Bedford, Part II from 1945: Postwar Planning and Innovative Development

We left Bedford last week in the midst of war but, like many towns in the country, thinking ahead. Planning for a better Britain to emerge from the destruction and sacrifice of war was a motif of the time and in this Bedford’s civic leaders were typical. In the event, the grander aspirations of the era were rarely fulfilled but they left a significant mark in the town as did a broader post-war revolution in housing provision In December 1942, the more energetic ambitions of Alderman SB Morling, the new chair of the Council’s Town Planning Committee were initially quashed, but a wider mood supporting progressive change was evoked in the eight lectures in the town organised by the University of Cambridge Board of Extra-Mural Studies in the following year. The celebrated housing expert, Elizabeth Denby, spoke on ‘Housing in Relation to Post-War Planning’. In the same year, the voluntary Bedford Council of Social Service initiated a survey of the town. Max Lock, the principal of the Hull…