8/8/2019 Ann MacEwen Obituary

1/2

Ann MacEwenLeading town planner best known as a champion of Britain's national parks

Chris Hall

The Guardian, Saturday 6 September 2008

Article history

Ann MacEwen, who has died aged 90, became perhaps the most distinguished female townplanner of her generation, notably for addressing the relationship between people and cars.However, she is likely to be best remembered for her contribution to country life, as a guru ofBritain's national parks.

The book National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? (1982), which she wrote with hersecond husband, the journalist Malcolm MacEwen, and its successor, Greenprints for theCountryside? (1987), gave the national parks movement an intellectual basis it had lacked.Without their influence, it is doubtful whether the national parks would have progressed,albeit hesitantly, from being mere romantic reservoirs of fine scenery towards becomingexemplars of how landscape and communities can be conserved.

Born Ann Radford (Anni to friends and family) in Sutton, Surrey, she was the grand-daughteron her father's side of the poets and writers Dollie and Ernest Radford, who first met in theBritish Museum Reading Room in 1880, did their courting in Karl Marx's sitting room andwere comrades of William Morris. Her parents were doctors practising largely in working-class districts of north London. Ann was a third-generation socialist and became, like bothher husbands, a member of the Communist party.

She was educated at Howell's school, Denbigh, north Wales, and took her diploma at theArchitectural Association, then boiling with pro-gressive ideas, in 1940. There she met herfirst husband, John Wheeler, a gifted architect with whom she had two daughters. However,he was killed in an RAF test flight accident in September 1945. She worked for a couple ofyears with Geoffrey Jellicoe, later the doyen of landscape architecture, who was in charge ofthe Hemel Hempstead new town masterplan in Hertfordshire. (He offered her the job at abus stop one morning, which she said favourably coloured her attitude to public transport forever after.)

Ann had contracted polio as a child and walked with a limp. She married MacEwen, alsowidowed and then a Daily Worker journalist, in 1947. He had lost a leg in a motorcycleaccident. As a good planner, she arranged to take a fast-track town-planning course tocoincide with her third pregnancy and in 1949 got a job with the London county council(LCC). She worked on the redevelopment of the slums and bomb sites of Poplar andStepney in east London. It was an exciting time for planners in London, but the moneygradually dried up, and the parks, the health and social centres integral to Ann's plans did

not materialise. She always regretted the rebarbative wastelands that marred her vision.

There was another problem. Ann's overwhelmingly male colleagues displayed little prejudiceagainst her gender, but the LCC insisted that to qualify for pension and promotion, she mustwork full time, which included the Saturday mornings she devoted to her family. To get withinhead-banging range of the glass ceiling was difficult.

Malcolm and Ann broke with the Communist party when the Daily Worker refused to reportthe facts of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Malcolm moved to the ArchitecturalJournal, where, helped by Ann's professional know-how, he pioneered opposition to road-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/06/conservation.wildlife#history-link-boxhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/06/conservation.wildlife#history-link-box

8/8/2019 Ann MacEwen Obituary

2/2

building and the motorised free-for-all. It was thus a natural progression for her to leave theLCC in 1961 and become the sole woman in Colin Buchanan's small team preparing thereport Traffic in Towns for the Ministry of Transport in 1963. Although Ann would lateracknowledge the shortcomings of the report, it marked a serious attempt to tackle theinhumanities of unrestrained and unplanned traffic. (Twenty years later she wrote with JoanDavidson The Livable City, a report condemned by a Thatcherite civil servant as "wringing

wet".)

In 1964 Ann became a founding partner of Buchanan's consultancy in charge of a number ofimportant studies for historic towns and cities. These were often battles against the machoroad-based orthodoxy of traffic engineers, many of which she lost. At Edinburgh, she had anotable run-in with the city engineer who was infuriated by her opposition to his cherishedmotorway-sized bridge over the valley separating the old and new towns. He appealed toBuchanan to overrule her, but Ann, as ever calm, persistent and logical, won - to the city'slasting benefit.

In 1968 the MacEwens bought the Manor House at Wootton Courtenay in the Exmoornational park, where Ann created a welcoming and stimulating home. They explored thecountryside on ponies which gave them, they said, eight sound legs instead of the two they

had between them. Malcolm became a member of the park committee and, after a viciouscontest, brought an end to the ploughing up of the remaining moorland, a battle thatprompted their first book about national parks, their purposes and future.

National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? was published under the epigraph: "We eachdedicate this book to the other, without whom it could not have been written." If readers wereseduced by Malcolm's combative journalism, they were persuaded by Ann's rigorousarguments.

Malcolm suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s and Ann spent five or six years as his carerbefore his death in 1996, a muted and sombre end to their long, sparkling and productivepartnership. Her three daughters, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren surviveher.

Ann Maitland MacEwen, town planner, born August 15 1918; died August 20 2008