Sharp was born in
Bishop Auckland in County Durham, England. He attended the local
grammar school and, between 1918 and 1922, spent four years working for the borough surveyor. He then moved to
Margate, Kent, to work on the town's
development plan, before working in
Canterbury and London where he worked for the planning consultants
Thomas Adams and
Francis Longstreth Thompson. His next post was as regional planning assistant to the South West Lancashire Regional Advisory Group, but after credit for his lengthy report was given, as was traditional, to the honorary surveyor, he angrily resigned, and was unable to find work for two years. Sharp used this enforced leisure to write
Town and Countryside (1932), which established him as a formidable polemicist. He challenged the
garden city movement, which sought to unite town and country, by insisting on their separate individual qualities. He finished the book in the family home in County Durham, an area which, with its contrasts between deprived coal mining areas and the fine architecture of the
city of Durham, was a lifelong inspiration to him. As a consultant, he advised on the protection of the city from development that would compromise its environmental quality.
Oxford,
Salisbury and
Chichester – for which he wrote development plans just before and then after the end of
the war. After a brief return to Durham to found the first undergraduate town planning course in the country, he returned to establish his own planning consultancy in Oxford, and was personally disappointed when Durham University failed to appoint him as its first chair of town planning. Sharp became president of the
Town Planning Institute in 1945–6, and of the
Institute of Landscape Architects in 1949–51. He was appointed
CBE in 1951. However, as a consultant based in Oxford, Sharp's inability to compromise made work hard to find. He spent much of his time writing poems and novels, for the most part unpublished. His last book on planning was
Town and Townscape (1968). He married Rachel Dorothy Morrison in 1963; they had no children. She survived him following his death in Oxford in 1978, aged 76. ==Published works==