with his mother and adopted her enthusiasm for the family mill at Chew Magna, near Bristol, a place were he was often sent during the summers of his childhood, summers which he later looked back on with great affection. Max and his brother attended Berkhamsted School, as day boys. He become a prefect in the last year before he left, in July 1926. His father was a founding partner in the Watford agency of Stimson, Lock and Vince. The firm was successfully riding the prewar boom period of London's suburban expansion. However, it was still 'family'. Old Mr. Vince was always 'Uncle Vince' to Max. Cecil died in 1936 when the boys were only 27. Donald had passed his RICS and was prepared to take on his father's role in the firm. Max was free to go his own way, He had already taken the first step by attending the Architectural Association school in London full-time from 1926. Max graduated in 1931. He travelled throughout Scandinavia writing up his experiences in the AA Journal, the AJ and the RIBA Journal. The humane and rational welfare state policies being practised there made plain to Max that an alternative was available to the state of Britain in the 1930s. After his father's death, Max stayed on in the Watford family house with his mother building up his architectural practice. In 1935 he stood for election. His manifesto appealed for votes as an architect 'with a trained outlook on Town Planning' and stated that he longed to see 'our town planned with efficiency and imagination, laid out with beauty.' The appeal succeeded and he was elected. He immediately pursued the causes of better and more appropriate housing design and argued for the social concerns of those on public relief. His advocacy of housing rents subsidised out of the rates for pensioners, large families and those with small incomes was fought with particular bitterness. He did not seek re-election to the council in 1937, but regarded his term as the best piece of education he ever had! From 1937 to the end of 1939 he was a Unit Master at the AA. It generated a concern for the way the professions were educated and confirmed the part original thought should play in good education. Max aligned himself more closely with the students than almost any of his contemporaries. He remained a practising architect and this integration of practical experience with teaching became a part of his philosophy. Professionally he was influenced by the writings on town planning by Patrick Geddes and started to sit externally in his rare spare moments for his town planning qualifications. Max also kept closely abreast of national and international issues which he worked on with and through his friends in a sustained manner that remained consistent throughout his life. At this early stage of his career his interests led him to contribute articles to the professional journals, to serve on the executive committee of the Housing Centre Trust also giving regular lunch time lectures there. He was an active member of the MARS (Modern Architecture Research) group. He had a passion for music which cemented many of the friendships made in these groups and he continued to maintain both the professional links and the friendships even when he left London for Hull in 1939. He also gave a series of densely argued lectures on religious philosophy which resulted in a commitment to Quakerism and pacifism. The love of argument, original thought and his convictions about social objectives steadily led Max into areas of social policy and planning while architecture was sidelined, but his passion for music stayed with him all his life though his religious beliefs wavered and wandered. Max Lock was able to generate a practice in the Watford area within a couple of years of leaving the AA in 1931. It may have started with introductions made through the family estate agency business run by his father and continued by his twin brother Donald after his father¶s death in 1936. The main work undertaken by the practice was housing, mostly for private clients. A study trip to Scandinavia and Finland in 1937 introduced him to the possibilities of timber construction, prefabrication and new models for housing finance, rental structures and refurbishment. The trip was for the Institute of Social Studies, a perspective that, combined with his enthusiasm for housing, started thirty years of effort by Max to influence social housing policy. He was an eager member of the Housing Centre Trust, Max gained publicity for these ideas by extensive writings in the professional journals and by using the knowledge directly in his role as a councillor in Watford. He wrote a long article in the Journal of The Royal Institute of British Architects (14th August 1939) 'The Administrative Aspects of Housing in Sweden'. The sub-headings show clearly the wide-ranging interest Max was taking in all sides of housing - Municipal Working-Class Housing - Housing of Large Families on Low Incomes - Reconditioned Housing in Stockholm - Owner-Built Prefabricated Houses - Tenancy Selection - Housing the Old - Allotment Garden Colonies - The Cooperative Housing Societies Enterprise. Late in 1937 he received a commission from Muriel Welsford, later a patron of the Hull Regional Survey, to prepare designs for a timber house. Using his recent research, he designed a mono-pitched roof with deep overhangs, shaped rafters and boarded finish. Like his brick houses it has style and balance derived from the materials but its expression, use of light and the spatial forms are notably original, much to the delight of his client and the interest of the RIBA Journal who printed a feature on it in March 1939. The drawings for the project have survived with this client account completed after the client, Muriel Welsford, had moved in. For its date, the form of the house and its use of a timber frame with diagonally boarded timber cladding, is striking and may have had more influence had not the Second World War with its clamp down on building started in 1939. Architecture Combined with Planning Max worked with the Housing Centre Trust to prepare an exhibition in April 1939 to highlight the national response required by the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act which granted workers the right to an annual holiday with pay for the first time. The exhibition in London called on diverse sources including the Guinness Trust. Out of the exhibition and concerns over the Act, Max received a commission for a scheme from Lambeth Borough Council. It was intended to be a flagship scheme to start a national programme to provide holiday centres for the urban poor. Max chose to work with Judith Ledeboer, one of the star students of his year at the AA. The research necessary for a new building type, the campus planning and the significant social benefit ideally matched Max's enthusiasm and he prepared a comprehensive presentation which, as it was a topical subject, gained extensive media coverage. Architecturally, the scheme was in timber frame construction but its planning approach was more interesting for the way it introduced rigorous segregation by function both across the site in the hierarchy of linked courts and within the plan of each building. His zeal, the building type and its planning gathered wide interest with national daily coverage and a three page spread in the Architects' Journal despite the gathering news of the start of war, the event that ensured the project was stillborn and the effect of the legislation deflected. Max learnt about the value of the press from this scheme and every project that followed included a special press briefing. The Ocean Street study started as a project set by Max for his students at the AA. This involved the then unheard of practice of finding out (with the help of John Madge of Mass Observation) what those affected by an official Slum Clearance Scheme would actually like to get from a housing improvement programme. The LCC was committed under the Housing Act 1936 to a compulsory purchase order of 729 houses displacing 4,400 residents; to build 15 five storey blocks of 856 dwellings and housing 4,110 people at a cost of 765,000. The students first listened to the official LCC approach, then went to ask the residents what they wanted. There was little correlation between what the residents wanted and what the LCC were going to provide. The students then tried to design for the residents' overall preference for 'houses' within the legal and financial constraints. Their solution was to place flats over two storey homes within three storey blocks with some four storey blocks of mixed flat sizes. The 'houses' in this arrangement then qualified as flats for funding. Gardens, allotments and a community centre were set out with daylight considered for all units. Lifts, another tenant request, were included in all blocks. The existing conditions were photographed, a model of the proposals was built, a film centred on the residents was made with a prepared script and the newspapers were summoned to a press conference. The project's exposure of the official local and central government lack of method in housing provision, the antiquated funding formula and the resident's views all fuelled furious headlines and gained an astounding number of column inches in the national dailies but attracted little establishment recognition and no government support. The project was pivotal for Max. It led him into areas of policy and planning; which demanded and accepted argument and debate; secured a wide audience; were designed to find out and then fit the requirements of the ultimate users; and aimed to right official misconceptions about the governed. From then on planning captured his concerns and all his energy. 1940-43 Civic Diagnosis Max's time in Hull was stimulating and productive, but far from easy. He had set up a cooperative household - the first of many - with Carrie, who had started life as a ¶tweenie™ at Castle Howard, as cook/housekeeper. He was an independent thinking Quaker of strong convictions and a conscientious objector who had been fully cleared by the official Tribunal. Military service was excused and he was free to continue in his professional work as teacher, architect, researcher and town planner. Local Authority teaching and other staff had been conscripted for national service. Information - the lifeblood and essential foundation to Max's professional approach - immediately as a teacher and later as a researcher - was restricted and to be kept secret - 'Careless Talk Costs Lives'. Wartime Hull was under constant air raid bombing. The scene was not conducive to freedom of inquiry or behaviour. Max's position as Head of the School of Architecture, under the auspices of the Hull College of Art, was provisional and to be confirmed. In the eyes of the Education Authority, all students were considered schoolchildren and not, as they were in the eyes of Max, as responsible young adults with their own personal and intellectual ambitions. He encouraged them to cooperative action with the Scalby Reception Centre project, student conferences and other outside activities. Tensions grew and in the end inquiries were instituted. The College Principal felt that, in spite of his respect for Max's qualifications as a teacher, he could not recommend his permanent appointment. And at the same time the Council was passing resolutions about not appointing Conscientious Objectors to posts until the war was over and the returning servicemen had been given first chance. So, after more than a year in the job, Max was not appointed. However, during this year of wartime and professional upheaval, Max, his staff and students were thinking through the strategy required to set the replanning and postwar reconstruction of the devastated City of Hull on a sound basis. It required thorough and coordinated social and physical surveys and it had to be on a regional basis - the urban area in its economic, social and physical setting. Max referred to it as a Civic Diagnosis - of the body as a whole - an anatomical simile he favoured increasingly. It reflected his respect for the biological background of Patrick Geddes. The Leverhulme Trust gave him a grant of +800 to carry out this work. Local industrialists, individuals and the Housing Centre Trust more than matched the initial grant with a further 1100. Influential support was given by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and the Lord Mayor of Hull, opening many doors which would otherwise have remained firmly shut in wartime, secret conscious and centrally controlled England. Even so, it was not until the middle of 1942 that the local Hull paper was able to headline 'RePlanning of Hull: C.O. Architect Given Access to Documents - Council's Close Vote'. The paper did not need to explain that C.O. stood for Conscientious Objector. A Civic Diagnosis is Recognised The Hull Regional Survey - A Civic Diagnosis - was completely new in its presentation, with maps, photographs, graphs and diagrams to make the factual and written content visual, striking and understandable to the ordinary citizen of the City. It achieved immediate