THOMAS ADAMS
(1871-1940)
from Carlops to the
Garden Cities of tomorrow
Exhibition in Jackson Street School,
Penicuik by Penicuik Community Development Trust on 31 March 2007
“America’s best-known Scotchman -the
most distinguished city-planner of our time” –New York Survey Graphic 1929
Founded the Town Planning Institute 1914
–now the Royal Town Planning Institute
Founded the American City Planning Institute 1917 –now the American Institute of Planners
Founded the Town Planning Institute of Canada 1919 –now the Canadian Institute of Planners
Guiding
influence in the creation of the
Institute of Landscape
Architects 1931
“I do not think
that the effect of good environment, of fine buildings, of pleasant homes, upon
the character, temperament, will, disposition, and energy of the people
sufficiently dawns upon the average citizen.”
Farmer and Parish Councillor Carlops 1895
Election agent for successful Parliamentary candidate Midlothian 1900
Secretary of the Garden Cities Association, Westminster 1901
Manager of Letchworth, the first Garden City, 1904
First Town Planning Adviser to the British Government 1909
First Town Planning Adviser to the Dominion of Canada Government 1914
Chief Planner for the New York Metropolitan Regional Plan 1923-29
Adviser to President Hoover on Home Building and Home Ownership, 1932
His Outline of Town & City Planning introduced by President
Roosevelt, 1935
President of the Institute of Landscape Architects 1937
Thomas Adams was born at Meadow House, Corstorphine, on the outskirts of Edinburgh to Irish-born James Adams a
dairyman, and his Scots wife Margaret Johnston, a gardener’s daughter. The family had spent some years in Corstorphine village when the father died, and young Thomas
took on the dairy with his mother at Wester Coates,
beside Donaldson’s Hospital.
Donaldson’s Hospital in open fields Sir Archibald Campbell of Succoth
(1852-1932) owner of the
Murrayfield Estate.
An evangelist and
philanthropist, he later gave part of his Glasgow Garscube Estate
for a
garden suburb at Westerton
and much of the rest as open space to the people of Glasgow.
The
land at Wester Coates and Murrayfield
was starting to be laid out for development, with Edinburgh coal merchant James McKelvie
promoting low-cost housing to the south, and the Caledonian Railway opening its
new line through Roseburn to Granton
and Leith. In 1884, as Tommy Adams entered his teens, this area
hosted the International Exhibition of Forestry and Wood Craft drawing visitors
to his neighbourhood from all over the world.
Caledonian Railway trains linked Edinburgh with the transatlantic ships Sir James King
(1830-1910)
The Caledonian
Railway gave easy access to the Exhibition here at its new Murrayfield
halt (its chairman James King also led the Clydesdale Bank, and as Lord
Provost, was to preside over Glasgow’s International Exhibition of 1888) The
ornate railway bridge still stands today, and under it ran horse drawn trams
past Donaldson’s Hospital to their terminus at Roseburn. Edinburgh investors were soon to install cable streetcars as
designed by Andrew Smith Hallidie
in San Francisco. But the talk of the International Exhibition at Wester Coates –opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales-
was the electric rail carriage shown by Henry Binko,
Austrian-born London chemical manufacturer.
Prime Minister
Gladstone tries Henry Binko’s electric tram at the
1884 International Exhibition Wood
craft on show
Just
over the horizon from Roseburn the engineering wonder
of the world, the Forth Bridge,
was taking shape with 1200 men at work in 1884. Like many of the International Exhibition’s
visitors, the Prince and Princess of Wales
took time to observe progress. A different sort of progress was soon to be
charted in the heart of old Edinburgh.
Anna Morton, her husband Patrick Geddes and family
moved into the old town to begin their work of regenerating and celebrating the
Royal Mile which gave the city Riddles Court, Lady Stairs Close, the Outlook
Tower and Ramsay Garden, and became world famous.
1884’s biggest engineering project the Forth Bridge takes shape Anna & Patrick Geddes
restoring faith in the Old Town
Geddes took an interest in a
low cost housing project being developed at Roseburn.
Edinburgh
was already well known for its low cost housing with several Colonies projects
supported by architect and builder, James Gowans. Groups visited the city from other parts of Britain
to see how things were being done. Tommy Adams was also keen on these issues.
Aged 20, he went to London
for the first annual convention of the British Amateur Press Association in
1892 and was chosen its first President.
The
next year, Tommy Adams became a farmer at Carlops
near Penicuik, taking up tenancy in 1893 on the Pentland
slopes at Fairslacks by Windy Gowl
on the far side of the village, just up the hill from Rutherford Castle and the
Well of Heavenly Aqua. He took a very active interest in new local government
arrangements, becoming a rural councillor there in 1894 and leading a campaign
to remove squatters’ huts from the green.
This
made him well placed to support the young Liberal hopeful Alexander Murray,
Master of Elibank (1870–1920) in his two unsuccessful
Parliamentary attempts at Edinburgh West in May 1895, and Peebles and Selkirk
in July 1895. Asquith commended these
efforts of Elibank’s team.
Shy,
hardworking, but with a twinkle in his eye, Tommy Adams married Corstorphine girl Caroline Bertha Weierter
at the end of 1897. Her father was
Frederick Weierter a Prussian-born bandmaster and
teacher of trombone and organ –some of the family later scottified
their name to Whirter. In 1898, Adams
started his own publication: The Progressive Youth of Great
Britain: An Amateur
Monthly Journal for Young Authors.
In
1900 Elibank, with Tommy Adams as his agent, took Midlothian
for the Liberals and their Labour allies.
Though they won the seat, their party was unpopular in the Boer war and
lost the general election. An ally of
party leader Campbell-Bannerman and of the young Winston Churchill, Elibank rose fast in liberal and court circles to become
one of the most senior wheeler-dealers of his party, later tarnished in the
Marconi share scandal of 1912.
The
Master of Elibank in later life.
When he first took the Midlothian
seat In 1900, Campbell-Bannerman called him
“that very thing most
difficult to find: an unexceptionable and attractive local candidate”
Elibank went to Westminster,
and Thomas Adams and his young family followed his patron south. Adams
got a new job as organiser of the Garden Cities Association, a pressure group
campaigning for a new approach to congested city slums. Under the visionary
Ebenezer Howard, and supported by Fabians, liberals and conservatives alike,
the Association grew from strength to strength with hard work from Adams, and
he became the director of the Association’s first Garden City development at
Letchworth north of London.
Ebenezer Howard, inventor and parliamentary
reporter, with two of the diagrams he used to publicise his garden city ideas
Adams’
brother in law Louis Weirter’s cartoon in the
Letchworth Citizen
The Cheap Cottages
Exhibition which Thomas Adams organised at Letchworth in 1905
An untiring publicist for the Garden City
movement, Adams left Letchworth for Wolverhampton
in 1906, and for the next three years travelled around Britain as a consultant to a variety of garden suburb
proposals, including plans for Knebworth with
architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and a projected scheme
for 8,400 houses at Alkrington north of Manchester.
Adams trademark in these schemes was respect for the
local landscape, and he worked closely with Thomas Mawson
who with Patrick Geddes had competed in the winning
proposals to lay out Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline for the Carnegie Trust.
Together in
government: John Burns at the Local Government Board and Winston Churchill at
the Board of Trade
John Burns was the first trade union leader to
become a government minister in 1906.
Burns introduced the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 during his
time in government, and Thomas Adams briefed all parties on its drafting. To advise councils when the new Act became
law, Adams was brought in to
be the Board’s Principal Planning Inspector.
He qualified as a surveyor in 1913, and with other surveyors and
architects set up the Town Planning Institute for the new profession in 1914.
Caroline’s
brother Fred wrote patriotic songs in Australia Charles
Compton Reade (1880-1933), born in New Zealand. Like Adams,
Reade
came to town planning through journalism. In London, Reade took up Adams’ old
position as advocate of garden cities
.
Later as a
government planner in South Australia, Reade designed Adelaide’s showcase
garden suburb, Colonel Light Gardens
Adams
was called to Canada in the summer of 1914 to advise its Government Commission
on guiding the country’s massive development.
Canada
in 1914 was a hothouse of big ideas in architecture, planning and industrial
relations. At Prince
Rupert, the late Charles Melville Hays (drowned in
the Titanic) had been looking to architect Francis Rattenbury
to create a new Pacific seaboard city to complete his spectacular
transcontinental Grand Trunk rail line. In Montreal
the Olmsted-trained landscape architect Frederick Gage Todd was engaged in
planning a new garden city of Mount Royal
for Mackenzie and Mann’s rival transcontinental Canadian Northern Railway. In Calgary,
Adams’ erstwhile
landscape colleague Thomas Mawson was making plans
for the city beautiful; Mawson had also set up a Vancouver
office with his son in charge there. Canadian architect Colbourne
Meredith and railroad engineer Noulan Couchon were immersing themselves in ideas of city
planning.
Charles M Hays
(1856-1912), Frances M Rattenbury (1867-1935), Frederick G Todd
(1876-1948), Thomas H Mawson (1861-1933)
Thomas Mawson’s
plans for Calgary
Frederick Todd’s Mount Royal and its
railway tunnel to Montreal (plan with section below)
¯
Adams
was employed by Canada’s
Commission of Conservation. As Jeanne Wolfe explains,
the Commission was “established by Clifford Sifton,
then Minister of the Interior, in 1909, it was originally intended to examine
the squandering of the Dominion's natural resources. It was rapidly realized
that the urban question was an integral part of the problem as water resources,
the demands for hydro-electricity, minerals and lumber, not to mention
agricultural difficulties, erosion and the destruction of wilderness areas and
of human life, were all held up to scrutiny. Anticipating the Brundtland Report by over seventy years, the commission
proclaimed that ‘each generation is entitled to the interest on the natural
capital, but the principal should be handed on unimpaired.’ It was the
commission's medical officer, Dr. Charles Hodgetts,
who had been largely responsible for shaping Canadian planning before 1914. A
former public health officer and a fierce critic of the ‘army of land
speculators and jerry builders,’ which he believed were ruining the cities, Hodgetts lobbied for the appointment of a planning expert.
