Town and Townscape is something of a curiosity, written and published as it was so long after Sharp's peak years of writing and plan-making. And whilst many of Sharp's enduring themes were evident the influence of the rapidly changing times of the 1960s was also apparent. It was an attempt to draw together many of Sharp's views on the visual dimensions of planning; upon townscape. The first sentence of the Prefatory Note stated 'This is a book about the physical character of our English towns, about the way they look, about what is destroying their looks, and in part about a particular way of enjoying their looks' (pxiii). Whilst perhaps not Sharp's greatest text, Town and Townscape contained much incisive analysis of enduring relevance, not least with regard to the revitalised fashion for building tall.
After an introductory chapter the book is organised into four sections, 'Face and Figure', 'Town and Townscape', 'Town and Traffic' and 'Town and Tower'. Each of these sections has two or three chapters of variable length. After stressing the importance of the visual appearance of places, the introduction sought to summarise principal threats to the visual quality of place, considered most severe in their impact on historic towns. These were held to be traffic, retail expansion, large-scale speculative development and architectural fashion. He remarked that there was not as much as opposition as might be expected to some of the changes these forces heralded, and when they were 'it is generally for the wrong reasons, for the preservation of the sentimentally picturesque rather than the visually important' (p4).
'Face and Figure' started with a chapter entitled 'Unity in Variety'. The central point Sharp sought to make was that most interesting and rewarding English townscapes are composed from a variety of building ages and architectural styles, but yet they achieve a unity primarily from a shared rhythm, 'In spite of their variousness in materials, in broken roof-lines, in irregular building-lines and so on, each street has something of a common rhythm that constitutes it as a whole in a single even though complex character' (p12). The following chapter, 'The Maintenance of Character' discussed the polar extremes of unfettered modernisation (with various devastating illustrations, such as Chapel Row, Gosport) and preservation, concluding both to be wrong-headed. Generally the goal should be the maintenance of character, with new buildings responding to existing rhythms or, sometimes, to other locally important factors, such as building materials. New buildings of different (typically bigger) scales and forms might be valid contributions to the urban scene, but these should form their own discreet new quarters rather than be shoe-horned into existing streets.
'Town and Townscape' started with a brief chapter, 'A Way of Looking' which reinforced the kinetic quality of townscape. This was followed by 'Oxford Observed', largely a rehash of previous writings but with a lengthy swipe at a then new rose garden, a 'townscape murder' (p54) at the end of the High Street, a planning case in which Sharp had been embroiled. To quote, 'But then the second or third wealthiest college in Oxford, dripping with endowments, snatched at the offer of a few thousand pounds by an alien lady whose god-wot eyes couldn't bear the thought of Oxford without a rose garden, and made in place of the simple grass the kind of small-scaled box-edged multi-plotted rose-and-pleached-beech parterre that might have been successful for a minor Cotswold country house but whose vulgarity in Oxford High Street only seems to show the sad corruption into triviality that can happen where there is no understanding' (p56). The next chapter considered other towns. Starting with London Sharp analysed how views down Whitehall and up Ludgate Hill to St. Paul's cathedral had been marred by then recent buildings (since replaced in the case of Ludgate Hill). Mostly, though, the chapter was a celebration of the visual qualities of various scales and types of settlements. He considered cathedral cities, provincial cities, country towns and villages and industrial towns, with occasional digressions into cases in which he had been embroiled, or to note particular threatened disasters. The section on cathedral cities recorded examples of visual effect from Canterbury and York as well as revisiting the Owengate progression to Durham Cathedral that he had first described at length in Cathedral City. He described subsequent attempts to rebuild Owengate, and the successful rearguard action to save it, as well as his own veiled account of how he finally ceased working in Durham. In the section on provincial city he considered Grey Street in Newcastle (as well as recording the threatened destruction of Eldon Square) and the Wills Memorial Hall tower in Bristol. As ever with Sharp, the country town was held to be one of glories of England, and in Town and Townscape Stamford in Lincolnshire held to be one of the crowning achievements of the form. He also took King's Lynn (another of his previous planning commissions) and Richmond, Yorkshire as examples. Under villages he briefly described Blanchland, Northumberland (a perennial favourite) as well as Dorchester and Thaxted. Finally he briefly sought to make the point that interesting townscapes can be found in rather less obviously prepossessing locations, taking examples from Wigan and Swindon.
There was a self-evident theme to the section 'Town and Traffic'. In the first chapter of the section, 'Car and Character', Sharp presented the by now familiar problem that towns could not accommodate ever rising levels of traffic but that even partial rebuilding would 'produce the kind of devastation, the dismemberment, that the vastly superior resources of America have facilitated in their far inferior cities' (p111). In 'Looking and Living', Sharp discussed demand management measures, rejecting the notion of congestion charging, partly on the grounds of it favouring the affluent. Instead, he promoted the idea of restricting access on the basis of demonstrable need, linked to improved public transport. Thus pretty much the only private cars allowed to penetrate the centre of the town would be those of residents. 'A Way of Redemption' was given over to a worked example of the real, but fictionalised, town of 'Oldborough'.
'Town and Tower' focused on the issue of tall buildings. Organised in three chapters, the first 'Fashion Parade' made Sharp's essential point about tall buildings in the title. For Sharp the then contemporary trend to build high was in essence a matter of fashion rather than stemming from any deeper rationality - an argument with resonance in 2007 as the fashion has returned with a vengeance. This was not an opposition to all tall buildings; Sharp's complaint was the lack of consideration that had been given to when they might, and when they might not, be acceptable. Part of the chapter acerbically described Sharp's work of a few years before when, on behalf of Cambridge City Council, he had opposed the University's intentions to build three high blocks designed by Denys Lasdun - Sharp's reproduction of his mock-up of the potential impacts of the blocks in Town and Townscape, as opposed to Lasdun's actual designs, nearly led to litigation. The subsequent chapter, 'Why High?', was actually a debunking of the arguments in favour of building tall. 'Why Not' catalogued the unfortunate townscape effects of tall buildings in London. He sought to show how the visual effect on the skyline was very different from the conventional exemplar of the benefits of building tall, New York. The former had a complex skyline of long vistas compared to the latter's organisation around on a grid-iron of canyons, devoid of architectural foci. And one bad tall building had a much greater impact than a bad low-rise building due its inescapability over a much wider area. Towards the end of the chapter Sharp argued for a social hierarchy in design; historically tall buildings represented collective values of society, whereas new office blocks, for example, represented private gain. To sum up, 'Building in high towers or slabs serves no essential public or private purpose. It is more costly in mere money. It does not save land. If it sometimes frees ground space it does so at the expense of other buildings' sky-space. It does not keep the town compact. It does not preserve the countryside, but, on the contrary, obtrudes upon it. It is architecturally anarchic. It ruins the scale of surrounding buildings, indeed of a wide locality round about. It can produce unexpected and destructive effects on near and far street-pictures. It reduces the scale and injures the character of near-by open spaces. It is offensive in the hierarchy of the town, subduing spiritual, cultural and civic buildings to insignificance. If it satisfies an architect's megalomania and his client's desire for prestige, these are not conditions which can be permitted to be achieved at expense of a town. It is a mere fashion: a fashion which should now be outlawed before, in its mad progress, it irretrievably ruins every remaining town in the kingdom' (p148-9).
The book finishes with a short conclusion about the goals and limitations of the text. It is a plea for much improvement to be made to towns but in a way that is understanding and respectful of existing qualities and character. This did not mean wholesale preservation or a denial of architectural innovation, but that new buildings should subscribe to the prevailing character of the street.