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Geographers only began to make a serious contribution to urban debates in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Their contributions fed actively into policy-making during and immediately after World War II, when geographers began to be recruited in substantial numbers into the new planning machinery at both central and local government levels, following the passage of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. But there was one notable if somewhat eccentric exception, who must form a preamble to the main story. He was Patrick Geddes, a trained botanist who made his mark at the very start of the twentieth century. Another person who made an outstanding geographical contribution to planning was Lionel Dudley Stamp, who single-handedly launched the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain. This chapter also discusses the direct impact of academic geography upon planning in the country.

This chapter focuses on the importance of different strategies devised by farmers to meet the late 19th-century depression. Lord Ernle wrote something about the agricultural revolution in 1912. When smallholdings were contemplated in the Land Utilization Bill of 1931, he dubbed them an anachronism. The same bias had provoked a much earlier outburst from Arthur Arnold. He appeared before the Select Committee on Small Holdings in 1889. Both of them saw the need for a differently structured system. Moreover, Edwin Pratt, in his book A Transition in Agriculture, focused his gaze on the increasing demand for food other than wheat and meat.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark event in American agricultural and conservation history, and few seem to be aware of the fact. In April 1935, Congress passed the Soil Erosion Act, the first effort in the United States to establish a nationwide, comprehensive program to preserve the very earth on which farming and rural life depend. That act committed the nation to a permanent program of research and action to stop “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands.” Describing erosion as “a menace to the national welfare,” it promised action on private as well as public lands, even to the point of condemning and purchasing private properties when inducements to good practices proved ineffective. And the act established within the Department of Agriculture a new agency, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), to carry out the work. Now, after fifty years, it is appropriate to ask what cultural forces produced this 1935 commitment and to speculate about what our attitude, our commitment, is today. What have we as a people done with our soil since the act was passed? What have we learned about preserving the soil and what have we forgotten? The South, soil-conscious and erosion-plagued beyond other regions, played an extraordinary role in preparing the way for the 1935 act. It furnished both lessons in consequences and leaders for reform. From an earlier period, a succession of southern leaders had warned of the dangers of soil depletion and erosion. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote in 1819 of a land carelessness that, if not ended, would force planters to abandon their Virginia fields and “run away to Alibama (sic), as so many of our countrymen are doing, who find it easier to resolve on quitting their country, than to change the practices in husbandry to which they have been brought up.” After him, men like Edmund Ruffin preached the gospel of lime, of “calcareous manure,” up and down the land, earnestly calling for stability, conservation, and a permanent agriculture for the region.