"THE HAPPY COLONY"

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 251, 17 July 1919, Page 5

"THE HAPPY COLONY"

OLD SCHEME OP TOW-PLANNING. Town-planning as an idea is not something of to-day, or even ot the present generation. There has come into the possession of a Wellington collector of "interesting matter referring to early New Zealand a copy of a beautifully, lithographed design of the perfect city, which was evidently proposed to be established somewhere in New Zealand by some early town-planners of noble ideals. The printed title to the lithographed drawing reads, quaintly enough: "View of the colleges for the Happy Colony, to be established in New Zealand by the workmen of Great Britain." Beneath the title it is stated thai the sketch was designed by Robert Peinberton, F.R.S.L., and below the sketch are the names of William Armstrong, architect, and Day and Son, lithographers to the Queen. Tlio sketch shows i>. vast circular space, with a college building in the centre, surrounded by fifty acres of well-ordered shrubberies, and outside thft again are vast Harden plots, great plans of the terrestrial and celestial hemispheres, and surrounding the whole, large and templelike buildings of classic design, which presumably form the workshops and •warehouses of this Utopian city. The residential portion of the city is not indicated, the assumption being that then, as now, the people should live in wellsized suburbs beyond the circular enclosure. There is no indication given as to where it was proposed .to establish this "city of fair dreams," and well versed as he is in matters concerning the early history of the Dominion, the owner has so far not been able to trace, the origin of the plan, nor has ho the slightest notion as to what body of "the workmen of Great Britain" were to* benefit' by the scheme. Suffice to say that the germ of town-planning must have been fairly active seventy or more years ago to give expression to such a quaint and altogether delightful conception of what : ,a city should be.