What did the Germans ever do for us? A century of British learning about and imagining modern town planning

This article uses contemporary sources to trace the recurrent ways in which the British planning movement has drawn on its German equivalent from the early twentieth century to the present day. As with most such European links, the resultant learning has varied. In some cases British references to German planning have been merely to inform or more generally to inspire emulation or occasionally avoidance. But often the learning has provided specific ideas, practices or techniques that have been directly adopted or more usually hybridised or synthesised into the British planning repertoire. German influences have been apparent in aspects of British planning such as land use zoning, city extension, regional planning, housing design, motorways, pedestrianisation, traffic calming and sustainable eco‐suburbs. What, however, has made the British planning movement’s long‐term and mainly admiring engagement with German planning so intriguing is that it has evolved alongside major conflicts and long term suspicion of the German nation itself. The prevailing popular and political imagination within Britain has seen Germany as an especially problematic country from which to learn, more so than, for example, the USA or Scandinavia. This makes British planning’s German connection an instructive case study of cross‐national learning and lesson‐drawing and the factors shaping these processes. It shows the limitations of more conventional conceptualisations of them as rational searches for ‘good practice’. This article shows that they also must be seen as explorations in imaginative geography, concerned with real places, ideas and practices, but viewed through particularly powerful ideological and cultural lenses.