He was not disappointed. In 1914 the commission retained the services of Thomas
Adams as town planning consultant to the federal
government. By
early 1915, Adams
had visited all the provinces except Prince
Edward Island. "The
keynote of town planning," he said, is "the conservation of life and
economy in the system of developing land [so as] to secure efficiency,
convenience, health and amenity."
He lobbied for and wrote planning legislation for many of the provinces,
founded the commission's journal Town Planning and the
Conservation of Life, advised many municipalities on planning problems,
often through the local Civic Improvement League, and designed several
projects....”
Based
in Ottawa,
Thomas Adams was soon involved in war-related work. His brother-in-law Louis Weirter was a balloonist-observer and war artist. His son
James Whirter Adams also joined up as an airborne
observer in France.
Battle of Courcellette
15 September 1916 painted by Caroline Adams’ brother, the artist-observer Louis
Weirter. He was
almost the only witness to the controversial exploit of Canada’s air ace Billy Bishop on 2 June 1917
Canada’s War: The Flag by Byam
Shaw. From Canada, Adams’ son James Weierter Adams
was appointed Probationary Observer Officer in the Royal Naval Air Service in
April 1917, later flying on night bombing raids with Red Mulock's
No.27 Group (No.216 Squadron) in northern France.
Adams
himself helped to plan the reconstruction of Canada’s
Atlantic port of Halifax after a
munitions explosion in
the harbour devastated the city and killed over 1000 inhabitants.
Like Reade in Adelaide, Adams sought to
depart from the old grid street pattern to relate much more directly to
landscape, greenspaces and patterns of activity. As a
private practitioner he planned the Richmond district of Halifax and prepared
plans for new communities at Temiskaming in western
Quebec and outside Canada, at Corner Brook in Newfoundland.
In 1917 Adams
travelled south to help found the American City Planning Institute. After the war, he advised the Canadian
cabinet on low-cost housing and founded the Town Planning Institute of Canada,
moving in 1923 to the United
States to lead the team drawing
up the New York Regional Plan. His skill was in getting different politicians,
experts and community groups to work together and get things done.
“A man to do things and to do them well!” –Charles Dyer Norton
With Frederic Law Olmsted Jnr beside him (left), Adams chairs the New York
Advisory Group of Planners, 1923
Adams sailed the Atlantic
regularly to spread his ideas –but spent more time in America
where he was better known. He appreciated working with Frederic Law Olmsted Jnr., son of the innovative designer of New
York’s Central Park and of so
many classic American parkway landscapes, and with State Governor Franklin D.
Roosevelt (a Democrat) and Federal Commerce Secretary Herbert C. Hoover (a
Republican). Adams and his team
published the Regional Plan for New York
in 1929.
A far cry from Carlops
–the first regional plan for New
York 1929
After
the New York Regional Plan was completed in 1929, Adams
moved to Harvard
University
to carry out research and write planning textbooks. He argued for the green spaces between towns
with clear arteries of landscaped parkways and railways between them, and in
towns for linked parks to be the heart of a foot-friendly circulation
system. Looking to solve the design of
efficient layouts and the economics of land development, he promoted the loop
and cul-de-sac Radburn design of layout which Stein
and Wright had developed in New Jersey in 1929, preferring it to hexagon forms
developed by Couchon in Canada and Parker in England.
In Radburn, “The
Town for the Motor Age”, houses faced a network of footpaths and parks, with
road access to the rear
By
the early 1930s, Tommy Adams had such prominent standing as an expert in town
planning and subdivision development in North America
that many of his writings were adopted as best practice by government and
professionals. He advised President
Hoover’s Conference on Home
Building
and Home Ownership, 1932, the largest federal conference held till that time.
And President Roosevelt, coming in with the New Deal, was an old friend of the quiet businesslike Scot
from his days as New York State Governor.
It was President Roosevelt who wrote the foreword to Adams’
Outline of Town and City Planning in 1935.
President
Hoover and President Roosevelt : taking America from
Depression to the New Deal
Back
in Britain, Adams advised briefly on the planning of London, Edinburgh and
Dundee. He presided over the Institute
of Landscape Architects and helped to guide King George VI’s
Coronation Planting Committee, writing a little book on Playparks
with suggestions for their Design, Equipment and Planting. After his death in 1940 his two sons become
major figures in British and American town planning. The elder, James Whirter Renwick Adams led the
planning service for the English county council of Kent; his brother Frederick
J. Adams taught planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the same year-1948- the Town Planning
Institute elected James as its president and the American Institute of Planners
elected Frederick as its president.
Michael
Simpson: “Thomas Adams and the Modern Planning Movement: Britain, Canada and
the United States 1900-1940” was published in London and New York by Mansell Publishing Company, 1985.
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