Thomas Sharp
Thomas Sharp (1901-1978) was a central figure in town planning in the mid-twentieth century.
The concepts he developed in his writings and plans have been of enduring significance and influence on thinking about planning and design for both practitioners and academics. He was a key figure in defining thinking about the forms that town and countryside should take; in reconciling existing and valued character with modernity, and; in making these arguments accessible through a series of polemical books.
Thomas Sharp was born near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, on the coalfield of south west Durham, to a family that mostly worked in the pits. Somewhat accidentally he drifted into the new planning profession after initially being apprenticed as surveyor. His first book, Town and Countryside, was both well-reviewed and controversial, in its assault on prevailing garden city principles. Further books followed during the 1930s including a treatise against the appalling conditions found in his native part of Durham, A Derelict Area, a series of articles for the Architectural Review on the historical development of the English Town, which became the book English Panorama and the Shell Guide to Durham and Northumberland.
In 1937 he started teaching town planning at the School of Architecture, King's College, Newcastle. The next ten years would see him rise to the summit of the profession and established as an important writer of plans. His next book, Town Planning, a Pelican paperback published in 1940, is frequently cited as the best-ever selling text on the subject. In 1941 he was seconded to the Ministry of Works and Buildings, where his work included acting as Secretary to the Scott Report on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, undertaking work for a publication on villages, later to emerge as Anatomy of the Village, and as Chairman of a technical group that produced an appendix to the Dudley Report on the Design of Dwellings entitled Site Planning and Layout in Relation to Housing. Sharp returned to academia in 1943. On his return he devised a degree in town planning, which became the first undergraduate degree in planning in the world, which we still teach today. In 1945 he tendered his resignation to strike out as a planning consultant.
His first commission as a consultant was a plan for Durham, Cathedral City, and is the first of a series of 'reconstruction plans', a number of which emerged as beautifully-produced books from the Architectural Press. The triumvirate of his most significant plans, for Durham, Oxford and Exeter, were hugely influential and were a major contribution to the development of ideas of townscape. Other commissions for plans in this period included Todmorden, Salisbury, Chichester, St. Andrews, King's Lynn, Taunton, Stockport, Minehead and neighbourhood layouts for parts of Kensington and the new town of Hemel Hempstead. He was also appointed to prepare the first masterplan for the new town of Crawley and to undertake designs for a series of new forestry villages in remote Northumberland. Later writings of significance include Oxford Observed, widely acknowledged as a classic, and his last major book, Town and Townscape.
He was President of the Town Planning Institute 1945-1946 and President of the Landscape Institute in 1949-50. He was awarded a D. Litt by the University in 1948 and a CBE in 1951.