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Gordon Stephenson (1908-97) was a planner and urban designer whose career spanned three continents and intersected with some of the major themes, actors and projects from mid-twentieth-century urbanism. He was an influential professor, practitioner and advisor to governments in Britain, Australia and Canada (Stephenson, 1992). Despite the extent of his work, it has received little scholarly attention and there has been little critical assessment of his role in the global development of planning. This special issue of Town Planning Review is part of a larger international study of Stephenson and his role as a global planner. Stephenson was born into a working-class family in Liverpool, one of three sons of a policeman. It was a rough town, a hub for immigrants, many of whose lives were marked by grinding poverty. Stephenson's family lived in Walton, a respectable and fairly new suburb three miles from the centre of Liverpool. Stephenson's later political views may have been seeded by an unsuccessful police strike when he was about eleven or twelve. His father lost his job and, after a period of considerable hardship for the family, went to sea as a master-of-arms (Stephenson, 1991-92, 1-29). At the Liverpool Institute where he was educated, Stephenson showed an early aptitude for drawing and won a scholarship to Liverpool University's School of Architecture in 1925. Charles Herbert Reilly, the Professor of Architecture, left a lasting impression on Stephenson. According to Gordon Cherry and Leith Penny, Reilly was 'the father of modern architectural education in Britain' and it was 'unlikely that any especially able student would be able to survive five years of architectural education there without being marked in some way by this man's influence' (Cherry and Penny, 1986, 10-11). Reilly had a life-long commitment to socialism, wrote for the daily newspapers and had a vast network of contacts. Stephenson received a classical architectural education at Liverpool University, with additional lectures on civic design and planning from Patrick Abercrombie, the Lever Professor of Civic Design and editor of Town Planning Review. Reilly was liberal enough to encourage students to use their imagination and to explore new ideas, so that students were also exposed to the Modern architecture and ideas emerging from Europe (Stephenson, 1991-92, 9-12; Gregory, 2010). In these years the Liverpool school attracted students from all parts of the British Empire. These included William Holford from South Africa, who formed a close friendship with Stephenson. They were to be travelling companions, academic rivals, colleagues and professional partners over the next twenty years (Cherry and Penny, 1986, 17). Stephenson won scholarships in 1927 and 1928, enabling him to travel with Holford for first a month in Paris and then a month in Italy. He felt himself to be 'an innocent abroad' whereas the cultured, sociable and charming Holford was 'the master of every situation'. The gruff-spoken Liverpudlian Stephenson had a more direct and forceful personality and was broad-minded 'with views increasingly tending towards the left' (Cherry and Penny, 1986, 18). Other scholarships provided the pair with their first American experiences in 1929. Stephenson and Holford both won positions in New York. Stephenson had a six-month apprenticeship in Wallace Harrison's New York studio, working on an early design for the Rockefeller Center. In that brief period he learnt the power of big ideas, writing to his brother: 'America has been a real stimulant ... it fills you with big ideas ... narrow minds, small thinking never fired anyone's imagination. You've got to grab hold of a big idea with both hands to see it through' (Stephenson, 1992, 24). In their final year, Holford won Britain's 1930 Rome Prize but Reilly devised a new scholarship from the Chadwick Trust to send Stephenson to Paris for post-graduate training. There, he spent his evenings at the Institut d'Urbanisme and his days as an assistant in Le Corbusier's office ('Saint Corbusier' as Stephenson called him in a letter home to his mother (Stephenson, 1992, 29)). … |