acclaim with a London exhibition at the Housing Centre in 1943 opened by the Minister of Town and Country Planning. The Architects' Journal gave over a complete issue to a full coverage and it was widely reported in the national and professional press as a basis for a programme of postwar reconstruction. The Middlesbrough Corporation invited Max to draw up a Master Plan within one year. This was Max's first real planning commission. Professor Abercrombie, who had been similarly appointed at Hull, gave his blessing. Scalby was an early project run as Head of the Hull School of Architecture. It was a platform for Max's campaign to express his ideas. Like the Ocean Street Study at the AA, it was a live project rooted in local society. Early in the war the students were evacuated from the Hull bombing to the seaside resort at Scarborough. The lack of preparation for this move and the unsuitability of their accommodation stimulated them into a search for a solution to this problem. They decided it could be solved by creating a recreation centre of special design that could have long term community use after the war. Scalby, a village outside Scarborough, was selected after a careful study of a number of locations. The project was used to scrutinise current legislation, to question established tenets and allowed a view of postwar Britain to be considered in its future permanent use. The scheme, originally designed for timber construction, went through a series of revisions as the proposed materials became increasingly scarce. Max knew the value of publicity and a public exhibition of the students scheme was held, local papers published and it was featured in the Architects' Journal in August 1940. Max's introduction of this innovative scheme with its wider issues, his enthusiasm and the way he publicised the scheme cemented his relationship with the students who began to see him as a worthy ally. Max paid little heed to the attitude of the officials of the Hull School probably because he was immersed in his ideas for research, teaching and practical planning based on geographically based data, called in his words 'Civic Diagnosis'. His starting point was the pre-car work of Howard, Burns and Geddes and was further influenced by the Lewis Mumford essays on re-planning postwar Britain, a book by A. F. Wells on the 'Local Social Survey', the housing land policies of the USA and many discussions in London at the Housing Centre and the Association of Planning and Regional Reconstruction. He particularly admired the work and principles of Geddes, a Scotsman, whose best work Max later went to see in India. He shared Geddes defamatory view of 'vistamongers', and the engineer planners Geddes labelled 'sanitarians'. His only resources were the staff and students at Hull when he began a campaign to show what could be achieved. His political skills drew in the Mayor of Hull, the Leverhulme Trust (with a first ever grant to a town planning project), the Housing Centre Trust, the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Private patrons were all badgered for finance for the Hull Regional Survey. He called on many voluntary local societies and secondary schools who responded with enthusiasm in the huge task of data collection. The approach was entirely original with defined coverage, a spine of ten priority issues and a methodical approach to collecting data, but the most notable element was the geographical plotting and its diagrammatic expression. This is second nature now but then it was without precedent. The teams used overlay techniques with map bases showing housing condition, shopping locations, leisure facilities, imports and exports by trade, accident statistics and pollution. The town and its people were the focus rather than the fields around its edge, survey was the basis of its facts, analysis the foundation of the conclusions. In The Guild of Building Review No. 16 of 1940 Max saw the newly emerging planning profession as being 'the fullest collaboration between the social, legal, economic, technical and planning experts'. He proposed the re-balancing of the then marked urban/rural divide, the reform of local government, the proposal for regional bodies with planning responsibilities and the active role of the planner in determining a role for intelligently planned communities. Education, research and the practice of town planning and architecture was an issue Max remained committed to all his life and he often demonstrated his faith in the capabilities of young professionals. A long article published by the Architects' Journal in November 1942 set out his ideas of integrated post war professional education as a continuous process of technical research, education and practice. Cooperative Living Max moved to Middlesbrough to start the Survey and Plan in early 1944. A large detached suburban house (Moor Close) with front drive and garden on the edge of the town was the unlikely setting for the Group to move into as a communal household. As the work progressed many specialist professionals and helpers passed through this household sharing their ideas as well as their rations. This mixed collection of single and married women and children with not so many men (who were either exempt from military service for one reason or another or on leave) was not entirely understood by their suburban neighbours. Max and Carrie (the housekeeper who had come with Max from Hull) were the constant anchors. The office, in a generous terraced house of three floors, was in the town centre (83 Grange Road) and open to all - officials, councillors and members of the public - an unheard of practice in the restricted and secretive war-time centre of the iron and steel industry. Max travelled widely - lecturing and publicising the Groups work and keeping in contact with the highly centralised and powerful official planning bureaucracy both through Whitehall and the Regional centre at Newcastle. Little was supposed to be done without their approval. Planning legislation and the whole system of post-war reconstruction was under detailed discussion. Town planning survey techniques and their presentation in map, model and report format were being pioneered by the Group and under close study for use in the emerging planning system which was being codified, regulated and formulated by government. The Group members as well as Max became totally immersed in Middlesbrough town life and gave much of their spare time talking to local organisations and societies. One of the lady architects - well and truly married and obviously pregnant - insisted on being introduced by her maiden name complete with the prefix Miss much to the embarrassment of local vicars chairing parish hall meetings. Col and Mrs. Pennyman of Ormesby Hall, just outside the town and set in the escarpment of the North Riding moors, opened their magnificent house (interiors by Carr of York and now National Trust) to the Group. Informal Sunday afternoon tea parties there became a regular get together. Ruth Pennyman became one of Max's closest life-long friends. Report Preparation By mid 1945 the field-work was completed and the individual topic reports were being written for final presentation to the Council by means of a large public exhibition in the Town Hall. Max eventually moved back to his parents' house in Watford - his mother had died during the war - with all the maps and records to start the mammoth task of coordinating the data and artwork for final publication. The many frustrations of war-time restrictions on printing and publication were eased by the enthusiasm of the Sun Engraving Co. Ltd. in Watford and Jordison & Co. Ltd. in Middlesbrough. Max spent much time writing articles and giving lectures pressing his primary theme. Open non-secretive planning was the only proper way forward and with the consent of the people. Plans without consultation were bound to fail. However, a civil service imbued with war-time regulation and control and who knew they knew best, was designing a government planning system backed by rigid legislation. It did not pay heed to the open consultation theme Max was putting forth. He was far too far ahead of the time. The 1944 Act and Redevelopment Middlesbrough's rapid growth between 1840 and 1870 was in poor quality high density terrace housing. Much was built to minimum by-law standards or even before by-laws were introduced. And it was located tight under the shadow of the ironworks and the railways which served them. It was not bomb damage but appalling housing and lack of supporting infrastructure that needed a redevelopment plan. The recently passed 1944 Town and Country Planning Act gave the Corporation, for the first time, the 'new and positive powers for redevelopment and modernisation of towns and cities'. As Max explained in his address to the Council in May 1945 when presenting the finished Survey and Plan 'This means that your responsibility under the Act is to secure the best use of the land in the public interest. Previous Acts have been concerned with new development. This one is the first to tackle the problem of redevelopment.' The Council accepted the Plan in broad principle. The Penny Pamphlets and Public Participation Pamphlets were produced as a summary for each of the ten main subject headings of the Plan. They were sold widely throughout the town at a penny each. They were complimentary to the public exhibition of the Survey and Plan in the Town Hall and, with many public meetings, were the culmination of a year's activity in publicity and public participation. Over 10,000 people saw the exhibition in one week. The Picture Post articles stimulated a documentary film made by Jill Craigie - Picture Paper - a story of the photographer / reporter who come to Middlesbrough to see and interview the Group at work and was shown in cinemas all over the country. Since his earlier experiences at Hull and Stepney, Max was increasingly keen on getting the local people involved, and particularly the young, in the Survey and Plan process. The schools undertook much of the data collection work in atmospheric pollution analysis and traffic counts. Local clubs, societies and trade organisations were met and consulted as well as the officials of the Corporation and the Ministries. Finally, models were built of the replanned areas. The public was able to get a real feel for the redevelopment proposals. The concept of Civic Diagnosis, required the collecting, collating, coordinating, analysing and comparing of a mass of data from many different sources and then presenting it in a palatable and understandable form. The advanced techniques of assigning various aspects of poor quality in housing was mapped for each aspect on transparent map overlays (this material being early crude plastic was brittle, hard to draw on and not very transparent). These separate transparencies were then m,atched and laid one on top of each other to show where these separate bad qualities were combinedin a single house or street block. The Structure of Neighbourhoods An essential part of the Survey and Plan was the unusual amount of original research on neighbourhoods carried out by Ruth Glass. As Max said in his introduction to The Sociologist's Part in Planning 'No specific planning proposals are attached to this report, as it does not refer to any one aspect of the plan, but is relevant to most of them.' 1946-1949 Plans as Tools for Administration The team moved into a large detached ship-owner’s house (Tunstall Grange) at the top end of Grange Road. The team members were made up of some associated with both Middlesbrough and Hull and others, like Frank Layfield, new to the team. The offices - including the old Magistrates Court as a modelmaking workshop and studio/exhibition hall - were in the complex of Victorian Public Library and Municipal Buildings. This was a marvellous prominent position in the town centre giving the team immediate access to the Municipal officials and vice versa, and, as in Middlesbrough, it was open to all. Cooperative Working and Living The cooperative principle of living and working together, started in Hull and Middlesbrough, and still with Carrie as housekeeper, was continuing. As Max wrote, with his usual positive optimism, in the preface to the Hartlepools book ‘Living and working as a Group we have found that the cooperative principle has extended itself throughout the official departments and into the town itself ...’. However, the long isolated winter evenings in Tunstall Grange found Max retreating from the relaxing card games and crossword puzzles and a certain armed services mess atmosphere engendered by those in the team returned from their stint of war service. He sought the quiet of his room to teach himself foreign languages - the start of a life-long involvement with Italian and Spanish in particular. Although the war had finished over a year before, restrictions, regulations and rationing were still severe, in many ways worse than in the war. The stigma of conscientious objection was passed and there was a real sense of optimism, of wanting to get on with change and improvement - to bring about all the war-time talk of post-war reconstruction - and a realisation that it was possible. In 1946 Max went on the Town Planning Institute Council fact-finding mission to the Netherlands and wrote the official report of the visit which incidentally profoundly influenced the future direction of his thinking on urban design. 