By the outbreak of the Second World War, anxieties over the great size of London and its assumed destructive impact on the rest of the nation had reached a crisis point. The metropolitan economic boom that followed swiftly on the end of the First World War led to an extraordinary growth of population and industry in the capital, especially in the 1930s. By the end of that decade one in five of the people of England and Wales was a Londoner, living somewhere within the boundaries of Greater London, as defined by the Metropolitan Police District. For many public policy-makers, this growth was not just draining the rest of the nation of its talent; it was directly causing disinvestment in the Distressed Areas of Northern England, Wales and Scotland. It was Neville Chamberlain, long a critic of London’s overgrowth and a convinced advocate of satellite towns and garden cities, who laid the national policy basis for at last solving the London problem with the Barlow Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, reporting in 1940. In alliance with the town and country planning movement, with the nation’s most famous planner-architect Patrick Abercrombie, and with a consensus of opinion that was especially strong on the centre-left of national and London politics, a planning framework was established for the post-war capital in two ambitious plans for the County of London and for the Greater London area. The war, with its assertion of a new national unity embracing the notion of planning in all walks of life but especially in the reconstruction of the bombed cities, produced a receptive climate to planning interventions in the future of London. But there were unintended consequences. It is arguable that the London Plans of 1943–44, and the Government planning policy of 1946 that followed their lead, would help produce nearly forty years of metropolitan decline that only began to end in the second half of the 1980s.

中文翻译：

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“伦敦的肢解”：张伯伦、阿伯克龙比和 1943-44 年的伦敦计划

到第二次世界大战爆发时，对伦敦的庞大规模及其对全国其他地区的破坏性影响的担忧已经达到了危机点。第一次世界大战结束后迅速出现的大都市经济繁荣导致首都人口和工业的惊人增长，尤其是在 1930 年代。到那个十年末，英格兰和威尔士有五分之一的人是伦敦人，居住在大伦敦警区定义的大伦敦边界内的某个地方。对于许多公共政策制定者来说，这种增长不仅耗尽了全国其他地区的人才；它直接导致英格兰北部、威尔士和苏格兰的贫困地区的投资减少。是内维尔张伯伦，长期以来一直是伦敦过度增长的批评者和卫星城和花园城市的坚定拥护者，他为最终解决伦敦工业人口分配问题的巴洛委员会奠定了国家政策基础，并于 1940 年发表报告。在全国最著名的规划师-建筑师帕特里克·阿伯克龙比 (Patrick Abercrombie) 的推动下，城镇和乡村规划运动在国家和伦敦政治中左翼特别强烈的意见下，为战后首都建立了规划框架。伦敦郡和大伦敦地区的两项雄心勃勃的计划。这场战争宣示了新的民族团结，在各行各业尤其是在被炸毁城市的重建中都包含了规划的概念，为规划伦敦未来的干预措施创造了一种容易接受的氛围。但出现了意想不到的后果。有争议的是，1943-44 年的伦敦计划以及紧随其后的 1946 年政府规划政策将有助于导致近 40 年的大都市衰退，而这种衰退直到 1980 年代后半期才开始结束。