Article written by Priscilla Chapman on Plug-In City, published in The Sunday Times colour supplement magazine, 20th September 1964. 


Since the first reaction to most plans for coping with the population explosion is a wild hope that all those people will never show up, an idea with a name like Plug-In City is not going to be popular at first glance. One established and long-disillusioned designer looked a tit and said simply: “It’s a very good idea. You would need a dictatorship to do it.” To put it in its baldest, least prepossessing terms, Plug-In City is a linear city housed in a high, narrow grid system which would start near London, grow in one direction towards Liverpool and in another, across the Channel, past Paris and on into Europe. It would not knock down London, Liverpool or Paris or any city we’re fond of. Its path will lie tangential to them. (Talking to Plug-In City’s designers the tense slips from the conditional into the simple future and, from here on, I shall leave it at that).

Along the top of the grid will run the all-important monorail which, besides carrying passengers, will also carry cranes which can in turn carry sections of the grid, so that the city can continually build and re-build itself, tar itself down, change its direction or go off in little spurs like those in the diagram on the left – all with less trouble than digging up a road today. The spaces formed by the grid (next page) is where you plug yourself in, or more accurately, where the crane plugs in everything that makes up a city, from living rooms to parking lots.

All this sounds soul-destroying, cold and highly unlikely. It has a touch of science fiction: Plug-In City was, in fact, first published in the ZOOM issue of Archigram, a fringe architectural magazine put out by its designers, renamed Amazing Archigram and done like a space comic for the occasion. Amazing Archigram had Superman zooming along over the aerial view reproduced on the left. Superman (puzzled, thinks): “It seems I have been over this city for very many miles.” Superman (thinks again): “Yes, indeed ... for it stretches over the Channel and beyond ... into Europe. In this part you can see the habitations plugged into the giant network-structure that is 12 stories high ...”

But the three young men who are evolving Plug-In City – Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton, who also work for Taylor Woodrow, and Peter Cook, who teaches at the Architectural Association – say it could be started right now and in 20 years be well on its way.

On a technical level it is set apart from other plans by its purchase on life as it will be in the future. It grasps the rate at which people and things will change and, in effect, acknowledges throw-away architecture.

But what is going to matter to people now is that this plan is so much less traumatic than others: so much so, in fact, that anyone – anyone, that is, who is not totally opposed to the future – could almost welcome the predicted millions and the opportunity to plug in with them. On an even cursory examination of the diagrams on these four pages, Plug-In City turns out not to be as heartless as it sounds. The name is more funny than frightening and the plan itself is humane, benign, even cosy – the work of well-intentioned young men who say the whole point is to have lively neighbourhoods. Chalk, Cook, Crompton and Co. Find it hard to say exactly what it will be like to step out of your front door in Plug-In City, but it sounds as though it will be a mixture of a theatre (balconies, aisles and stairs) and Montmartre (passages and stairs connecting different levels): in any event, there will be lots of well-travelled, busy catwalks and streets honeycombing the grid system, all connected by the lifts and escalators. They reckon on a density of 400 people to the acre to ensure the lively neighbourhood feeling (like Mayfair’s today), and while the L.C.C. do not generally allow a density of more than 135 these days advanced city planners who want to get away from the New Towns that stretch too far and too dispiritedly, are already thinking in terms of 400.

Plug-In City has two enormous advantages over cities as we know them. The first is that it is a straight line rather than a circle. What this means sinks in when you consider that London has a radius of 20 miles, that under proposals like the South-East Plan it would soon be several times that and week-end cottages wouldn’t be anywhere you could get to at a weekend. Its designers see Plug-In City as a magnetic field across Europe, collecting like iron filings all the hopeless little piecemeal building that is smothering the countryside. The second advantage is that being a self-destroying, self-building system it is easily pushed into the shape people want it to be – rather than its pushing people into shape. What this means sinks in when you remember the traffic jam a building site causes for months on end, or just the mess of having central heating put in. Because the trouble with concrete and brick is that they take a long time to put up, a long time to know down, and when they are down, all you have is a pile of rubble to shift.

In Plug-In City, when cars become extinct – and they are moving that way as surely as the dinosaurs ever did – you plug out the roads and parking space designed for them, and plug in whatever you need for the new kind of transport – all of it neatly manufactured in sections at a factory.

And while today the job of providing enough houses is appalling, in Plug-In days, according to Warren Chalk, plastic and metal rooms will be mass-produced, cheap and expendable. “You might choose a Ford bathroom and Vauxhall kitchen, and as you rise in the world you can trade in your Hillman living room for a Bentley.” Living in the unit he’s working on now will be like living in a super de luxe caravan. Parts of it, like the clip-on appliance wall and bathroom/kitchen capsule (see diagram on page 31) will be designed for future replacement. The floor will be like a tray. “When someone brings out a great new, heated, carpeted, roll-around-on tray, you hire the crane to slide out your old one and slide in the new one.”

This isn’t the Georgian house-dweller’s dream, nor just the way the bungalow-and-garden lover sees his retirement. But there are two points to assuage any horrors. The first is that you don’t have to live in Plug-In City. Retired people probably won’t. London and Paris will still be there because, says Peter Cook, Plug-In City will not only leave them standing, it will see that they don’t get their life-blood cut off and wither away. Quite early in its development it will mesh in with one side of each city so there will be a steady commerce among them all.

