Childhood and Early Career
Thomas Sharp was born near Bishop Auckland, County Durham in 1901, on the coalfield of south west Durham. Growing up in this environment had a deep impact on his character. He remained throughout his life a self-conscious northerner; bluff, stubborn and uncompromising, often to his own personal and professional cost. It also infused him with a deep anger at the poverty and squalid living conditions experienced by the working class in the pit villages around him and he remained a lifelong, but always unaffiliated, socialist.
Nearly all the wider family worked at the pits but Sharp's father, after a variety of jobs in his youth, spent much of his working life as an insurance agent as well as being a Primitive Methodist preacher. Far more present in Sharp's life was the strong personality of his mother. It was she who insisted that Thomas would not work in the pits but was apprenticed to a surveyor in Spennymoor; so began his accidental drift into the planning profession. After three years in this post he made a break from home and moved, in September 1920, to Margate, Kent, where he was introduced to the idea of town planning as Margate was one of the first Boroughs in the country to embark upon a town plan. In 1924 he became a Planning Assistant to the City Surveyor of Canterbury and a little over a year later, moved to London to work for the planning consultants Thomas Adams and Longstreth Thompson and here became one of the first to join the Town Planning Institute by examination.
By this time Sharp had thus escaped his parochial and working class upbringings for a modest professional career. But there was not yet any clear sign of the exceptional achievements to come.
