12 - Planning for the Central Belt

Summary

The planning of urban development has been a theme running throughout this study but whereas previous attempts were related to the ideals of landowners and industrialists, there was a consensus emerging in the late nineteenth century that the cities and city regions of the time required not just efficient administration but also imaginative spatial organisation. It would be wrong to suppose that local authorities had previously lacked powers to control development: for centuries the Dean of Guild Court (an institution that existed right up until 1975) had the power of veto over building operations and could therefore establish codes of building practice to ensure reasonable precautions over fire hazards and smoke pollution. An overall view could be taken of town development and pressure exerted to maintain amenity and ensure the development of waste land. Some notable conservational decisions were taken such as the prevention of quarrying at Edinburgh's Salisbury Crags, immortalised in Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian. Before purchase of land for city parks become common, efforts were made to ensure that open spaces such as Perth Inch and Glasgow Green were not absorbed by residential or industrial development. However ‘the available building and town planning powers which were widespread in the early modern period were gradually eroded in practice by the growth of municipal corporations who in their efforts to assert their own authority over burghal affairs, coincidentally dealt a death blow to precisely that agency which, in the rapidly industrialising environment of the early nineteenth century, had most to offer in terms of controlled urban development’.