1947 was one of the worst winters on record - the Hartlepools were totally cut off from the rest of the country - both road and rail - for more than a week by snowdrifts - and snow lay on the ground until well into March. But the survey work, report, consultations, models of proposals and public meetings were completed on time and the publication of the report put in hand. Portsmouth, Gosport and Hampshire The team, largely intact, moved to Hampshire - an altogether different climate - a warm south coast and rolling downs - far from the bleak windswept north east. A large house facing directly onto the Solent was made available for the team to live in. It had a naval background complete with a huge brass bell which Max was given to become, later, a feature of his London Victoria Square house conversion. The entrance hall had a wide, open staircase well. A Foucault pendulum was set up so that the team could get a sense of proportion - watching the world move under their feet as they sat round in the summer evenings discussing the day’s work. The office, in contrast, was a Georgian High Street terrace building in the centre of Fareham - open, of course, to all and sundry, with large rooms for consultation meetings. A Test Case for the New 1947 Act Max and the Group were appointed by the Joint Planning Committee covering the Borough of Hartlepool, the County Borough of West Hartlepool and seven rural parishes of County Durham. Here was the opportunity for Max to look at town and hinterland treated as one to fulfil the new statutory obligations. The huge postwar legislative programme of reform in local government, housing, education, health, and above all, planning was being enacted. Mandatory standards were being laid down. Max and his team and the Local Authority councillors and officers were determined that these emerging obligations should be met in the Plan so that the whole planning process could be carried forward both statutorily and socially. The West Hartlepool Development Plan was the first in the country to go through the hurdles of the 1947 Planning Act to become a Statutory Development Plan. The group was finding that ‘planning’ was changing from the intellectual, innovative, exploratory process of Hull and Middlesbrough. It was now increasingly a process of meeting all kinds of statutory standards and forming them into a unified whole which would have to meet the inevitable legal challenges of a Public Inquiry. The approved Development Plan was not that drawn up by the Group for the whole urban area and its hinterland covered by the Joint Planning Committee. This committee disappeared with the 1947 Act and the County Borough of West Hartlepool became a planning authority in its own right. It was their portion of the Plan that was being approved. The irony of this was not lost on Max. Portsmouth A conflict between two of the new planning authorities led to the Minister advising the authorities ‘to engage a consultant to review the problems of the whole area.’ The Max Lock Planning Group was appointed. The Portsmouth appointment was a logical extension of the Group's work in the Hartlepools. The latter had been the task of coordinating the needs of separate authorities within a single urban area into the growing bureaucratic requirements of the emerging planning system _ but it was an isolated area in a trap of poverty and the pressures were to halt what seemed an inevitable decline. Now the task was a subregion with prosperity and conflicts. The permanence of the Naval Base was, at that time, assured. It directly employed more than a quarter of the insured workers in the subregion. The area was increasingly becoming an attractive location for industry. In contrast, the main urban centre of Portsmouth was packed on an island with limited accessibility. High density housing, the naval dockyards and a regional town centre all suffered from considerable war-damage and were in desperate need of reconstruction. The city was bound to burst its boundaries. The pressures for expanding towns and satellite settlements was being seriously resisted by a rural hinterland of remarkably unspoilt beauty. The two separate areas were now established planning authorities under the 1947 Act. The Group had to concentrate on collecting and collating data over wide but tightly specified fields to inform and direct decisions concerning urgent postwar investment in reconstruction. The results of survey rationally analysed would lead to strategic policies being adopted in a politically divergent situation. The Plan came out in favour of developing existing settlements rather than a new town. In the end it came down to calculating what would be the likely population (overspill) that would need to be housed in the rural hinterland. This was a huge number-crunching exercise involving densities, available infill areas, condition of existing housing and the need for its replacement, overcrowding, building capacity, cost and programming of infrastructure as well as a cost calculation of the advantages of a new town development as against developing existing settlements. The information collected was transferred on to punch cards for electrical tabulation - an early example of the use of this system in UK planning. The methods of collection and the compatibility of data from various sources were designed from the start with this system in mind and all under the control of a qualified statistician who had the Hollerith card sorters to carry out the analysis. It allowed a depth of cross-tabulation of data to be completed within the short time-scale available to the Group to produce their recommendations. As well as housing and population information, data on journey to work, employment and re-location of industry was essential. The urban area had an awkward geographical configuration of inlets, islands, bridges, ferries and chalk escarpment along the mainland. It called for an integrated plan for work and living place if permanent traffic congestion was to be avoided. Special surveys were designed to establish the daily journey to work pattern. The short time allowed for the production of the Final Report allowed an initial analysis of this data to be incorporated in the strategic planning decisions. The mass of survey data was then handed over to the new planning authorities in a form for further study, analysis and integration into more detailed decision making. Historic Buildings and Villages In 1948 there was no full legal protection for historic buildings or areas of particular urban or village interest other than the Monuments in the guardianship of the Ministry of Works. A full survey of historic buildings was therefore carried out with particular reference to their setting and grouping. The Plan did not propose any extensive addition to the villages and the Report argued strongly for stricter architectural and planning control in these sensitive areas. ‘A pastiche of old style fancy-dress architecture would be even more harmful than the utilitarian council house. English domestic architecture, for all its prostitution to speculative taste, is still inherently the best in the world. The English village is still unique and the most precious heritage we have, and some of the best of these are to be found in Hampshire.’ Quotes such as this were not as familiar then as they are now. Victoria Square Max moved into Victoria Square. The house, in a terraced William IV square, had basically remained unaltered since its original construction which afforded Max a stimulus to convert it over the coming years to suit his way of life and work. All his arrangements at that time were in a state of flux. The cooperative way of working and living over the previous eight years had broken up. The Group had wound down - the Portsmouth Report was finished - however detailed work, more architectural in concept, was being commissioned from Max. Bedford by the River Max was now committed to Bedford. The time scale of this study was short. A locally recruited team was built up and worked from the old Mayor’s Parlour in a tough period of research and negotiation. ‘Bedford by the River’ was a much more graphic and design oriented report than anything previously produced. Detailed design work was also coming out of Bedford as it had done at Portsmouth. Max Lock and Associates was formed between Max and three new architectural recruits and based on Victoria Square and Bedford to execute the increasing and mainly architectural work load. The informal office arrangement at Victoria Square where a telephone extension had finally been made to the basement drawing office from Max’s private line was outgrown and the practice moved to several floors over a bookshop in Great Russell Street and then to John Street where it still is. Little planning work was being generated within the UK during this period. Max was elected to various Town Planning Institute (it didn't get its Royal charter until 1971) committees with particular emphasis on education and research. However, he was becoming increasingly frustrated at the TPI. In his view there was much more to planning than the limited view of statutorily blinkered English local government officers. The TPI had become little more than a ‘County Planning Officer’s club’. The new Planning Offices thought they could do it all. Plans were not yet sufficiently advanced to create the wave of objections that did arise when they were eventually made public at the statutory Inquiries. In 1961, it was the RIBA that awarded Max along with Colin Buchanan a Distinction in Town Planning. A New Kind of Planning Consultancy There was a growing need for disinterested professional advice to aggrieved individuals and local organisations. Municipal Boroughs (many, like Bedford, cities of ancient origin) were not local planning authorities in their own right and felt they were being imposed upon by the Counties in one way or another. Their views were not being properly taken into account. Two commissions to come to Max at this time were indicative of many to follow. First was Sevenoaks Borough who were concerned for the future of their town centre under the plans of the Kent County Council. Second, in Aberdare 17000 local residents were incensed that the County Council had declared a whole part of the town - their homes! - as a clearance and redevelopment area. Max was called in to resolve these conflicts. The most significant of the schemes undertaken by Max at this time was the redevelopment plan for the centre of Salisbury. During this period Max was also involved in two large redevelopment schemes on what was to become the M4 corridor. The first was at the 250 acre Woodley Airfield outside Reading. The second involved ‘Brentford’s Riverfront’ along the north bank of the Thames opposite Kew Gardens. The team Max brought together for this work was the nucleus which would later come together for the Kaduna report. The Bedford report was produced to high graphic standards. Photographs were used extensively to elaborate ideas. Bedford featured on the cover of the Ministry’s own Bulletin No 3 on Town Centre Redevelopment. But Max felt a lack of continuity which he expressed in a Paper praising progress in Bedford twelve years later ‘… a curious municipal insensibility that never once sought fit to consult the planner on the plan he had engendered! But we live in a schizophrenic age.’ The role of the consultant seemed to be ‘to leave the baby on the doorstep.’ The Glamorgan County Council prepared, in secret and without consultation, a radical development plan showing wholesale housing clearance. Its publication caused natural shock, anger and 17,000 objectors. Max was called upon by the Aberdare Protection Associations to appear as an expert witness on their behalf at the Public Inquiry into the County Development Plan. His evidence, along with that of Ian Nairn, Wyn Thomas and Tryston Edwards stressed the social and economic advantages of rehabilitation as against wholesale clearance. This finally broke the then perceived wisdom that slum clearance or green field development were the only possible public housing policies. ‘Traffic, Trade and Tradition’ Max’s concise summing up of the conflicts to be resolved in the city centre plan could only be met in his view by ‘the gentlest of civic surgery’. The developer proposed a large new shopping precinct with much additional new shopping floor space in the central New Street Chequer near the cathedral close. The view of the Group was that the total retail turnover available to the city centre would tend to be concentrated in the new development. Hence it would be withdrawn from the established retail premises thus depriving them of an economic base. Their continued maintenance as listed historic buildings would be in jeopardy. What started as an advisory commission for the County Council on one application ended as an independent, fully researched city centre plan for the City Council and backed by the traders and preservationists. After Public Inquiry, Max’s rational approach was accepted by the Inspector and the Minister who both concluded that proper economic retail surveys should be an integral part of future town centre redevelopment proposals. The Borough of Brentford and Chiswick was about to be absorbed into the London Borough of Hounslow with the creation of the Greater London Council. The Borough Council wanted a Plan for their riverfront which would put their views firmly ‘on the table’ before they disappeared. The opportunities presented were unique. Over 100 acres were being released by public undertakings for redevelopment; the whole area was at the node of an emerging motorway network feeding west London; a magnificent mile of riverfront faced Kew Gardens; two areas of historic London small settlements were included; and a new local government structure was about to be established. The plan presupposed these ‘opportunities’ could and would be exploited cooperatively. However the vision had no promoter. Max had gone to Kaduna with his team. The old established local authority which had set it up had gone. The new ones were larger and with their own self interests and conflicts of establishment. The separate public utilities, who between them held so much of the land, were being encouraged individually to make the ‘best price’ out of their holdings. The implicit concept of cross-subsidisation in the Plan was only possible through comprehensive planning and development. The high rise high value housing units associated with the hotel, conference centre, restaurants and banqueting suite along the riverfront would create the values for the essential replacement of social housing in other parts of the site as well as the relocation of non-conforming riverside uses. Without the necessary nurturing the ‘opportunities’ rapidly dissipated. The 1947 Act bureaucratised municipal planning. The flow of work to consultants started to dry up. Max’s architectural practice was beginning to flourish under his new younger associates who became partners in 1954. With the office moving out of Victoria Square, Max had the space to give more time to his piano practice and recitals and to his thoughts about the connections between music, the architect and planning. Max’s reputation had been made as a town planner and that was where his heart was. In the UK where he had made that reputation there was little recognition and now no flow of work. Overseas was a different story. His reports had been widely acclaimed and were held in many university libraries. A Tour of the East In 1951 the British Council asked Max to make a lecture tour of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. His lectures were enthusiastically attended by the growing planning profession in the sub continent where Geddes’ work in India was known and respected. Max made hundreds of friends and lasting correspondents. He kept a full diary of his tour including a visit to Chandigar (which he did not approve of in principle) and met his old friends Max Fry and Jane Drew and Pierre Jeanneret for the first time and found him ‘... quiet, modest and meek - the antithesis of Corb., who is away in Paris designing the Government Buildings.’ Max also gave many piano recitals and it seemed that most of the tour was designed around the location and availability of pianos for his daily practice. At the end of the tour Max discussed his findings on planning and architecture in India with Prime Minister Nehru and wrote a report on his recommendations. Max was asked later to record a talk for the British Council which was played at a large gathering for Geddes’ centenary in Bombay in October 1954. The various Middle East commissions arose soon after and took Max to Jordan as UN Advisor. While there on his way through to Iraq where he was working on the new town at Um Qasr he heard that housing development was to take place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. He was outraged and went to Jerusalem to investigate with his UN ‘hat on’. He saw the Mayor and the Governor of Jerusalem and the Holy Places, General Burns. On his return to Amman he wrote to General Burns suggesting a joint Jordan and Israeli Town Planning Board for Jerusalem. A sensible enough solution one might have thought. The diplomatic ‘fall out’ resulted in Max receiving a severe reprimand from the Jordan Government to mind his own business which was UN Advisor on Town Planning to the Jordan Government. Max spent most of his time in the Middle East from 1954 until the Suez oil crisis in 1956 when the work flow dried up on him yet again. The work was, in any case, becoming much more orientated towards high cost, grandiose projects which fundamentally went against Max’s ‘vista monger’ view of such schemes. In 1957 there was a complete change for Max from being involved in the day to day work of planning consultant in specific towns to becoming a lecturer on the wider issues of planning. He was invited to be visiting Professor for the Fall Term at the Department of Town Planning and Civic Design at Harvard. It was there that he gave a recital to a packed house including Lewis Mumford, Dean Josep Sert, Chermayeff and his old colleague Jaqueline Tyrwhitt now a full Professor at the Department. The Bazilian Foreign Office followed asking Max to visit and discuss the new capital Brasilia and lecture to members of the Brazilian Municipal Association in various cities on town planning techniques. Then he was guest lecturer at the Sixth Annual Planning Congress for Australia and completed an extended two month lecture tour of the main States. The Jordan Government had requested UN assistance in 1954 for town planning work with particular reference to the capital city Amman and the developing port of Aqaba on the Red Sea. The commission was to be for one year. However Max felt he could not give his full time for one year considering his other commitments. Eventually it was agreed that one of his partners Gerald King, would take the post of UN Field Town Planner in Amman for the full year and Max would be responsible for and approve the Final Report as UN Town Planning Advisor. Amman has a unique topography consisting of a high plateau cut across by deep steep-sided valleys. Seven definable mountains (or jebels) had been developed around the old centre which grew up astride the ancient trade route from the Red Sea to Damascus and Beirut along the bottom of the main valley (wadi). Physical communication between the developing parts of the city was the key to its development plan. The concepts of a roof top inner ring road spanning the steep sided valleys on columns of office and residential tower blocks and the location of the growing government centre out of the old heart and on to its own Parthenon like plateau top were bold engineering solutions in keeping with their time as well as the long association between Jordan and the British Army and civil engineering consultancy firms. Max not only reported on the development plans for Amman and Aqaba but also on the future of town planning in Jordon. His proposed Town Planning Headquarters staffing structure was innovative by giving equal weight to the civil engineer, architect, surveyor and research worker (with an economist/statistician and geographer/sociologist attached) and all under a Town Planner. The final report received the general approval of King Hussein. Um Qasr, Margil and Basrah: Iraq The area of Iraq at the head of the Persian Gulf was coming under increasing oil revenue generated pressure for development in the mid 50s. Large civil engineering government Authorities were the prime development agencies in irrigation, flood control, railways, roads and ports. As there was a limit to the size of ship that could berth at the traditional main port of Iraq at Basrah, it was decided by the Director General of Ports to investigate the possibility of developing Um Qasr 40 miles south of Basrah nearer the Persian Gulf and the border of Kuwait. Max contributed the ‘social aspect of town and country planning’ to a joint report that was dominated by ‘the engineering technical considerations and the economic point of view’. The town plan part of the port and other engineering works was a simple open-ended one capable of self-contained linear expansion along the most topographically suitable ridge in the area. Max’s conclusion was ‘... an entirely new town like Um Qasr ..... could be sufficiently simple, direct and clear cut to enable the new town to advance through its successive stages as a simple well conceived whole. Social happiness, perhaps more than commercial success depends upon a place being pleasant to live and work in, and this can only be achieved by a consistently strong partnership between the public on the one hand and administration, estate management, the Town Planners, Architects and Engineers on the other. Without this mutual cooperation life in a new community, especially if it is isolated from any other, becomes sterile and mediocre.’ A further commission came from the Port Authority to plan a housing development for 15,000 as an extension to Margil the port town of Basrah. Here was an early example of Max studying the family and cultural way of life of the people and of how it was expressed in traditional house design, layout and climate control and furthermore how this could be then extended into a successful community plan and layout. This resulted in the Ubullah Neighbourhood Plan in 1956. A report and plan for The New Basrah was prepared for the Municipality in 1956. It was a graphic production welding plans, diagrams, sketches, photographs, tables and text in the line of Max’s earlier UK planning reports and particularly that for Bedford by the River. Attention was paid to the old city centre and the many fine traditional buildings in it. This emphasis on the value of conserving the best of the past was something new in the Gulf area at that time. This government sponsored housing development was to improve the living conditions of a small and poor town. It was a challenge to try and meet the need of the people within a straight jacket of preconceptions and paternalism and allowed Max to extend his concept of starting with a study of the culture and way of life of ordinary people and allowing that to influence and determine an appropriate community wide development plan in scale physically and economically with the society it was to serve. El Beida: Libya Max was appointed by the Libyan Public Development and Stabilization Agency under the General Manager Sir Arthur Dean to draw up a master town plan based on the existing village of El Beida around the King’s summer palace. This was all part of the proposal for a new capital city - Cyrenaica - where work had already commenced by the Ministry of Works on new Federal Government buildings. Max’s involvement got no further than a preliminary report and sketches before being overtaken by the ensuing Middle East political crisis. The plan provides for a new road over the sea to by-pass the town and form two lagoons on either side of a pier where a dhow harbour and yacht marina could be accommodated. The main feature was ‘the pier with the Ziggurat at the end. A beacon at the top would direct a vertical beam of light at night. The artificial island beyond the pier contains an amphitheatre and exhibition ground.’ This was a joint entry with Associated Maritime Consultants and it would seem the concept got carried away with the scale of engineering possibilities. Maybe this was then seen as the only way to keep up with the competition in this oil rich area and that perhaps some ‘planning’ might come out of it. In March 1965 Max went to Nigeria to set up the Kaduna office. At the request of the then Ministry of Overseas Development and the Government of Northern Nigeria a reconnaissance trip had been made at the end of 1964 to draw up a programme for a Master Plan for Kaduna, the capital city of the Northern Region. The programme was agreed and the work was to take one year. The Group was based in the Northern Nigeria Survey Department in Kaduna South - a large complex of buildings originally set up when the colonial government moved their headquarters from Zungeru to the greenfield site of Kaduna in 1915-16. A new open plan office surrounded by a verandah was specially built to accommodate the incoming team from the UK. It was an integral part of the existing small Town Planning Office and the much larger Land Record and Cadastral Office. Max set up a whole range of interviews with the senior politicians and civil service officers. He listened to their worries and alarm at the rate of Kaduna’s growth and of how the creation of jobs and training could keep up with it. He travelled back to London regularly to make the arrangements for the visits of the other consultants who would be coming out during the summer months between their other commitments in the UK. The government was supplying all kinds of other back-up for the team. First was a fully qualified secretary, trained to high court stenography standard, who turned out to be a man of many parts, text book author, song writer and lead guitarist in the North’s premier pop group - The Soul Supremes. Then there was equipment, mapping, printing, communications, aerial photography, vehicles and accommodation. At first the team was lodged in the newly built six storey Hamdala Hotel - situated alongside the race course, complete with swimming pool, in the main administrative centre of Kaduna North five miles from the office in Kaduna South. Max was preoccupied with his constant round of interviews, using all his political skills of persuasion to get changes made in the law and administration of land, the Capital Territory, local government, the rural hinterland and, above all, town planning. The field work continued all summer, interviewing households, plotting development, helping the specialist traffic and other engineers with their task of data collection and starting the preliminary analysis of the unique household interview sample survey by hand. Max had brought his dumb piano which totally mystified the staff at the Hamdala Hotel and he practised daily. He was profoundly upset that a magnificent new concert-grand had pride of place in the lounge/bar and was never used except for leaning against and as a beer shelf. It was hopelessly out of tune but an eager amateur tuner was found who had kept the missionary pianos going. Max eventually persuaded the management to move the piano up to the unused mezzanine level. He was not around on the big day to advise that the legs could be unscrewed when moving it. The single rear leg was smashed off as the piano was humped round the half landing. It wasn’t a mortal wound and Max propped it up with a chair and books to give a full public concert on the evening of the January 1966 Army coup. By spring 1966 the team was back in London and the task of designing the report, its writing, map presentation and printing was set in hand. The status of the Nigerian government and Kaduna was in flux. Max was in constant negotiation during this uncertain period determined that the Kaduna report would express the best for Kaduna and the evolving ideas of the Group for planning in the developing world. Kaduna - A Magnet for Migrants The Group was, of course, aware of the national tensions, particularly over the Census and population figures. Since the totals could not be agreed the details were obviously not available. A profile of the population was essential for the work to proceed. Kaduna was, after all, a major magnet for migrants from all over a country which had no reliable statistical base and some four hundred different languages. A sample household interview survey was carried out with a team of mature students recruited from the Institute of Administration in Zaria and representing the many migrant groups in the city. They could survey the people in their own languages and thus overcome the suspicions at that suspicious time. The analysis showed that over one fifth of the people living in Kaduna had come from outside the North and over 90% of the adults had not been born in the town. This was way higher than most people thought. The city was laid out as a physical representation of colonial policies for administrating Nigeria on behalf of the British Government. The ultimate logic of Lord Lugard’s philosophy of the Dual Mandate was that each sector and class of society should be defined. Each could then keep its own form of rule for its own area. Each area would have to be legally protected in order to keep the rule intact. Above all, each should be free of interference the one from the other. It was segregation on a grand scale - European from Nigerian (rigidly separate living and working areas) - Nigerian from Nigerian (indigenes to the area from non-indigenes). The historic patterns of growth and physical hierarchical structure inherited from the colonial past were now splitting apart on the ground whilst the administrative machinery and law remained unchanged. Law, land and money were, in Max’s philosophy, inseparable in proper planning. Much time was given to devising an administrative structure that might work in the complex web of existing traditional vested interests. However, land was a prized asset in the pursuit of political power and the largesse of patronage it permitted. This thrived on a lack of law and an anarchic administration. Housing and Layout - an African Solution The social survey revealed the conditions of living in the town and allowed a rational analysis of family size, sharing of accommodation, relationships between sharing households, ability to pay rent, overcrowding and need for basic sanitary arrangements. Designs and layouts based on these analyses were made for many types of site, density, plot and house size. Particular attention was paid to the needs of the Moslem community to have a male reception house entrance area (zaura) with secure women's and family quarters behind. A long term detailed plan was proposed to solve the housing problem. The plan applied to a broad spectrum - not just designed for the rich, which the International Bank report had just pointed out was the outcome of the past Nigerian policies. The idea of low cost ‘Build-it-yourself’ houses as well as the idea of a ‘Sanitary core’ within the housing block were pioneered in the housing designs. Furthermore, the layout of the new proposed housing areas followed the site’s topography. Max adopted this approach which, he argued, is a vital factor when dealing with any urban planning project. The advantage of this type of design is the usage of topography as a natural drainage system which is easy to adopt and upgrade as well as keeping cost down. Flexibility within a controlled infrastructure was the basic principle. However, in the end flexibility on its own won the day. The report had a striking cover designed by Max using traditional motifs based on the crocodile, - Kaduna being the Hausa word for ‘crocodiles’ which infested the river running through the city. It was widely acclaimed and received a critical appreciation in many countries rarely achieved by a report on town planning. Here was a model for the developing world much as Middlesbrough had been for war torn Europe twenty one years earlier. The book was designed to be read at many levels. Illustrations and maps were closely integrated with the text. Its many short captions, allowed it to be flicked through and its essence easily captured. It could be more seriously read subject by subject in summary at the beginning of each chapter and in summaries of the more complex parts within each chapter. The fine print appendices, full cross referencing and index were there for the truly dedicated.
Both the sample social survey based on Max’s twenty years of experience and the traffic analysis by Peter Hills who had been the youngest member of Prof. Buchanan's team for the ‘Report on Traffic in Towns’ published two years earlier were pioneering studies in the African continent. The sample survey analysis allowed a geographical tabulation of the economic characteristics of the population, their family structure, work places, means of transport and modes of journey to work. Major desire volumes were predicted for 1985 and an ultimate road hierarchy plan met the criteria of ‘resolving the conflict between accessibility and environment by rationalising the town into networks and environmental areas’. A major innovation was the use of ‘cost/benefit’ analysis to determine a rational decision concerning a common sense proposal to move the railway away from the centre of the town to its western edge. The concepts of putting a cost on a human life or the shadow pricing of labour were far too far ahead of their time in the Nigerian context where the prevailing mood was expressed by the Premier to Max at a Government House reception ‘Planning should be on tap and not on top’. Max continued to press the military government to take planning and its administration seriously. He returned in mid 1966 with Desmond Heap and a draft proposal for town planning legislation. The local press supported the Plan with vigour during this post coup period. Many long articles were written, interviews given and extracts from the report reproduced. The Military Governors, first for Northern Nigeria and then for North-Central State, always received Max with enthusiasm on his various visits. Action seemed to be being taken. Edicts and decrees were issued. However they were, unfortunately, only on paper. The Capital Territory boundary was not enlarged. The ground in and around it was exploding with indiscriminate development without infrastructure. Furthermore, the plan’s basic skeleton was not to be. First, the existing Federal road through Kaduna was upgraded ‘with international funding’ by smashing its alignment through the heart of the centre as a dual carriageway ‘improvement’. Then oil revenues permitted a bypass to be constructed around the western edge of the built up area. Lack of planning law and control as well as no Capital Territory administrative reform allowed plots all along its frontage to be sold off for commercial development. This unintentionally and prematurely opened up access to huge areas across the valley on its western side which were promptly sold off for individual house and shanty town building. Since the bypass had been designed with access only at each end - over twenty kilometres apart - vehicle movement between these new living areas and the existing city centre were made by spontaneously created laterite tracks forcing death trap crossings over the bypass kerbs. The philosophy and principles of the Kaduna report had been severely dented. The proposed Civic Centre was to be the traffic free feature at the southern end of the existing mature tree lined main spine road but relieved of through traffic. A Federal and international loan financed ‘improvement’ chopped down all the trees and widened it to dual carriageway thus splitting the commercial, social and high density residential centre into two and burying so much of the Plan’s philosophy at one fell swoop. Sadly, but understandably, the Regions were turning more and more exclusively in on themselves and particularly in the North where education standards had always been low. Northerners were increasingly unable to fill the qualifications for the new jobs being created by much Federal investment in the North that the North’s domination of the Federal legislature ensured came their way. Qualified southerners were flocking north to take up these posts. By 1964-65 demands from Northern politicians to restrict new jobs and land allocations to Northerners only were being expressed openly. These demands became so strident that tensions broke with an Army coup in January 1966. Many senior political leaders from the North were assassinated. Brigadier Ademulegun, was shot on the night of the coup in his house opposite the Hamdala Hotel shortly after he had attended Max’s piano recital earlier on in the evening. This was a severe blow. Max had concluded with him a rationalisation and release of large tracts of Army land in and around Kaduna. Now the new military regime put this all on hold. They had serious political issues to deal with; the fears of a unitary style Lagos government; a Northern army officer’s counter coup in July; the pogrom in October of tens of thousands of Ibo people living in the North; and finally the cessation of the Eastern Region from the Federation ending in the Biafrian War. 1968-72 Protagonist and Antagonist Max worked continuously during the last half of the 1960s in keeping the pressure up on the planning schemes he had been working on before going out to Kaduna. He operated mostly from his house in Victoria Square writing letters, organising meetings and regularly visiting Salisbury, Oldham, Woodley and Brentford and Chiswick. In Salisbury the County Council was drawing up an official Town Map which the City Council and Max wanted to see as truly representing their agreed views on the future development of the City Centre. In Oldham, the Ministry was working closely with, and backing, Max’s architectural partners on an experimental prefabricated housing and district heating scheme for the worst central housing area in the town that had been slum cleared. Max was pressing for the detailed housing surveys carried out in the first half of the decade in the other parts of the town to be used as a basis for rehabilitation and upgrading programmes as against wholesale clearance. In Woodley and Brentford and Chiswick the local residents were pressing for their interests to be heard at a time of basic decision making over, respectively, the routing of the M4 motorway around Reading and the Greater London Council government reform. Max was also holding discussions with other professional firms to establish a multi-disciplinary planning group including valuation and property agents. He felt strongly that the latter firms were an