‘The Esher Report’ is the iconic nickname of the architect-planner Lord Esher’s York: A Study in Conservation given by the York Civic Trust, one of its prime local supporters.[1] It was one of the four government implication studies on the recent planning legislations in the conservation of historic towns, commissioned in 1966 jointly by Richard Crossman’s Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MoHLG, 1951-70) and the relevant local Councils. The four pilot studies (on Bath, Chester, Chichester and York), officially known as the ‘Studies in Historic Towns’, were initiated in response to perceptions of planning distress in redevelopment schemes of historic town centres across the country. Led by Crossman’s diligent junior minister, Lord Kennet, and advised by a purpose-built Preservation Policy Group at the MoHLG, the ‘Studies’ were ambitious in their conception. The intention – with each of the four towns’ varied and complex conditions (both physical and political) – was to bring together different tendencies of thought in conservation to inform future legislation. [2]

Nonetheless, after its successful publication in 1969, the Esher Report has long been a missing chapter in the architectural historiography. It was primarily due to the Report’s unfortunate fate at the end of the 1960s, when the majority of its recommendations were rejected by the stubborn York City Council, with the promised Government aid revoked amid bureaucratic changes. Therefore, the Esher Report has been read and omitted as a story of ‘disappointment and failure’, but as this history unfolds, it shall be a charming one. [3] First, Esher, whose life mobilised between architecture and a prescribed public life, was inherently an alluring topic: as put by Otto Saumarez Smith, Esher’s dual identity made him ‘one of the central cogs in the prosopographical machine of post-war architectural culture’. [4] Second, the story of the Esher Report is not wholly characterised by the ‘heroism’ of the 1960s conservation movement – as chronicled by Alan Powers in Twentieth-Century Architecture (2004) – but multiple protagonists’ resilient belief in conservation as public service, which was later translated into Esher’s nuanced method for York and the local amenity societies’ collective desire to regenerate their walled city. [5]

This dissertation approaches the story with a biographical lens. Through the personal history of Esher – evidenced by his architectural criticism and multiple written memories – and his local and national intellectual network, this study aims to situate the intellectual processes of the Esher Report from 1964 to 1971 (marked by the beginning and end his personal involvement in York) within the architectural culture of modernism and conservation in post-war Britain, and to expose the intricate relationship between architecture and public service, modernism and conservation, local and national politics. Meanwhile, it draws from a strong base in archival and oral histories, in excavating numerous overlooked collections at the Borthwick Institute, City of York Council, John Rylands Library, Royal College of Art, York Civic Archive and York Civic Trust, and mining unmapped personal tales from the former oral history interviews with three protagonists of this story, conducted by John Gold in 2003.