Both Simon and Tony have written about town and street planning in the last couple of days. In the respective countries they talk about the form the cities take ranges from the sublime (the US’s easy-to-navigate grid system) to the riduculous (the apparently haphazard method the Japanese employ)

Admittedly these are both from the perspective of the potentially lost and I can confidently say I’d rather be lost in the US that Japan.

But what about at home?

England also has it’s sublime and ridiculous examples of town planning.

Older cities (such as York) have a seemingly haphazard arrangement of streets based primarily on Medieval streets - which were planned around the river, a church or castle and firmly within a city boundary.

Georgian (18th Century - think Jane Austen) towns, such as the one I live in - Bath, are predominantly about theatre. Large open squares, circusses and crescents with continuous facades made up of individual houses. Who cares about what happens in between. This was England’s first attempt at town planning.

And have we managed to improve? Well - as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman note in Good Omens

neither [Aziraphale (an angel) or Crowley (an angel who did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards)] claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a sucess.