Лесли Патрик Аберкромби: қала құрылысшы және жоспарлаушысы

English town planner (1879–1957)
the town planner

Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie ('/æ//b//ɚ//k//r//ʌ//m//b//i//, // //k//r//ɒ//m//b//i/ ABərkrumbee, krombee; 6 June 1879 – 23 March 1957) was an English regional and town planner. Abercrombie was an academic during most of his career, and prepared one city plan and several regional studies prior to the Second World War. He came to prominence in the 1940s for his urban plans of the cities of Plymouth, Hull, Bath, Bournemouth, Hong Kong, Addis Ababa, Cyprus, Edinburgh, Clyde Valley and Greater London.

Patrick Abercrombie was born in Ashton upon Mersey, one of the nine children of Sarah and William Abercrombie, a stockbroker and businessman who had wide artistic interests, particularly of the Arts and Crafts school. In 1887, the family moved to a new home in Sale, designed by a Leicester architect, Joseph Goddard, with interiors influenced by designer John Aldam Heaton. Abercrombie was educated at Uppingham School, and spent a year at the Realschule in Lucerne, Switzerland.

In 1897, he was articled to the architect Charles Heathcote, while studying at the Manchester School of Art. After four years, he started work under Arnold Thornely in Liverpool, and set up home in Birkenhead, which remained his home until 1936. After a year working in Chester with architect Philip Lockwood, in 1907 he was offered a post as junior lecturer and studio instructor at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture. In 1914 he won a town planning competition for Dublin, and the following year was appointed as Lever Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool, soon becoming a nationally known authority on town planning and the garden city movement. Hull, Bath, Edinburgh and Bournemouth, among others. Of his post war replanning of Plymouth, Sir Simon Jenkins has written:
Poor Plymouth. It was badly blitzed in the Second World War and then subjected to slash and burn by its city fathers. The modern visitor will find it a maze of concrete blocks, ill sited towers and ruthless road schemes. Most of this damage was done by one man, Patrick Abercrombie, in the 1950s. The old Barbican district would, in France or Germany, have had its façades restored or rebuilt. Here new buildings were inserted with no feeling for the texture of the old lanes and alleys. Throughout his life, he generously devoted his time to civic bodies. He was a founding member of the Town Planning Institute (TPI) formed in 1914 and became its president in 1925. In the 1920s and 1930s, Abercrombie developed a specialty in regional planning. He became chairman of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in 1926, and was on the Council of the Town and Country Planning Association. and in 1944 the Greater London Plan, together commonly referred to as the Abercrombie Plan. The latter document was an extended and more thorough product than the 1943 publication. The Greater London Plan proposed that physical growth of London should be stopped by a green belt and that over a million people should move out to expanded towns beyond it. Abercrombie conceived the Ringways scheme of London in 1944, proposing four ringroads around Greater London. In 1949 he published with Richard Nickson a plan for the redevelopment of Warwick, which proposed demolition of almost all the town's Victorian housing stock and construction of a large inner ring road.

During the postwar years, Abercrombie was commissioned by the British government to redesign Hong Kong, for which he submitted plans in 1947. In 1956 he was commissioned by Haile Selassie to draw up plans for the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa; he submitted the plan in 1957 but its major aspects were not carried out.

Abercrombie was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1945 New Year Honours. He was the most celebrated British planner of his generation. He appears in the film The Proud City presenting his plan to the public. He died in 1957. A blue plaque has been erected at a house where he lived from 1915 to 1935, on Village Road, Oxton, Merseyside. In July 2023, a blue plaque was erected at a house in Aston Upthorpe, where he lived from 1945 to 1957. He was the architect of the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI) in Wrexham.

Abercrombie married Emily Maud Gordon in 1908; they had one son and one daughter. He was widowed in 1942. Abercrombie was the brother of the poet and critic Lascelles Abercrombie, and uncle to Michael Abercrombie.