Colin Buchanan was a British town planner, educator, and author. He was a professor of transport at Imperial College, London.
Background
Colin Buchanan was born on August 22, 1907, in Simla, India. He was the son of William Ernest and Laura Kate Buchanan. Buchanan was born into a family of civil engineers whose work helped to shape cities. His great-grandfather practiced civil engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland. His grandfather traveled and worked as an engineer all over the world; his uncle Sir George Buchanan was knighted for building a harbor in the city of Rangoon, India, and his father, also an engineer, built several major structures, including a water supply system in Simla. India, which is where Buchanan was born. For the first three years of his life, Buchanan remained in India; then his mother brought him and his sister back to England, where he remained for the remaining years of his youth.
Education
Colin Buchanan was educated at Berkhamsted School. He also attended Imperial College, London.
After completing his education at Imperial College, Colin Buchanan worked in various international locations, including Sudan; but it was inside the United Kingdom that he left his most distinctive mark as an engineer and city planner. After working for several years, Buchanan wrote his first book, but it was never published. He worked on it during the 1930s while working at the Office of the Ministry of Transport. He was responsible for road improvements in Great Britain at that time and often traveled about, taking photographs of traffic problems and automobile accidents, chronicling where and why the majority of accidents occurred. He never found a publisher for this work, although his interest in the effects of traffic and automobile safety influenced much of his later work.
During World War II Buchanan was sent to Egypt and then to Sudan, where he oversaw the building of a bridge across the Great White Nile. The bridge handled a different type of traffic: providing a military supply route across Sudan to India and Burma. While serving his country in the war, Buchanan rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
From 1946 to 1960 he was at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in London, working mainly on planning and transport in the London area. Meanwhile, he had qualified as an architect, and he designed his own house. After the Ministry moved him to its Inspectorate, Buchanan led public inquiries, mostly into slum clearance. Later, as Principal Inspector, he conducted inquiries into important projects such as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Winfrith Heath, Dorset; the Oldbury Nuclear Power Station, Gloucestershire; Trawsfynnydd Nuclear Power Station, Snowdonia; and the Piccadilly Circus redevelopment. Ernest Marples moved Buchanan to the Ministry of Transport as Urban Planning Adviser in 1961.
After completing his Report, Buchanan formed the consultancy Colin Buchanan and Partners, and in 1963 he was appointed to the new Chair of Transport at Imperial College. From 1968 to 1970 he sat on the Roskill Commission into London's third airport, but submitted a minority report dissenting, on planning grounds, from the recommendation that the airport should be constructed north of the Chilterns in the Vale of Aylesbury - instead, he argued for the site on Maplin Sands.
In 1973 he was appointed the first Director of the new School of Advanced Urban Studies at the University of Bristol. Buchanan was a Fellow and past Vice-President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Fellow and past President of the Royal Town Planning Institute, which awarded him its Gold Medal. From 1980 to 1985 he was President of the Council for the Protection of Rural England.
For the next seventeen years he devoted himself to his hobbies of photography and touring Britain and Europe in a motorhome he designed himself. He did not give up driving until he reached his ninetieth year; then did so only reluctantly.
A combination of an inquiring mind, an overseas childhood, and a deep vein of stubbornness led to Colin Buchanan's questioning accepted wisdom on the role and impact of the motor vehicle in towns. He also had a lively curiosity about the behaviour of human beings and their motor vehicles; on one occasion, in search of suitable illustrations for his personal research into driver behaviour, he reportedly photographed a ministry superior unknowingly, while the latter was performing a dangerous manoeuvre on the road.
This love-hate relationship with the car was allied to a passionate interest in what is now called environmental planning, especially the theories of the Swedish urbanist Alker Tripp, whose concept of promoting cities as a set of environmentally protected precincts was to be taken up with great subtlety and power in the 1963 report.
Personality
After buying his first car, Colin Buchanan took up camping, making his own tents with a sewing machine; do-it-yourself, carpentry, caravans and motor-homes remained his enduring passions.
Interests
photography, carpentry, caravan touring
Connections
In 1933 Colin Buchanan married Elsie Alice Mitchell. They had three children: Susan, Malcolm, and David. In 1984 his wife died.