This is the second in a series of blogs on APRS history and this one is about Frank Mears, one of the founders of APRS. Here Graeme Purves, a planner and environmentalist, who wrote his PhD on the work of Frank Mears explores his legacy, both in terms of APRS, and in his wider work across rural and planning issues.
APRS traces its origins to a letter the architect-planner Frank Mears wrote in his capacity as President of the Edinburgh Architectural Association which was published in The Scotsman in December 1926. In it, he called for the establishment in Scotland of an organisation with similar objectives to those of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), which had held its first meeting earlier in the year.
Mears argued that ‘watchful care’ was required to ensure that the statutory obligation on urban authorities to prepare plans for future development did not have adverse consequences for the countryside. Suburban sprawl and ribbon development were concerns at the time. Mears cited the ‘mixture of industrialism and suburbanism’ appearing on the fringes of Edinburgh and ‘wretchedly designed and built bungalows and motor stations’ springing up along arterial roads as examples of bad planning.
Mears was born in 1880. His architectural training in Edinburgh at the turn of the 19th Century had a strong Medieval emphasis and as an apprentice he worked on important ecclesiastical projects, such as the Coates Memorial Church in Paisley. In around 1908, he became involved with the circle of artists, intellectuals and civic activists associated with Patrick Geddes, and it was this that stimulated his interest in planning.
As a young architect, Mears worked as Patrick Geddes’ assistant at the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh and was involved in several of Geddes’ overseas projects. As a result of this involvement, he gained early experience in applying what today would be described as ecological restoration techniques” to problems of rural regeneration. In Palestine during the 1920s he promoted reforestation schemes as a means of restoring the water table so that long-abandoned cultivation terraces could be brought back into agricultural production.
In his subsequent career in Scotland, Mears was the planner who most faithfully attempted to translate Geddes’ ideas on cultural evolution and regional development into practice. He had a strong commitment to the revitalisation of Scotland’s rural areas which he regarded as the source of all that was distinctive and valuable in Scottish culture. In lectures delivered before the First World War, he had presented Geddes’ vision of the coming “neotechnic” age in which electricity and modern communications would liberate industry from the old locational constraints, enabling its benefits to be distributed more evenly between town and country and encouraging a revival of skilled craftsmanship. He had argued that the early Norwegian hydro-electric schemes offered new hope for the Highlands and suggested that the experiments in co-operative agricultural production then being pioneered in Denmark and Ireland pointed the way forward for Scottish rural communities.
At the inaugural meeting of the Council for the Preservation of Rural Scotland, held at the Incorporation of Architects in Scotland at 15 Rutland Square, Edinburgh, in the Spring of 1927, Mears outlined the objectives of the CPRE and stated that it was intended that the Scottish Council should operate on similar lines and in the closest co-operation with its sister body south of the Border. Afterwards he was elected to an interim committee charged with responsibility for working out a constitution for the new organisation and preparing for its first public meeting later in the year. That meeting, held in July 1927, marked the formal foundation of what was subsequently to be known as the Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland. Mears was elected as the Association’s first Honorary Secretary and played a central part in its activities for the rest of his career.
Mears was critical of the insensitivity of the Ministry of Transport’s proposal to drive a modern trunk road through Glencoe and, in response to representations by the APRS, the Ministry agreed to face its engineering works in Glencoe in local stone and to respect the local landform in its designs for road improvements throughout the Highlands. In 1930, Mears and Charles Denny Carus-Wilson were appointed consultant architects for five new road bridges on the A82: over the River Kiachnish (1932) between North Ballachulish and Fort William; and over the River Oich and at Invergarry (1932), at Invermoriston (1933) and at Fort Augustus (1935) in the Great Glen.
In his consultancy work for Scottish local authorities, Mears stressed the importance of providing modern services and infrastructure in rural areas and in East Lothian and the Borders he applied community planning principles to the development of strategies for rural resettlement. He was also concerned about the quality of new development in the countryside and, in 1932, he and Leslie Grahame-Thomson prepared standard designs for low-cost rural houses on behalf of the APRS. These were taken up by several county councils. 71 cottages to the APRS designs were built in Roxburghshire. Mears also prepared plans and designs for housing schemes along similar lines in Peebles.
Like Geddes, Mears saw the problems of urban and rural areas as complementary and believed that satisfactory solutions could only be achieved by planning on a regional scale. In seeking to advance the cause of planning in the Twenties and early Thirties, he took every opportunity to promote the Geddesian concept of regional survey. He maintained a cultural emphasis in his approach to regional planning, seeing the modern Region as the product of continuous interaction between the human species and its environment; each of its communities adapted to its particular geographical setting and responding to changing circumstances by a process of cultural evolution.
Mears frequently emphasised the geographical and cultural heterogeneity of Scotland and argued that the diverse cultural traditions which had contributed to its development were still potent forces in the life of the modern nation and should be respected in planning for the future. He therefore rejected standardised solutions to contemporary problems, believing that planning proposals should be individually tailored to local conditions, with due regard to existing customs and systems of social organisation.
The growth of Scottish national consciousness during the interwar years was reflected in the emergence of a specifically Scottish dimension to planning and, as Scotland’s leading planning advocate and practitioner, Mears made a seminal contribution to this development. The principal problem facing Scotland was the increasing centralisation of economic activity within the British State. While the Midlands and South of England wrestled with the problems of urban expansion, Scotland was confronted with an altogether bleaker picture of industrial stagnation, rural depopulation and chronic bad housing. Mears believed that Scottish circumstances demanded a planning system capable of initiating as well as controlling development. Throughout his consultancy work he sought to devise development strategies which built upon indigenous physical and human resources and traditional Scottish settlement patterns.
Under the autonomous administration established by the wartime Secretary of State, Tom Johnston, Mears was given the opportunity to apply his ideas about regional planning across a broad canvas. His Central and South-East Scotland Plan identified rural depopulation as a key problem facing both the region and Scotland as a whole. One of its most original features was the application of community planning principles in a rural context to provide a strategy for the resettlement of depopulated Border valleys. The Plan also contained proposals for the reforestation and recolonisation of the Slamannan plateau, laying the foundations for what was to become the Central Scotland Forest.
Towards the end of his career, Mears addressed the problem of rural depopulation in its most acute form in a strategy for the revitalisation of the County of Sutherland. Against the prevailing wisdom of the time, he rejected the notion that the problem of rural decline could be solved “by a simple process of decanting a given proportion of large-scale industries into partially depopulated areas”. Instead, in a plan strongly influenced by Fraser Darling’s Preliminary Report on the West Highland Survey, he advocated a strategy based on the regeneration of the crofting economy through measures such as land rehabilitation, tenure reform, investment in agriculture, forestry and fishing, and the encouragement of small rural industries based on indigenous resources.
With the election in 1945 of a Labour Government committed to centralised economic and social management and Tom Johnston’s departure from the Scottish Office, the initiative in matters of planning and reconstruction passed from the Scottish Office to Whitehall. In this climate, those aspects of Mears’ philosophy which were at variance with British planning orthodoxy were largely disregarded, though his influence can be detected in Frank Tindall’s work on rural development, river catchment management and woodland conservation for the County of East Lothian. Today, Mears’ views on land rehabilitation, community empowerment and the importance of the cultural dimension in regional planning can be seen to have abiding relevance.