My interest in urban design began in the mid 1950s with Professor McCaughan’s history of planning lectures given in the then Department of Civic Design, University of Liverpool. At those lectures ‘Mac’ made it quite clear that he was a follower of Camillo Sitte, a Viennese architect whose main work dated from the last decade of the nineteenth century. After a five-year education in architecture where the heroic dimension of modern architecture was stressed, it came as a refreshing tonic to read the works of a scholar, Sitte, who analysed urban form to distil from it the principles of good design. After Sitte, the writings of Le Corbusier and those of like mind.
