ABSTRACT
Town planning in 1930s Britain was a ercely contested domain. Although the Town Planning Institute (TPI) was established in January 1914, its ambitions for leadership in town planning and civic design were not necessarily accepted by other professional institutions with overlapping interests that had enjoyed a much earlier start (Cherry 1970). These included the Institution of Civil Engineers (1818), the Royal Institute of British Architects (1834) and the Surveyors’ Institution (1873), each of which continued to campaign for a stake in the business of town planning. Indeed, in the case of architecture, developments within the profession meant that architects’ claims for pre-eminence in the design of cities intensied rather than declined during the quarter-century after the TPI’s foundation (Gold 2007).
