Abercrombie, Patrick

Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie  was an English architect, landscape architect and town planner who became Professor of Civic Design at the Liverpool University and then Professor of Town Planning at University College London. He was also involved with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). Abercrombie is best known for the work he did with J H Forshaw on the Country of London Plan (1943) and the Greater London Plan (1944). They contain perhaps the greatest landscape and open space strategy ever formulated for a capital city, and certainly the best that London has had. The idea was to create a web of open space leading from the city centre, through green corridors, greenways and green wedges to a green belt on the periphery of London. Beyond the Green Belt, Abercrombie proposed the layout of New Towns. The fullest expressions of his vision are the Lea Valley Regional Park and the South Bank Thames Greenway.

In Landscape by design (1979, p.124), Tony Aldous wrote of the Institute of Landscape Architects (now the Landscape Institute) that 'The Institute by this time numbered many eminent people who had publicly spoken out fo rhte landscape and its better caare and design. Besides Abercrombie, the countil included John Forshaw, the LCC's planning officer. Their Greater London Plan not only set the pattern for conurbation planning the world over, but was a pioneer in giving landscape a place of importance in town planning.'