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Reconstruction. Londoners were determined to turn Hitler's destruction into a "Heaven-sent" opportunity for civic improvement, and as dynamite squads reduced tottering walls and chimneys, the press blossomed with articles on post-war construction. Wrote Donald Evelyn Edward Gibson, architect assigned to the task of rebuilding Coventry: "[London] was the great magnet, but owing to the misapplication of democratic principles it became a mass of barbarity in which too many sought to better themselves at the expense of others. . . . Meanwhile, looking on impotently was a great body of highly trained architects and planners visualizing rational and ordered plans for living. . . . Will the landowners with their often short-sighted and acquisitive outlook again be allowed to smash the ideas of our 20th-century Wrens?"
The task of national replanning went to stuffy but astute Minister of Works and Buildings Sir John Reith. With the assistance of Consulting Engineer Colonel Howard Humphreys as Director of Works, and Architect Thomas S. Tait as Director of Standardization, he last week submitted a reconstruction plan of vast perspective to the Cabinet. In it he recommended that such Gordian knots as land-tenure complexities and conflicting powers of local authorities be resolutely slashed, that reconstruction be planned on a mammoth scale with decentralized industry, new housing arrangements and social amenities for workers, highway planning, and reapportionment of land on the principle that all land of whatever category must be used for the communities' benefit.
"I want a brighter England," said Architect Tait. "I want to see gloom banished from the grey industrial areas. I want great simplicity in design, good proportion, more light, more color, more lakes and more fountains. . . . Needs and modern materials will dictate our architecture. It will have to be functional but it will not be ugly, cubist or arrogantly advanced."
Britons wondered: Would it look like London?