Amazing year, 1956. The City of Vancouver brought in its Zoning and Development Bylaw that, among many other things, rezoned the West End for highrises. The Americans passed the Interstate Highway act. Dame Edna appeared for the first time on a revue stage in Melbourne.
Yes, an amazing year. And in Britain, the new town movement was in full post-war swing. For instance, there’s Harlow, a new town in Essex, conceived in 1947 and built out in the ’50s, with the first pedestrian precinct in Britain.
Here’s how its shopping street looked in 1956:
What jumps out? The absence of cars, of course. But look at the bicycles: propped up against the curbs, apparently without locks.
According to Stephen Bayley, who writes in the Guardian:
New towns were the architectural expression of the PWLC (postwar liberal consensus); the solid equivalent of the NHS expressed in terms Vitruvius might have understood (if not always designed with the taste and style he might have employed).
“By 1970,” he writes, “the original new towns movement was over. It was flawed, it largely failed, but it was a noble experiment.”
Interestingly, Harlow “has one of the most extensive cycle track networks in the country, connecting all areas of the town to the town centre and industrial areas.”
Not bad for a ‘failed’ experiment. Maybe it’s time we tried one ourselves.
There are no trees in that picture.
BTW, was there much opposition to the West End being rezoned for highrises in 1956? i.e. to the same extent that you would see NIMBY opposition to say, rezoning the Broadway & Commercial transit hub for highrises?
Not only bicycles were left unlocked at the curb back in 1950’s UK, so were children. Mothers simply left their prams outside on the high street footpath while they shopped. According to my mother-in-law, no one gave it a second thought. This was also common practice in the wilds of Prince George into the early 60’s according to my mother. That this astounds us now is another one of those anecdotal indicators (along with the proliferation of iron bars on shop windows) that notwithstanding statistically declining crime rates over the past 20 years, people feel more insecure in urban places.
a couple points, the first about the bikes. I suspect, looking at the number that have full chain-cases, that these bikes were equipped (as their modern counterparts are) with built-in locks that don’t actually show up in the picture. These locks were built-in, mounted to the seat-stays, and locked the rear wheel. Another period, built-in, lock was mounted either in the forks or at the bottom of the head-tube and when ‘locked’ prevented the bicycle from being ridden. Just try to ride a bike with the forks ‘locked’ for any reason – it’s a short ride.
In addition, read any period journal and you’ll find a reasonable array of additional, after-market, add-on locks. People have always stolen bicycles. 1899 catalogs show locks as a favourite accessory.
On public safety. Let your kids out of your sight. Relax. I suspect there are no more dangers, per 100,000 population now than there ever was. But we do have an entire industry that markets fear. Actually, depending on how you count them, several industries: broadly speaking the police and ‘security’ businesses, journalism in any of a dozen guises, insurance companies, purveyors of ‘victim’ claims of many sorts.
But nice bikes nonetheless.