This book was born out of work Sharp undertook for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and was to be a handbook or manual on village planning, following on from the Scott Report. When the Ministry decided not to proceed with the publication Sharp requested permission to publish the work with a commercial publisher. Permission was initially refused but Sharp persevered and eventually was given permission. The Anatomy of the Village became one of Sharp's best known works, with lucid prose and generous illustration by photograph (now conveying a rather elegiac quality) and beautiful line-drawings of village plans with short written analyses of existing villages, possible village extensions and a new village. Ironically, a short official version of the work did eventually emerge in 1953 (in Design in Town and Village with Gibberd and Holford).
Whilst a significant part of the text was given over to an analysis of the qualities of the English village, that this was no guidebook or academic treatise was evident from the Prefatory Note. This quoted the Scott Report (for which Sharp was Secretary), which anticipated considerable post-war development in the countryside and suggested that such development should be attached to existing villages. The aim of The Anatomy of the Village was to set out the main principles of village planning, especially in relation to physical design. The subsequent text was divided into two chapters dealing with 'past and present' and three with 'future'.
Chapter 1, the English Tradition, set out first to analyse the English tradition of village building. The early part of this chapter conveyed much of the essence of Sharp's values towards place and planning more widely. He saw the English tradition as both informal and orderly, as combining the utilitarian with beauty, or at least charm, and pleasantness and he saw a precious tradition but in need of evolution. New village building should not simulate the old. The chapter then set out a broad typology of village plan forms. First, and most common, Sharp identified the roadside village, sited at a crossing or on a single road. Critical to village character was that the road was rarely dead straight; thus the road became visually contained and formed a place; closing views in this way was both visually and psychologically satisfying. The second major plan form suggested was the squared village, though in practice the shape of the enclosure may take many different patterns. This, Sharp considered, often had a more immediate visual appeal as the plan form was more readily appreciated. However, the principle of visual containment was shared with the road-side village, with roads generally staggered and not allowing any direct vista through. Squared villages in the Midlands and South were held to be generally more complex than those in the North and often gathered around a big house or castle. Two other less common forms of villages were subsequently considered; seaside and planned villages. Seaside villages were characterised as often having a tortuous and huddling form for shelter against the elements. Planned villages were usually associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and whilst having a degree of formality to be usually relatively simple in plan and comfortably within the English village tradition.
Simplicity was a key factor in the distillation of village character and a distinguishing feature from small towns where a greater degree of complexity of plan form was held to exist. Lowther in Cumbria was presented as a counter example of an inter-locking geometric village form which, had it been completed, would have been distinctly un- English. Similarly, landscape features such as trees, whilst potentially of great aesthetic consequence were held to be natural and unaffected. Finally, in the English Tradition, village community was again held to be characterised by simplicity of form, of an integrated, perhaps semi-feudal, social system.
Chapter 2 considered the Village Today. Sharp set out a position that the ability of the village to naturally evolve and absorb changes had been lost in (then) recent times. Social structures based around the rural economy had been disrupted by second home owners and retirees. Physical form had been weakened by ribbon development and so on. New building in responding to the motor car and a demand for privacy had lost compactness. Understanding of village form and character had died, evident also in crude 'environmental improvements' by, for example, kerbing village greens. The key decision, for Sharp, was whether to create a whole new form for village planning (for example, suburban or truly urban) or whether to take something of the traditional essence of village form and develop from it in a contemporary manner.
The next part of the book set out to consider the future, starting in chapter 3 with social requirements. Though villages might vary in plan form Sharp made no such distinction in terms of social form. Villages should have a diversity of occupations and social classes - he was critical of (then) recent land settlement developments for this reason as well as on design grounds. The one future exception to this he anticipated was 'holiday villages'. He did not anticipate any significant change in the basic pattern and distribution of villages. Sharp considered that the minimum size of a village should be related to its ability to support some basic social facilities and in particular a nursery and junior school (up to age 11). From this he extrapolated a minimum village size of about 570 catchment (including outlying farms) or about 400-450 village inhabitants, whilst acknowledging that declining fertility rates would cause this figure to rise. Some of his other descriptions of village facilities seem somewhat fantastical today (as many villages lack any such facilities). On the one hand it was apparently then common for a village of 300 or so to have eight or nine shops and three or four inns. He considered two general stores, a bakery, a butcher, a cobbler and perhaps a saddler as minimum provision. On the other hand he considered future facilities might include communal refrigeration for local produce or a communal heating station and laundry. Towards the end of the chapter Sharp drifted into discussing design issues. Perhaps the most notable argument he advanced was that houses should have good sized back gardens, for privacy but at the front, gardens were unnecessary - he considered a traditional narrow unfenced garden strip, or 'flower strip' better in functional and aesthetic terms.
Chapter 4 went on to more directly discuss plan forms for the future village or extensions to existing villages. First, Sharp considered whether detached, semidetached or street houses (terraces) generally comprised the most desirable form of development and unsurprisingly, given his previous writings, concluded street houses to be optimum. Generally these should be straight but might sometimes be gently curved, perhaps following a topographical feature. In terms of plan forms for new villages he expressed a clear preference for the 'squared' type, with all its potential for diversity, such that 'in the future, as in the past, every village can be different from every other village, and that every village may be an individual place' (p.63). To this argument Sharp identified potential dangers: the danger of producing an overelaborate and over-sophisticated pattern, the danger of producing a completely rounded finite design, inhibiting organic change and the danger of designing overlarge public amenity spaces. Spaces, he argued, should be closed for climatic, pictorial and psychological reasons (as a contrast to open country views).
The final chapter considered issues of building and planting character in the new or extended village. The chapter started with a lengthy (and quite possibly self-) quotation from the Scott Report which argued against over-prescription in the use of materials in countryside building; quality and appropriate colour were considered important, use of traditional and local materials not, for 'the future of architecture does not lie in the easy direction of mere preservation and narrow conservatism' (p.66). Though new buildings should not imitate those existing, Sharp argued for good neighbourliness, through such factors as height, street line, character and colour of materials. Good neighbourliness did not mean timid conservatism. One specific technique in achieving liveliness, Sharp suggested, was colourwash. Planting should generally be informal and simple with, for example, a few substantial trees - for the 'simple robust utility' (p.72) of the English village.