Purves, Graeme A. S.

2019-02-15T14:17:26Z

2019-02-15T14:17:26Z

1987

Sir Frank Mears has been acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Scottish Planning. His career encompasses the period of the emergence of statutory planning, the formation of the Town Planning Institute and the passing of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1947. From the mid nineteen-thirties until his death in 1953, he was planning consultant to numerous Scottish local authorities and many of the early techniques of Scottish planning were worked out in his office or with his students at Edinburgh College of Art, where he taught for many years. Several of that first generation of planning graduates whom Mears influenced later went on to take up prominent positions in practice in Scotland. Despite this, little has been written about him and he remains an obscure and enigmatic figure. There is no doubt that he has been overshadowed by his father-in-law and early mentor, Sir Patrick Geddes and by his more flamboyant contemporary, Sir Patrick Abercrombie.

Geddes' visionary ideas and boundless energy have earned him an international reputation as a founding father of modern town and country planning and Abercrombie's bold development plans for some of the major cities of the British Isles set the tone for much subsequent physical planning throughout the United Kingdom and beyond. With the exception of two notable episodes in the twenties, it was to Scottish planning problems that Mears addressed himself and it was within Scotland that he ultimately gained pre-eminence. Nevertheless, he has subsequently suffered the neglect which Scots so frequently accord their native prophets, a fate to which his own modest and retiring nature must unfortunately have contributed.

This thesis attempts a critical assessment of Mears' career, seeking to identify the influences which shaped his approach to planning and examine the significance of his work, both 1 in relation to the development of modern planning theory and practice in the United Kingdom and to social and cultural devel opments in Scotland and the wider world in the first half of this Century.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/33601

The University of Edinburgh

Annexe Thesis Digitisation Project 2019 Block 22

The life and work of Sir Frank Mears: planning with a cultural perspective

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy