ABSTRACT

The report of the Barlow Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population (1940) has since been described as the 'essential basis of the post-war British planning system'. The Commission was set up in 1937. Its analysis of social and economic process and the progress of planning legislation and of 'experiments in decentralization and dispersal' remains impressive, even if its conclusions were, in the event, rather 'muted'. The Barlow Commission weighed the dispersal-oriented medical evidence against both the problems of dispersal and the alternative solution of inner-city redevelopment. Within their overall evaluation of urban growth and urban policy, the Barlow Commission's recommendations about garden-city development must be seen as crucial in the legitimation of these policies. By the outbreak of the Second World War it had become increasingly accepted that satisfactory standards of life could only be obtained by major intervention on the part of central and local government.