ABSTRACT
Town and Country Planning formed a part of the 'welfare' offer made during a period of grave national crises in the early 1940s. Necessarily it held out the morale-boosting vision of better things to come after the war - better housing, schools and factories, more open space, an end to the slums, and so on. But the war was, in the end, as much about the defence of British capitalism as anything else and it would be unrealistic to expect that any fundamental changes would have resulted from it (although as Chapter 2 shows, observers as acute as Nicolson and Macmillan expected changes of this magnitude).
