The Times, 5 August 2014
Influential urban planner who shaped London’s Docklands and conceived a transport revolution
The left-leaning town planner Peter Hall and Michael Heseltine, the secretary of state for environment, were unlikely partners as together they surveyed derelict swathes of East London with a vision of their economic transformation at the beginning of the 1980s.
Hall was a slightly scruffy, unconventional figure, who had co-written a book with an anarchist; Heseltine was an impeccably coiffured patrician Conservative minister charged with reinventing Britain’s inner cities after the riots of the early 1980s. The ripples of their seismic decision-making are still being felt in the vast hinterland east of Tower Bridge, where Canary Wharf has grown into a financial powerhouse to rival the City.
Hall’s status as the key government planning adviser of the Thatcher years got off to an inauspicious start. As a member of the South East Economic Planning Council (SEEPC) in the 1970s, he had called for an orbital motorway for London, a new airport at Stansted and an enterprise zone to kickstart development of London’s Docklands. Thatcher abolished the SEEPC in 1979. “As soon as she shut us down she rapidly implemented all three ideas,” said Hall.
As Britain’s most influential postwar planner, Hall was the father of enterprise zones, where property taxes and planning regulations would be relaxed in order to attract investment. He was inspired by the effect of such deregulation in Hong Kong. His big experiment was London Docklands where the concept was wrapped into an urban development corporation with powers to rapidly shape the landscape. There were similar plans for several British cities, although the government backed away amid criticism that the system was anti-democratic.
However, overseas investment came flooding into the Docklands, notably from the Canadian Reichmann brothers whose marque development at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, catalysed the area’s development into a world-class financial centre. Major banks, such as HSBC, moved into the area’s skyscrapers. The Corporation of London became so alarmed that it reversed its own strict planning constraints and started approving office towers within the Square Mile, such as the “Gherkin”, “the Cheesegrater” and the “Walkie-Talkie”.
When Heseltine returned as secretary of state for environment in John Major’s government in November 1990, he again summoned Hall. The pair came up with a vision for an expanded development along London’s Thames Estuary corridor, which became known as Thames Gateway. The plan was given impetus by the building of the High Speed 1 rail link, from St Pancras.
After Labour returned to power in 1997 Hall became a member of the Urban Task Force led by Richard Rogers which aimed at fostering a vibrant “cappuccino culture” in regenerated inner cities, with some success. Hall was an uncomfortable member alongside people he regarded as “town crammers” and felt that John Prescott had been hijacked by an agenda to increase housing density in city centres. He thought the postwar London plan of Lord Abercrombie, of low density housing with vast green spaces, and which he much admired, was under threat. From early in his career, he had advocated catering for the baby boom with New Towns such as Peterborough and Milton Keynes.
Hall championed long-term planning of big transport infrastructure and found a kindred spirit in the Labour transport minister Andrew Adonis. He influenced the government’s decision to go ahead with the Crossrail tunnel from Liverpool Street to Paddington and he was one of the main cheerleaders of a north-south high-speed rail link. He believed the next big development in London will centre around a major transport interchange at Old Oak Common in west London where HS2 will connect with the Great Western Line and other services. His most cherished idea in recent times was a network of garden cities in the southeast to cater for massive population growth.
As an admirer of the garden city movement, it was apt that Peter Geoffrey Hall was born in Hampstead in 1932. His family moved north and he was educated at Blackpool Grammar School and at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, where he studied geography and completed a PhD. Hall later became a professor at Reading University and took the chair of planning at the Bartlett, University College London.
He became one of Britain’s most popular authors on cities. In London 2000 (1963) he predicted congestion charging in London. Walking around cities was his hobby. Books, articles and objects collected from these wanderings filled his home in Ealing, before his wife persuaded him to have a cull. He could often be seen, a wiry figure with a shock of white curly hair, jogging around the London suburb. Hall’s knowledge of London’s transport system was encyclopaedic and colleagues travelling with him were amazed at how he knew exactly the right point to get on and off to save precious minutes.
He was married twice, first to Carla Wartenberg in 1962. He married Magdelena Mroz in 1966. She survives him. There were no children from either marriage.
Hall was a genial man with a wry sense of humour. His lectures were so popular that students would sit on steps and spill out into corridors. He remained sprightly in old age, even after treatment for prostate cancer. Hall recently attended a conference in Liverpool and cut his head after falling on a pavement. After waiting in A&E for two hours he could bear it no longer and returned to deliver his speech with a plaster haphazardly covering his cut.
His vision of an offshore airport in the Thames Estuary to replace Heathrow seemed too big a goal even for him, but Boris Johnson has taken it up enthusiastically and it may yet become a posthumous legacy of Hall’s vision.
Professor Sir Peter Hall, town planner and geographer, was born on March 19, 1932. He died on July 30, 2014, aged 82