essential part of the planning and development process but, at that time, there were many legal and professional difficulties placed in the way of achieving this aim. Finally, the Urban Development Advice Group (UDAG) was formed and in 1969-70 took on the task of drawing up a report on the future planned development of Dunstable. However, foremost in his mind was to try and ensure the successful launching of the Kaduna Plan. The book had been published in 1967 to wide acclaim. Max had many meetings with successive Ministers at the ODM and regular visits to Nigeria to put pressure on senior Army officers, civil servants and professionals to reform the city management and administration, to set up a properly qualified planning office and to effect the cadastral land registration of the main planning proposals and, in particular, the rail and road reservations and hierarchy. For and Against the Planners Other planning work was coming in - almost like a second wave of ‘plans to be contested’. The shopkeepers of Linthorpe Road in Middlesbrough were having their shopping centre eliminated by the proposals being made in the official Teesplan. The ancient city centre of the Borough of Beverley was being threatened by particularly insensitive County Council planned inner ring road proposals. The London Borough of Hackney with an understaffed planning department was feeling overwhelmed firstly, by the GLC and its Greater London Development Plan proposals and pending public inquiry under the chairmanship of Frank Layfield and secondly, by huge comprehensive ‘clean sweep’ proposals coming forward for South Shoreditch - the Borough’s traditional centre of employment opportunities. Throughout this period Max was regularly attending professional meetings at the TPI, the RIBA, the Housing Centre Trust and a planning advisory panel run by the chairman of Town & City Properties as well as contributing to the annual overseas planning Summer Schools. Long talks were held to reform the Max Lock Group as a planning entity separate from the architectural partnership. He made two trips to the West Indies giving planning advice and tours of Canada, the USA, Brazil and Salvador giving invitation courses of lectures at the universities of McGill, Harvard and Rio de Janeiro. Linthorpe Road - Middlesbrough Revisited Linthorpe Road is the popular route into the Middlesbrough town centre from the main part of the urban area. Over many years shopping had developed on both sides in a substantial way. The Coop had even built a large department store before the war at the southern end away from the town centre. In 1967 there was a Public Inquiry into the refusal of planning permission concerning a large cinema site almost opposite the Coop store. The official evidence supported a planning refusal on the grounds that the proposal was against the long term plan for that area. The Teesplan proposals were in the public domain for the first time. The Linthorpe Road Traders Association were horrified to learn that the official plan proposed the elimination of most of their shopping frontages. They called on Max as the author of the original Middlesbrough Survey and Plan to help them fight their case. After preliminary enquiries Max was convinced that the official proposals were quite unrealistic. He could not see how they could be afforded or implemented in any practicable sense. A report to the traders was drawn up with maps, diagrams and a stringent analysis of the evidence that had been given at various separate but related public inquires. The picture that emerged made it quite clear that the planning assumptions behind the Teesplan proposals were far from safe. At its most simple, there was no economic way, even if morally justified, that one quarter of the existing town centre shopping space could be eliminated by planning procedures in order to make the redevelopment of another part of the centre pay. The logic of the traffic proposals to back up the planning assumptions was also shown to be inconsistent. The Beverley Borough Council had been a party to the County Council (as Highway Authority) proposals for road improvement in and around the historic centre of the town. These were produced as an Official Plan. It was only at the last moment when the full implications to the Conservation Area and its setting became clear that councillors and citizens had serious misgivings. Max was called in to seek a compromise and find a more acceptable solution before the proposals came up to Public Inquiry; to give evidence to that inquiry; and to produce a preliminary report with his recommendations. The time schedule was extremely tight, the issues contentious and solutions illusive. With Peter Hills advising on traffic and Michael Read on valuation a strong case was put forward at the Public Inquiry against the Official Plan. Many other persons and organisations also spoke against the proposals. This evidence and further survey work after the inquiry formed the basis of Max’s Preliminary Report and recommendations. Possible solutions alternative to those of the County Council emerged. The County even put forward a compromise solution having previously said that the original scheme was the only one that could go ahead. The annotated plans reproduced here are from Max’s own copy of the preliminary report and show that he was still seeking a realistic solution even after the report had been published. Planning never stops. The Borough of Dunstable had been under considerable pressure since the war. There was the massive investment in large scale vehicle manufacturing plant, a Greater London Council expanded town project at Houghton Regis only a mile north of the town centre, the huge new town of Milton Keynes but ten miles up the recently completed M1 motorway running along the eastern boundary of the Borough and the most favoured third London airport site being considered by the Roskill Commission less than fifteen miles to the west. The statutory plans for the area were hopelessly out of date and the planning authorities had instituted a sub-regional study which put all updating for town plans on hold. In and around Dunstable employment opportunities had been outstripping the local labour force available for some time and the recently published South East Study had forecast its continuance. Mobility of the population as a whole (56% of the population were in households that had moved house at least once in the previous five years) was exceptionally high and of workers in particular creating mammoth journey to work flows both in and out of the town. The only rail link had ceased carrying passengers. The car was king in this centre of car manufacture. The Borough of Dunstable was Highway Authority for its area but not the Planning Authority and was in a real quandary. It had to do something but yet could not be seen to be stepping out of its severely limited statutory responsibilities as far as forward planning was concerned. There were strong limitations on the planning brief. The land use provisions of the outdated Town Map were to be respected. A time limit of five years was placed on the period for which plans were to be drawn up. The work was to be distinguished from the Statutory responsibilities of the Local Planning Authority. However, a wide brief was there to carry out a large range of detailed surveys covering the physical fabric of the town, its infrastructure, economy, valuation, traffic and environment. The planning team set up an office and flat in the centre of the town to carry out this work. The analysis and conclusions of these surveys did, of course, have long term strategic implications. It was these that were spelt out in the report. The ways in which their physical implementation might be absorbed into the town fabric and structure were explored in some detail. In the late 1960s London’s planning was in a state of flux. The Greater London Development Plan was in its last stages of preparation to go to Public Inquiry. The London Local Government reform of 1965 was only just beginning to settle down with the responsibilities of the new London Boroughs becoming clearer. Leonard Manasseh and Partners had done much housing work for the old Boroughs that made up the new Hackney and he was asked along with Max to conduct a Pilot Survey; to assess the survey material available and the work necessary to update such material; to make good defaults in it; and to prepare a local development plan within the statutory obligations of the 1968 Act and the Greater London Development Plan. Elizabeth Chesterton and Mike Theis joined to make a team to draw up the Pilot Study which set out some of the principles that should be taken into account in any local development plan as well as its programme and costing. The Main Planning Considerations make interesting reading today. At about this time a massive scale proposal was put forward to the Borough for a ‘clean sweep’ comprehensive redevelopment of the whole of South Shoreditch as offices, commerce, industry and housing. It was a ‘town within a town’ proposal that would have made the Barbican look like a village. Max was approached with a detailed brief to study the whole area (including part of Islington) and come up with recommendations for a redevelopment policy within six months. A basic team consisting of those that were forming the new Max Lock Group started field work in February 1971. The evidence from this survey pointed clearly to South Shoreditch being a complex employment centre with some 20,000 workers in some 800 firms of all types and sizes. The area was playing an essential role in the economy of central London and as a source of income to the residents of Hackney. The conclusion of the Group was that the economics of the clean sweep approach did not stand up and that its implications for South Shoreditch continuing as a source of varied employment would be severely jeopardised. The area should be relieved of any planning blight by having a positive policy of individual building improvement and redevelopment as well as local environmental and traffic measures. This was the way it could fulfil the role given to the area in the Greater London Development Plan as an ‘Area of Opportunity’. The many ‘For Sale’ and ‘To Let’ signs were not necessarily signs of weakness but ones of change, variety, adaptability, vitality and growth. This is still true today. 1973-88 Planning for Rapid Growth Nigerian Planning Work Renewed In early 1972 Max received an invitation from the North Eastern State Government of Nigeria to visit Maiduguri, the State capital, and put forward a proposal to prepare a master plan for Maiduguri and the six other provincial headquarters towns in the State. Max made a preliminary tour of all the towns with Abdullahi Bashir the only town planning officer in the whole State. His life-long habit of keeping notebooks of his first impressions, meetings and interviews are a wonderful source now of his thoughts, ideas and immediate correspondence and particularly of this tour. On his return trip he was given a lift in a VW van from Kaduna, where he had gone to check the progress of the plan, to Kano to catch his London flight. The van hit an unlit road block outside Kano and a scaffold pole part of the barrier went through the front into Max’s leg and broke it. A consolation came when he was visited in the Kano hospital by the NE Sate Military Governor wishing him speedy recovery to return to carry out the projected planning work. After protracted negotiations at the end of the year, the State agreed to the brief Max and the Group had drawn up. A site on the edge of the traditional town between the central market and the proposed new State Government Secretariat and alongside the nascent Zoological Gardens was allocated to the Group on which they would build their office. A condition imposed by the Permanent Secretary was that he would support in Lagos the Group’s registration as a business in Nigeria so long as Maiduguri would be the Nigerian headquarters of the Group. A Purpose-built Office in Maiduguri Max drew up a simple single-storey design based on a traditional open plan with locally produced burnt brick columns supporting a covered verandah all round. A local contractor, who was building just outside Maiduguri one of the mandatory vast Army barracks for each of the new State Capitals, built the modest office block in record time. Houses for the group members were selected from many being built speculatively on the small government layouts well outside the walled town on the higher ancient sand ridge of the ice age Lake Chad. This ridge, incidentally, was the highest ground - some 10 metres - above an unrelieved plain stretching for fifty plus miles around. Max’s final tour round the six provincial headquarters towns was a much more stately affair. It was organised in true style in a government Land Rover with driver and cook complete with all his equipment from the government run Maiduguri Catering Rest House. The total journey round the towns encompassed some 1000 miles on mostly laterite roads or a single strip of tar. Ferries across the Benue River were still an adventure on a makeshift motorised raft. Max returned with full note books and sketches of the provincial capitals showing their structure and an analysis of their fundamental opportunities and constraints. Max shuttled between the UK and Nigeria over the following years recruiting professional specialist staff including graduate Nigerians and supervising the continuity at Beverley, Middlesbrough and Hackney. He took every opportunity to call in at Kaduna where he found much praise for the plan and the book. However the evidence of what was happening on the ground and proposals that he was told of left him deeply concerned over the future of the basic elements of the Kaduna Plan. He wrote to the Military Governor in Kaduna asking ‘Why they had accepted the Plan in principal but were not carrying out any of the principles of the Plan?’ Max concluded at the time that this plea had had its effect. However, when he was not there pressing with his conviction and optimism, inertia and ‘practical politics’ took over. The administrative tangle over land allocations and city management had, if anything, become more chaotic. The slums of today were being built today. In spite of much pressure and support from local officials to get the ties of the international funds to the upgrading of existing trunk roads shifted to allow a regional bypass to be built around the town centre rather than slammed through the centre as a dual carriageway, their pleas fell on deaf ears in Lagos and Washington. Max's spirit was no longer fully in the Nigerian practice and more on Addicroft Mill that he bought and wished to convert for his overdue retirement. Mike Theis, his partner, formed the indigenous registered company of Max Lock Group Nigeria Limited with Nigerian participation under the Indigenisation Decree 1976. Max remained as Consultant to the Group. Max Lock Group Nigeria - Ideas into Practice Max’s maxims - land, law and money - were established in the Kaduna work as being the essentials of proper planning. Now eight years, a civil war and a military government later, a new commission for ‘master plans’ for the state capital Maiduguri and the six provincial towns of Mubi, Yola, Gombe, Bauchi, Potiskum and Nguru in the vast, remote North Eastern State, brought these essentials to a head. The Group found even more so than in Kaduna that:- Planning was peripheral to land survey and the cadastral registration of land was solely concerned with elite allocations. An archaic administration was plotting rubbish applications and processing them - the political Lands Division dominating the other technical Survey Divisions. Local Authorities were exercising their traditional rights for land allocation and were now doing it unilaterally without reference to higher authority. Topographical information was lacking or out-of-date and what was actually happening on the ground was even less well known. Aerial photography was available but there was an inherent conflict between imperial and metric as well as the pressing need for immediate data from the uncontrolled photos as against the Ministry requirement for ‘proper line mapping’. Compound counts along with ‘by eye’ map updating were top priority to establish a base from which samples could be drawn and a town structure defined. The torrent of land applications - public and private - stimulated by the oil wealth needed to be properly vetted within the concepts of the emerging development plan before starting any official processing. A ‘Master Plan’ concept was outdated in the rapidly changing pressures on the urban fabrics. General and regular Site Boards were finally accepted as an ‘ad hoc’ means to an end with applicants arguing their real needs along with rational planning assessments by the Group in each case. Borno, Bauchi and Gongola States were created in 1976 out of the original North Eastern State. Bauchi and Yola were changed at the stroke of a pen from sleepy seats of provincial administration into State Capitals just as the Group was presenting their final reports. Fast reassessment was even more necessary. The field observations of the land use surveys, along with analysis of the preliminary aerial photography, identified the major constraints of topography like gullies, erosion, rock outcrops, tree cover and existing building. The development concept or structure plan was produced at an early stage to show the opportunities as against the constraints. A hierarchical network of road reservations was then plotted on gridded sketch mapping or the most recent aerial photos. Land applications could then be judged against the emerging development plan. Even ten years after Independence, many of the senior professional posts in this remote State government were held by expatriates, both those ‘staying on’ and new recruits from south-east Asia. Local recruiting for the Group was limited. Only forty-three Higher School Certificate leavers were coming out of the few secondary schools in the whole State in 1973. The Group employed most of them for the long summer vacation. The best joined the Group and formed a mobile team doing the preliminary land use, ‘by eye’ map updating, compound counts and town assessments. They became the core of the Group’s field survey team on projects throughout Nigeria over the following decade and were sponsored on their own courses at Kaduna Polytechnic and overseas. A specialist group of women students were able to enter purdah households for the general household interview survey and specific studies on the role and needs of women. As battery operated pocket calculators became available in the mid 70s, the slide rules were abandoned and far more analysis and tabulation of the surveys as they took place could be done in each town with the mobile team making regular supervisory visits. The first small group of planning degree students on the new post graduate course at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria were interviewed to see if any would like to work in Maiduguri over the summer vacation. One was firmly committed elsewhere and the remaining eight came to Maiduguri. They formed the core of the teams to establish a baseline in all the towns. Bolaji Arogbonlo became a director of Max Lock Group Nigeria Ltd. on its foundation under the Indigenisation Decree in 1976 and had particular responsibilities for the later projects in Kaduna and Niger States during 1978-1988. Detailed survey and analysis was made of specific subjects like central markets, substantial areas of traditional housing, motor parks and primary school sites and requirements. The results of these studies could be used as examples for minimum disturbance and cost physical improvement programmes in drainage and supply of essential services. In some cases the field survey teams became directly involved in supervising local community schemes and site works such as the Bula Bulin drainage improvement at Maiduguri and the building of a temporary market at Bida. In most towns where development plans were undertaken typical street blocks were surveyed both physically and socially in order to show how modest but vital improvements could be made within the capabilities of the inhabitants. A detailed survey and consultation study of the Monday Market Maiduguri shows how a low cost high improvement proposal of existing permanent brick built buildings and mature tree planting are retained and nurtured. Simple new climatically suitable structures, within the capability of local manufacturing resources, are introduced for expansion. Facilities are made for the poorest ‘penny penny’ traders many of whom are old women or young migrants dependent on petty trade to supplement their subsistence urban existence. The West African market is an essential and informal social and economic network often acting as a vital relief and support for those in need. From 1973 the Group faced accelerating conditions which challenged all previous preconceptions of what a development plan should consist of, how it should be presented, and the most suitable means to bring about rational implementation. First, the Group sought to deal with development control and the processing of applications for land through regularly convened Site Board meetings - the Ministry technical officers, the applicants, the local authority and, typically, seconded members from the public utilities, the Ministry of Works, the Medical Officer of Health or the Police. Second, a proposed road network and hierarchy was laid down at the earliest possible time on a gridded interpretation of the preliminary aerial photos and all land applications plotted and judged against it. The ‘final’ reports were designed as loose-leaf bindings for updating, with policy statements on various topics and detailed planning exercises for such matters as housing layouts, markets, motor parks - simple DIY examples. Here would be a baseline from which monitoring could be measured on population growth and structure, land take up and such essential services as provision for education, firewood reserves, aquifers and utilities. The local government reforms of the mid 70s placed increasing emphasis on local government headquarters towns. This resulted in direct local government commissions requiring the design of layouts and their basic setting out in street blocks for subdivision into plots but within the context of the overall town plan. Whenever possible the layouts were drawn directly onto aerial photographs -mapping was rarely available. The layout designs were topography led in order to ensure natural drainage, retain mature tree cover, avoid sites undevelopable for building uses such as rock outcrops, erosion, flood and ponding areas but which could be identified for positive open area development. The Group worked out a simple methodology and used locally available materials as corner posts for defining the street blocks. Local government staff were used on the setting out teams wherever possible so there was local knowledge of the layouts and some assurance of continuity. Anticipating now rather than firefighting later was the watchword. These simple survey methods were used which were quick to execute and accurate enough - give or take half a metre. This gave the new local governments a clearly defined physical framework of road and drainage reservations and development areas within which plot applications could be made into potentially serviceable plot allocations. The State Ministries responsible for land were appalled as this ran across their monopoly of survey and their tradition of time consuming and expensive cadastral plot beaconing to standards of accuracy - give or take a centimetre. The Ministries of Local Government were, however, strongly in support. The Group argued that the cadastral survey could always be done afterwards should any person wish to have that degree of plot security i.e. as collateral against a bank loan or mortgage. A Retrospective View - A Legacy of Planning Insight During the early 70s, Max was in Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, where, of necessity, he tried to build and run a self sufficient office and home. The office had to be naturally ventilated, sun shaded, be constructed from local materials, connected to its own sewage treatment plant and be day lit because services were non existent or unreliable. His efforts with his house failed in the garden where the lack of water and his frequent travelling saw his attempts to grow produce defeated by the desert sun. The rigour of the design appealed and self sufficient, minimum impact buildings were becoming a discussion topic even in London. Max was interested and had a new cause. Max wanted to retire and as he hunted the country and reviewed sale particulars for a property that could live up to the way he had used Victoria Square, the idea of self sufficient living was added to his wish to hold musical evenings. Particulars for Addicroft Mill near Liskeard, with four and a half acres of riverside land provoked love at first encounter though the abundance of running water was a considerable part of the appeal, no doubt reminding him of his happy childhood summers spent at Stratford Mill in the Chew Valley. Max moved to Addicroft in 1974 but did not sever his connection with life in London. The mill had an overgrown leat that had once powered the mill. Max had the leat dug out and used the bypass leat to power a new water wheel with generator to provide electricity. The mill machinery was then brought back into use so Max could grind his corn and he learnt to bake bread. A cider crush was also renovated to make juice and cider from the orchard. Beds of water cress, a vegetable patch, ducks and two swans completed the picture. Much of the work had no precedent this century so working with local engineers it was a trial and error process that took many hard muddy man hours to complete to get the mill power harnessed to switchable processors. It gave him great pleasure when he became a net contributor to the National Grid and the electricity board sent him a cheque each year for the value of the