ABSTRACT
It was not that planning was innocent of academic influence before the 1950s. On the contrary: in virtually every urbanized nation, universities and polytechnics had created courses for the professional education of planners; professional bodies had come into existence
to define and protect standards, and had forged links with the academic departments. Britain took an early lead when in 1909 . . . the soap magnate William Hesketh Lever, founder of Port Sunlight, won a libel action against a newspaper and used the proceeds to endow his local University of Liverpool with a Department of Civic Design. Stanley Adshead, the first professor, almost immediately created a new journal, the Town Planning Review, in which theory and good practice were to be firmly joined; its first editor was a young faculty recruit, Patrick Abercrombie, who was later to succeed Adshead in the chair first at Liverpool, then at Britain’s second school of planning: University College London, founded in 1914. The Town Planning Institute – the Royal accolade was conferred only in 1959 – was founded in 1914 on the joint initiative of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors; by the end of the 1930s, it had recognized seven schools whose examinations provided an entry to membership.
