'A corner of the USA that is forever Putney': Charleston is a masterpiece of urban give and take

Before he drafted the plans for Charleston, South Carolina, the philosopher John Locke was already thinking about religious tolerance. In his Two Tracts on Government, written from 1660 to 1662 but not published until long after his death, Locke was actually pretty down on the very freedom of conscience he would become canonical for championing. ‘In every commonwealth there must be supreme power,’ he writes in these earlier, rarely discussed works. This reticence to express the values he became famous for is often put down to Locke cutting his cloth to suit the absolutist Stuart kings; his liberal turn came after their fall goes the story. Yet this change also came after he planned a new town in the American colonies.

Locke had joined the staff of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a medical capacity, but once his political skills were noted, he was promoted to private secretary. At the time Shaftesbury was not only Chancellor of the Exchequer, but one of The Lords Proprietors of Carolina; a coterie of colonising landowners with legal privileges emanating from ownership of these apparently virgin lands. Shaftesbury and Locke together drafted a document that offered English settlers inducements consisting of land, religious toleration and limited political representation. (Limits that would prove to be highly problematic towards the end of the 18th century). The plan offered Locke a chance to rationalise society to its purest balance; accepting order and risk to achieve freedom and thereby taking a good bet on some prosperity.

Locke's role as the city planner was not simply legal, but spatial and included the creation of a regional plan across the whole of the Carolinas. Charles Town, as it was called, was allocated 12,000 acres, with a further 12,000-acre area for settlers and the colony’s nobility. Counties and towns would be the administrative units. Locke drew up plans to ensure that riverfront plots were narrow but deep, to ensure that the number of properties were high and access to the water was for the many and not the few. Informal settlements were prohibited. Street grids would exist for even the smallest settlement. Each planned town, from Charles Town down, was ‘to be laid out into large, straight and regular streets, and sufficient room left for a wharf if it be upon a navigable river’.

The settlement became Charleston when the focus of the colony moved slightly down the coast. Its relationship to England is far closer than is generally given credit and not because it was designed by one of the nation’s key philosophers when he was still in a secretarial position. The intent was to prevent overdevelopment that would impede access and prevent overcrowding. The plan for Charleston was written following the Great Fire of 1666, after which a City of London edict established a buffer along much of the Thames in which construction was prohibited. The raised promenade at the tip of the Charleston peninsula is a vestige of it; a corner of the USA that is forever Putney.

It doesn’t take long to wander through Charleston’s old town (or ‘south of Broad’ as it is known) to realise that Charleston for a Brit is legible as an utopian outgrowth of London; much as Welwyn Garden City was 250 years later. After the Great Fire, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a more rationalised capital were ignored; and the opportunity to rethink the city was gone, as the government dodged making compulsory land acquisitions and the existing landownership patterns were held over. Charleston was a chance to fulfil this desire for a new intellectual class to create a city from scratch. Although the plan standardised spatially the class system of early colonialism, it was itself based on rationalist principles and writing them down arguably made them easier to attack.

The impact of the London blaze can be sensed in many of the instructions in Locke’s letter, completed in May 1671. Streets should be ‘large, convenient and regular’. The specifications are unsurprisingly hierarchical given that Locke worked for a Lord. Principal streets were to be 80-feet wide, alleys from them 40-feet. Secondary streets were 60 feet, with back streets 30 feet. The street grid would form squares of 600 feet on each side. Lots associated with principal streets were standardized at 75 feet by 280 feet, while those for secondary streets were 60 feet by 285 feet. This mediation in scales is what makes the town so beautiful. Impressive frontages give way to intimate gardens down side streets.

Edinburgh’s New Town is an impressively rigorous piece of Georgian planning. It is however an austere experience living and working in it. The rigidity of the façades, the regularity of the scale: that is until one gets to its edges at Dean Village, the Water of Leith or Carlton Hill and the rhythm relents to meet the topography and the urban grain undulates. This subtlety of texture is built into Charleston, which being away from the centre of political power and filled with entrepreneurial new frontier types who brooked at rule making, was built out in many different ways — albeit according to the plan’s limits. Arrivals from the Caribbean, for example, built houses perpendicular to the street, so cooling breezes could run east to west along exposed verandahs, or piazzas as they are bizarrely called in these parts.

Charleston is a masterpiece of urban give and take. Locke never visited and never embraced his role as planner, so it is impossible to say whether it had any influence on his ideas about tolerance and freedom. Walking through the astonishing variety of Georgian architecture, wedded to the grid, it is very tempting to think that the way in which he reconciled ideas about individual liberty to public order through the ideas of privacy and public space, emerged from how an ideal new town might operate.