contribution. A Middlesbrough Symposium The call to bring Max Lock back to Middlesbrough in 1987 along with other members of the original Max Lock Group team was inspired by a combination of three Community Programme projects under Middlesbrough Council. It began with the interest shown in a project called The Home Front which examined Middlesbrough’s role during the second world war. In addition, projects on housing and community history became involved along with Teesside Polytechnic. A new exhibition of the 1945 Survey and Plan was mounted in the town's Dorman Museum. Max was invited to the town for the formal opening of the exhibition by the Mayor, and a one day conference at the Polytechnic to review the 40 years' progress. The Evening Gazette reported on the 2nd April, 1987: 'Today the man who dared to dream the dream and put his vision of better times on paper, is back in Middlesbrough ¦ more than 40 years on. So what did the Middlesbrough of 1944 look like to the young Max Lock, a man still in his thirties with the challenge of a lifetime ahead of him? Max Lock approached the Middlesbrough situation with incredible foresight. He wanted houses moving out into suburbs. He wanted part of Linthorpe Road pedestrianised. He even saw the need for more light industry to be attracted to the area, as he was unhappy about the amount of dependence on heavy industry.' Mr Tony Noble the Council's incumbent chief planning officer concluded: 'Certain parts of Max Lock''s plan were acted on over the years. He envisaged something like the Cleveland Centre and the complete removal of people from the Cannon Street area and from Newport. But they were not carried out in the systematic manner he hoped for.' The Thread of the Ideas Max always loved ideas and the argument that followed their exchange. He was ready to let his own ideas take life and to lead him into new directions throughout his working life and even into retirement but the ideas he developed brought him little peace or renown which is surprising when so much of his approach became the basis of physical planning in the UK. In the beginning, during the war years, he had a clear view of a brighter future and the route he chose showed great promise . He saw it as lying between the two mutually exclusive islands of the Bauhaus and the Beaux Arts traditions that dominated the three dimensional thinking of the thirties. In his words 'they lacked the chemistry to change to a fourth dimension, from the inorganic to the organic, one that brings to today's techniques and aesthetics a truly biological "symbiosis" between man and his environment be it countryside, village, city or region.' Patrick Geddes was his guide and Max honed the ideas spawned with diligence, craft and persistence so Civic Diagnosis grew into the mature anatomy of physical planning. Those first ten years were truly fulfilling and enjoyable. He loved the team working with its hint of utopia in its single, shared base and subjugated domesticism. There was an all embracing philosophy to develop, use and proselytise. Its extent, its value and its dissemination were tested in an intensely busy practice laboratory that surveyed thousands of urban and rural lives up and down the country. The public clamour for change, the bomb damage to many central areas, the stimulus of the Blitz and Blight Act 1944, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, the 1951 Festival of Britain and the new breed of property developers fuelled the national euphoric fever, the feeling that change was always for the better. It was the easy decade, with assured demand as thousands of acres of bombed and blighted land and the people that lived on it needed guidance. Max had a philosophy and a practical method that was systematically and cooperatively applied. That clarity proved dispiritingly short lived. In the fifties, the Development Plan Period, planning fell behind in the public consciousness, while within government stresses were becoming apparent with Whitehall ministries fighting each other over town planning issues. The 145 large Counties and County Boroughs as the planning authorities were proving rather deaf. The enthroned planning officers had power but little information to act upon, 'Planning' was deleted by Churchill from the title of the Ministry of Planning and Local Government, consultants were frozen out and those ubiquitous developers had found all the legal loopholes in the legislation . Poor follow up to prepared plans, autocratic and partial planning decisions made by the counties, opportunities lost by towns in competition, the timidity of officers when dealing with the central area redevelopment proposals were all symptoms of the spreading malaise, the bureaucratisation of planning, plans imposed 'by remote control'. Planning had lost its youthful figure and was slowing down in the flab of an early middle age. Max was objective 'this period was characterised by delays and often frustration for the individual, aggravated by the growing anonymity vis a vis the public of the newly established official planners.' but, deeply disappointed by the administrative failings, he turned from a proponent to an opponent, a contester of plans, trying to 'retain the imagination of the planned'. He blamed the 1947 Act which 'had quite unintentionally cut in half the fair promise of planning simply because it created an organisation that turned out to work against its own purposes and sought to solve the problem in terms quite other than those of the problem faced.' A gleam of optimism returned much later in 1969 when the Skeffington Report on public participation and accountability did address some of the ideas on participation that Max had advocated, as a fundamental part of the process, since the 1940s, but its recommendations have never been implemented as citizen's rights, as he reflected in retirement. The further development of town planning slowed in this administrative swamp, the break in momentum and dearth of commissions caused him to look abroad for new patronage. He remained deeply convinced of the value of his approach but surprised that what he saw as self evident truths and much needed tools should be ideas still ahead of their time. At Harvard, despite the presence of Lewis Mumford, another Geddes disciple, in the Faculty of Design, he found that there was no appreciation of methodological disciplines by the staff in the Town Planning Department, though the students were keenly interested. The USA had no bomb sites and was firmly running in a little altered prewar groove even in 1957, 'at least bombs dropped on Britain had done far more good for Town and Country Planning in the UK than their absence in the USA', Max concluded. The staff curtailed the lectures which were based on Middlesbrough and for a second occasion, this time in an academic environment, Max had to face the prospect that his ideas were too far in front of his contemporaries to gain the ready acceptance he felt their value deserved. Selling the Ideas - Publicity as a Key to Planning Max had a deep regard for the power of the press and its value to planning, he called the local press 'the Queen on the planning chess board' . One of his first media contacts was made at the start of his career during the Herne Bay study, and one of the last public things he did was to give an interview to the BBC. Herne Bay went into the professional journals but the next scheme, Ocean Street went into the national dailies and he helped the students make a film which was picked up by the newsreels of the day. In 1944 Jill Graigie made a documentary film 'Picture Paper' showing the Group at work in Middlesbrough. Communication with the planned was just as well organised and the Penny Pamphlets on topics brought out during the Middlesbrough plan in 1944, clearly written and illustrated though abbreviated, were without precedent. He called this public participation though by today’s standard it was consultation during the analysis stage followed later by presentation of the conclusions. Still it was to be the 1960’s before his efforts were improved upon. He wrote most of the planning sections in person, perhaps achieving his best style in his last major report on Kaduna. The 1960’s and 70’s saw him writing in the Listener, broadcasting and contributing to the Centre for Advanced Land Use Studies and their conferences. Personally he was a thoughtful and prodigious networker with an excellent memory for faces and the families beyond them. Corporate bodies and pressure groups such as the Guiness Trust and the Housing Centre were cross fertilised with new projects and high flying contemporaries such as Sir Desmond Heap, Sir Frank Layfield, Ruth Glass and Sylvia Crowe were repeatedly used for advice on planning proposals. Max believed that planning education was worth the full attention of the profession if post war demands were to be met effectively. In recollection, Max saw post war failures and delays as symptoms of educational failure to produce enough of the right kind of town planners. In 1943 the profession was taught as a post-graduate subject and of those who passed the Finals 48% were architects, 36% civil engineers, 13% surveyors and 3% others. The secondary status of the discipline within the universities reflected its status in the Town Halls where power over town planning often rested with the Borough Engineer and Surveyor. Town planners were returning servicemenn who had taken a correspondence course while in the services and a three months post demobilisation intensive course in the new discipline. The task needed much more resolution than could be achieved 'by the pleading and praying' of a secondary profession. The new world would need town planners with social, technical, legal and administrative knowledge, thorough and integrated training, able to shoulder a wide responsibility. Max saw the profession needing flexible collators, coordinators, democratically aware practioners working within local government cooperatively with the other environmental disciplines. Support from a planning research centre, modelled on the Building Research Centre, would connect the schools to the local authorities and would publicise planning matters. During his stay at the AA school, his headship at Hull, visting professorships at Harvard and Rio de Janeiro, work with Ahmado Bello University at Zaria and his talks on music and architecture, he was deeply committed to the role of education. He was a life long student too, of music and languages as well as the built environment, so he saw the problem and the benefits of education from both sides making him an excellent mentor for final year dissertations. When there was any problem to be tackled Max turned to young teams and people who knew that but for Max they would have had to wait their 'Buggins Turn' before anyone else would have given them the same chance. The investment was returned with interest and life long friendships of tutor and tutee were often the outcome. Music and the Architect Max abandoned music to study architecture when he was eighteen, then rediscovered it with some passion twenty years later when he started lessons again under Grace McKnight Kauffer. His repertoire was wide including Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven and Prokofiev. In playing and practising he became interested in the harmony of music with architecture and developed ideas drawn from his travels into a lecture that he took round the world as well as round the architectural schools, including Harvard, more or less continuously since its inauguration in 1957, when it was reviewed by the Architect's Journal, May 9th. The theme was the common idea of harmony, rhythm, discord, movement in music and in design. Max accompanied slides with the visual references drawn from diverse sources such as snow crystals, mollusc shells, Edward II's tomb, Italian pallazzos, and the Shah Abbas Bridge, Isfahan. The comparisons were direct and steered clear of the Von Schelling pretension that architecture is frozen music, in fact Max was careful to disclaim 'I cannot sit down and play you the Coliseum or the Dome of St, Pauls or the Eiffel Tower'. The lecture was the public tip of the private iceberg which took many hours of practice daily and even included taking a dumb piano and sheet music to the southern edge of the Sahara to maintain the suppleness of his hands. His London house in Victoria Square, reviewed by the press when put up for sale, was opened up from front to back to create a music room for recitals to invited audiences. This developed to include concert standard pianists and violinists on a regular quarterly basis when Max was in England. When he retired, he chose another property with the same potential and used the same contacts to bring musical evenings to Cornwall. Here the galleries, a balcony, sliding walls, polished stone floors and a concert grand specially imported from Austria all contributed so gatherings of more than a hundred people could take over the entire house, with the orchard used for car parking.
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