And then Plug-In City is designed to leave the countryside and sea coast much as it is. Bognor Regis will still be there too. People can always escape, and Chalk, Crompton and Cook all reckon that by the time Plug-In City happens, they will have second flats or houses in “leisure areas”, with grass and what-not, and that for most people the working week will be three days. They don’t think it would take a dictatorship to get Plug-In City started. They think people are a lot nearer being psychologically ready for big changes than we realise and that buying houses off-the-peg isn’t going to be such a big step. “We have to skate between people’s inhibitions. People like to feel safe and they like to see predictable things around them. New Towns weren’t such a shock because they could see a corner pub and washing hanging out on the line. But there is a difference between what’s just predictable and what’s human, and it’s important to let people know that something new can be human too.”

Peter Cook doesn’t think it will take long. “After all, my wife wears clothes which will be an embarrassment in two years. Hospitals have paper sheets. Soon it won’t be so shocking to throw away a building we have been using.” “Our basic message,” says one issue of Archigram, “is that the home, the whole city and the frozen pea pack are all the same.” (And on the same page of the same issue is the line: “ The idea of an expendable environment is still somehow regarded as akin to anarchy ... as if in order to make it work would bulldoze Westminster Abbey ... “)

At the same time they feel designers cannot hang back worrying about politics. “We know people may not accept – but architects are always saying people won’t accept something and they have no way of knowing for the plain reason that they have never gone far enough to give people a real choice. We think it would be a good idea to take just one block in a twilight zone, maybe Paddington, and start a Plug-In system just to see how it works, and if it wouldn’t be a better choice than another low-density Stevenage.

“But the terrible thing in England is that architects are so over-intellectualised and self-critical that they are afraid of taking a step for fear it won’t be right.” What worries Peter Cook, who teaches, is that it is even happening to the students. “They are all beginning to think like civil servants. You can just hear them saying ‘I am instructed to make this room 20ft. Long and 10ft. High’ without thinking for themselves.” His dearest wish is to get people to lecture to his students in fields which are going to be increasingly related to the architecture of the future – a car designer, an inventor or someone like Jacques Cousteau.

People are always asking Chalk, Crompton and Cook where they plan to keep the baby in Plug-In City or how the groceries will be delivered, and then they go back and fill in details. They try to avoid falling into Superman-at-home-on-the-satellite attitudes and work comparatively soberly, developing solutions for which they know the technical knowledge already exists.

They have noticed a hierarchy of speed and change, which they didn’t plan but which seems to be the natural evolution of a rapidly changing city (see diagram on page 30). According to it the small, light, high-speed elements tend to develop faster and to be nearer the top of the city. The slower, heavier, less responsive elements are near the ground. This is why they thought of the clip-on appliance wall. Dennis Crompton is carrying it further and working out an hotel in which the newest, most up-to-date rooms will be fed in at the top by the crane, while older ones gradually work their way down to the bottom.

They realise that the roads at different levels would inevitably be rushing past people’s bedroom windows and, in the tower on page 29, actually liking up with the parking levels. This raises the question of noise and while they cannot foresee the exact answers, Plug-In City will be a lot quieter than cities are now. The plastics the plug-in units are made of will be soundproof and cars are on the way out. They have given a lot of thought to commuters. In Plug-In City people could take local monorails to work, but they hope that residential and business districts will be so mixed up that most people will just take the escalator down a level or two.

The new means of transport and the shape of the city are linked. One of the reasons they feel that cities of the future will have to be linear is simply that the speed of monorails and hovercraft require it. “A radial city is fine for walking around in or for light, slow traffic, but monorails have to get up high speeds in order to operate economically.” It’s a point already proven by Manhattan, which is virtually a linear city; its subway system runs express trains at speeds impossible in London’s Underground.


“There are all kinds of things which we haven’t tackled properly yet and which we are going to have to,” says Peter Cook, and not the least of them is leisure. People will have more free time and perhaps less reason for going out. If, for instance, groceries are delivered by conveyor belt, a woman won’t have to go shopping and will miss the casual socialising that comes with it. Chalk, Crompton and Cook have thought of it and think the answer will be that everything will be geared up, communications will be faster and going out won’t be the effort it is now. They also feel that leisure just isn’t going to be the way it is these days. “We all separate leisure from life. We ‘go out’ for a big night and ‘save up’ for a big-bust holiday once a year. But leisure will be closer to home and more woven in with every day life. We are thinking in terms of plug-on balconies which could be added to the house units. They wouldn’t be little 3ft.-wide affairs, but 20ft. Outdoor rooms.”

Work and leisure and travel will [will] be closely bound up. There will be, says Warren Chalk, giant hovercraft zipping across Europe with a conference going on inside. Businessmen, having started the day with a deal in Berlin, will get off the deal in Moscow. And they have not forgotten the public reaction to the skyline. (Talk about pylons and electric cables.) The sight of Plug-In City hoving into sight over the downs isn’t going to please everyone, but the designers think that it will be on such a grand scale that it will be “great” and also liberate more countryside anyhow.

Do they think Plug-In City has a chance of getting off the ground? Maybe not the way it is now. It changes constantly. Peter Cook says the diagrams on these pages “are like cartoons for a painting. It was important to make the initial leap to a different kind of city because nothing else will make a dent on the problem. And while we hope something will develop from it, we don’t say Plug-In City is the only way. It happens to be the best one we have seen and the best one we can think of at the moment. It certainly doesn’t preclude better ones coming along. Like Ron Herron, who worked with us on it – he’s got a city that walks”.

Priscilla Chapman

© The Sunday Times 1964