ABSTRACT
It cannot be said of Holford that his views or his performance as a planner were representative of the state which British town planning had reached in the 1950s. It will by now be apparent that his conception of planning, even by the standards of a profession and a social movement that prided itself on the comprehensiveness of its outlook, was unusually wide. Predisposed to look for connections rather than distinctions between different kinds and levels of planning activity, he might with justice be said to constitute in the post-war years the fullest embodiment of the ideal of the omnicompetent, comprehensive planner. He had dealt with the distribution of population and industry at a national level, with urban redevelopment in terms of the design of individual buildings, and with all scales of planning problems in between. Only Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin before him had attempted so much and risen so high in the process. These distinguished predecessors, however, as prominent members of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, had been closely identified with a definite social and aesthetic programme, and had to a certain extent moulded that programme in their own image. Holford was not so identified: his intellectual approach to planning was informed by a generalized belief in the interconnectedness of things, and though it was capable of being expressed in terms of the motives or procedures of planning, this belief could not be reduced to normative statements about the kinds of environment towards which planning might work.
