A warning may be necessary for Welsh, Irish and Scottish readers. The author, Benno Engels, is under the impression that there was an English parliament in the nineteenth century. There was, of course, a parliament in England but it included, and possibly even benefited from, the presence of elected representatives from other parts of the United Kingdom. Consequently, the context of The Poverty of Planning is weakened by Engels’ inappropriate use of the term ‘English Parliament’.

Benno Engels’ stated objective is ‘to establish why central state-sanctioned urban planning had not become a hallmark of nineteenth-century England’ (p. 399). He states: ‘the legislation that would be sanctioned by the English Parliament was made permissive for English local government authorities who had been left with the responsibility of deciding whether to undertake town improvements’ (p. 399). To overlook the fine studies of Dublin or Glasgow, and the excellent works on Liverpool, Leeds and many boroughs in the English urban hierarchy, is to presume their councils were toothless or disinterested or incompetent in the fields of urban management. This was far from the case. For reasons of necessity, many municipal authorities were ahead of the national debate. Councillors and council officers sought and planned improvements in urban management by framing and promoting a great many local acts which the British parliament passed. The statistical revelations of urban mortality rates coupled with middle-class concerns about the indiscriminate impact of epidemic disease on family fortunes were sufficient motivation for local councillors to approve local plans to improve – and fund – environmental health. Friedrich Engels, amongst others, identified such issues in Manchester in 1842. Elsewhere, English boroughs responded because, politically, it was imperative to raise revenue through property taxes to manage urban development, public order and insanitary cities locally. That political will was lacking at the level of the national British government both because an urban consensus was impossible to achieve, and because framing effective and enforceable controls of a general nature was legislatively problematic given the strong county-based representation in parliament.

Engels (B.) provides 15 pages of end notes to a chapter on social theory exploring a ‘neo-Marxist approach’ to urban planning in Victorian England. Based on social class and property relations with themes linked to inter- and intra-class conflict, this will not be unfamiliar territory to readers of Urban History. Similarly, chapters on local government improvements before 1835, and on middle-class activism thereafter, set up a neo-Marxist chapter on working-class agitation which draws heavily on publications by Kirk, Gray and Joyce, amongst others. Engels then argues that a late nineteenth-century transition from industrial to monopoly capitalism marked the rise of working-class activism which, he claims, triggered ‘a series of endogenous developments that helped loosen the stranglehold that property owners had been able to exert for so long over the political decision-making apparatus’ (p. 317). However, as business historians have pointed out, in responding to technological changes it was capital rather than labour that altered the scale of industrial production through mergers and monopolies from the 1880s and which in turn gradually altered the composition of the political elite, locally and nationally.

Planning involves regulations, by-laws, funding and a conceptual framework for urban management and development. It involves not just houses, but amenities for homes. Sanitation, schools, parks and galleries, markets, property valuation and by the late nineteenth century public utilities and public health, all of which and more formed part of the civic mission. Only at the local level was framing such provisions feasible since faith, social composition, vested interests and political will each varied significantly from place to place. As a result, beyond a general regulatory framework and often codified long after individual towns and cities had developed their own amenities, the British parliament was often limited to defining minimum standards. The British parliament considered, revised, standardized and sometimes improved the detailed proposals already enshrined in local statutes and prepared by knowledgeable municipal council officials and their skilled parliamentary draughtsmen. The town clerks knew their job. It was they who took control of urban planning – and much more besides.