Ann MacEwen

Leading town planner best known as a champion of Britain's national parks

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• Chris Hall
• The Guardian, Saturday 6 September 2008
• Article history

Ann MacEwen, who has died aged 90, became perhaps the most distinguished female town
planner of her generation, notably for addressing the relationship between people and cars.
However, she is likely to be best remembered for her contribution to country life, as a guru of
Britain's national parks.

The book National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? (1982), which she wrote with her
second husband, the journalist Malcolm MacEwen, and its successor, Greenprints for the
Countryside? (1987), gave the national parks movement an intellectual basis it had lacked.
Without their influence, it is doubtful whether the national parks would have progressed,
albeit hesitantly, from being mere romantic reservoirs of fine scenery towards becoming
exemplars of how landscape and communities can be conserved.

Born Ann Radford (Anni to friends and family) in Sutton, Surrey, she was the grand-daughter
on her father's side of the poets and writers Dollie and Ernest Radford, who first met in the
British Museum Reading Room in 1880, did their courting in Karl Marx's sitting room and
were comrades of William Morris. Her parents were doctors practising largely in working-
class districts of north London. Ann was a third-generation socialist and became, like both
her husbands, a member of the Communist party.

She was educated at Howell's school, Denbigh, north Wales, and took her diploma at the
Architectural Association, then boiling with pro-gressive ideas, in 1940. There she met her
first husband, John Wheeler, a gifted architect with whom she had two daughters. However,
he was killed in an RAF test flight accident in September 1945. She worked for a couple of
years with Geoffrey Jellicoe, later the doyen of landscape architecture, who was in charge of
the Hemel Hempstead new town masterplan in Hertfordshire. (He offered her the job at a
bus stop one morning, which she said favourably coloured her attitude to public transport for
ever after.)

Ann had contracted polio as a child and walked with a limp. She married MacEwen, also
widowed and then a Daily Worker journalist, in 1947. He had lost a leg in a motorcycle
accident. As a good planner, she arranged to take a fast-track town-planning course to
coincide with her third pregnancy and in 1949 got a job with the London county council
(LCC). She worked on the redevelopment of the slums and bomb sites of Poplar and
Stepney in east London. It was an exciting time for planners in London, but the money
gradually dried up, and the parks, the health and social centres integral to Ann's plans did
not materialise. She always regretted the rebarbative wastelands that marred her vision.

There was another problem. Ann's overwhelmingly male colleagues displayed little prejudice
against her gender, but the LCC insisted that to qualify for pension and promotion, she must
work full time, which included the Saturday mornings she devoted to her family. To get within
head-banging range of the glass ceiling was difficult.

Malcolm and Ann broke with the Communist party when the Daily Worker refused to report
the facts of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Malcolm moved to the Architectural
Journal, where, helped by Ann's professional know-how, he pioneered opposition to road-
building and the motorised free-for-all. It was thus a natural progression for her to leave the
LCC in 1961 and become the sole woman in Colin Buchanan's small team preparing the
report Traffic in Towns for the Ministry of Transport in 1963. Although Ann would later
acknowledge the shortcomings of the report, it marked a serious attempt to tackle the
inhumanities of unrestrained and unplanned traffic. (Twenty years later she wrote with Joan
Davidson The Livable City, a report condemned by a Thatcherite civil servant as "wringing
wet".)

In 1964 Ann became a founding partner of Buchanan's consultancy in charge of a number of

important studies for historic towns and cities. These were often battles against the macho
road-based orthodoxy of traffic engineers, many of which she lost. At Edinburgh, she had a
notable run-in with the city engineer who was infuriated by her opposition to his cherished
motorway-sized bridge over the valley separating the old and new towns. He appealed to
Buchanan to overrule her, but Ann, as ever calm, persistent and logical, won - to the city's
lasting benefit.

In 1968 the MacEwens bought the Manor House at Wootton Courtenay in the Exmoor
national park, where Ann created a welcoming and stimulating home. They explored the
countryside on ponies which gave them, they said, eight sound legs instead of the two they
had between them. Malcolm became a member of the park committee and, after a vicious
contest, brought an end to the ploughing up of the remaining moorland, a battle that
prompted their first book about national parks, their purposes and future.

National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? was published under the epigraph: "We each
dedicate this book to the other, without whom it could not have been written." If readers were
seduced by Malcolm's combative journalism, they were persuaded by Ann's rigorous
arguments.

Malcolm suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s and Ann spent five or six years as his carer
before his death in 1996, a muted and sombre end to their long, sparkling and productive
partnership. Her three daughters, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren survive
her.

· Ann Maitland MacEwen, town planner, born August 15 1918; died August 20 2008