Charles Compton Reade (4 May 1880 – 28 October 1933) was a New Zealand town planner who promoted town planning and the garden city movement of the early twentieth century.
Born in Invercargill, New Zealand, in 1880, Reade became the major figure in disseminating garden city ideas in Australia. Reade saw the evils of inner city slums while working as a journalist in England and began writing of the need for improved town planning, becoming active in the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association of Great Britain, of which he was acting secretary and editor for its magazine in 1913.
In 1914–15, he led a lecture tour through five Australian States and New Zealand. South Australia appointed Reade as a town planning adviser in 1916 and later he became its first official Town Planner in 1918, retaining the position until 1920. In 1917, he drew up plans for an Adelaide garden suburb, initially with a working title of Mitcham Garden Suburb and officially named Colonel Light Gardens.
Reade convened Australia's first two town planning and housing conferences in 1917 and 1918. He also twice tried to get town planning legislation through the South Australian state legislature: on the first occasion it was defeated by the property-oriented upper House and on the second was passed but was heavily amended by the House.
Reade then left Australia for overseas planning positions, establishing a town planning department in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, in 1921 and moving to Northern Rhodesia in 1929. He committed suicide in South Africa in 1933, only nine days after becoming Chief Planning Officer of Witwatersrand.
Extensive academic study of the life and work of Charles Reade has been conducted by Associate Professor Christine Garnaut of the University of South Australia.
Contents
Influence in Australia
Charles Reade was born in 1880 in Invercargill, New Zealand. Reade's childhood involved international travel and education about the conditions of the working class that influenced his later work both as a journalist and his view of the power of good planning to effect improvements in health and enjoyment of life.
Reade became a journalist at the age of 26. He concerned himself with the living and working conditions of the working class. He strongly believed that good town planning could avoid the overcrowding and disease he saw in his travels in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield. He advocated the eradication of slums to give greater dignity and self-respect to the people who had the misfortune to live there. Reade drew upon the examples of planning in continental Europe, as well as the new garden city model proposed by Ebenezer Howard, to show how planning could improve social welfare which had been degraded through industrialization.
Through his writing, Reade became involved in the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association of Great Britain. From 1906 the Association became less fundamentalist about the implementation of Howard's planning principles and more concerned with getting national planning legislation implemented. In 1912, after a year of working in New Zealand, Reade returned to work for the Association. He participated and learnt a lot from the widespread lectures and conferences and pamphlet distribution which occurred during this time. His affable personality and strong work ethic soon brought him to the attention of the Association's officials, and he was chosen, along with W. R. Davidge, for a promotion tour of the new garden city planning movement to Australia and New Zealand in 1914.
In Australia, the general enthusiasm for the Garden City movement began with John Sulman's idea that planning should be about 'convenience, healthfulness and beauty' rather than ad hoc. These principles were embraced after Reade's speeches and conferences during his tour of Australia. Town planning associations began forming rapidly in his wake.
Reade used propagandist techniques learnt with the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association in Britain to great effect. He shocked audiences with examples of the claustrophobic squalor of the slums in industrialised Britain and warned that without implementation of planning law, Australia could also develop these horrific conditions. Reade spoke of the importance of constructing proper housing for the growing population, the evils of unplanned subdivisions outside the city, demarcation of industry and commercial property and planned open spaces. Reade had great foresight as these issues are still as relevant today as they were at the time.
Published work
The Revelation of Britain: A Book for Colonials (Gordon and Gotch, Auckland, 1909)
Town Planning And Development In The Federated Malay States (1922)