For Town Planning Review the first milestone was the foundation of the Department of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool in 1909, with the editing and publication of a journal on the new subject of "town planning" among its basic duties. Patrick Abercrombie became the iournal's editor and the first issue appeared in April 1910.
The early issues of the Review contained contributions from such pioneers as: Thomas Adams, George Burdett Ford, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Theodora Kimball, and Raymond Unwin. From the start, as well as subjects related to planning in Britain, the coverage of papers in the Review was international in scope, e.g. planning schemes in America, the competition for the new Australian capital at Canberra, and, not least, a set of extended essays on the planning and design of Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Vienna.

The ambition of quarterly publication was broken in 1915 and issues appeared on a rather haphazard schedule until Wesley Dougill joined Abercrombie as co-editor in the later 1920s (becoming sole editor in 1933) and established a regular Spring and Winter rhythm. The few issues published in the "War Time Series" between 1940 and 1948 hardly reflected the momentous developments in town and regional and rural planning in Britain at that time.

The post-war series of the Review commencing in April 1949 must be counted as the second mile stone. Not only was there a new design far the layout, typography and illustrations, a new and extended editorial team under the leadership of Gordon Stephenson, but the contents were re-shaped into a far more consistent set of editorial notes, substantial articles and reviews with occasional discussion items and extended pieces. And quarterly publication was resumed far the first time since 1914. Stephenson followed an active editoriai policy in seeking authors and papers and maintained the TPRs international perspective. In effect he re-founded the iournal on the basis which largely exists today.

More recent milestones have been the foundation (1979) of a companion journal -Third World Planning review - specialising in planning aspects of the less developed countries, and the establishment (1995) of a "TPR Special Series" to provide far the publication of book length sets of essays and monographs.

Town Planning Review today maintains both its founders' wide-ranging view of the scope of "town planning' as an inclusive spatial planning and their international perspective, although it is fair to comment that the bulk of contributions reflect thejournal's British base and its English-language medium.
While TPRs circulation is worldwide (mostly to OECD-type countries), the readership focus has been increasingly directed towards the scientific and research community rather than the professional and practitioner of earlier days. This has been principally achieved through the adoption of the academic 'blindfold' refereeing system.
There are three main features in the TPR today. First is a short invited 'Viewpoint" on a topic of the day. The second (and main section) consists of research and review papers submitted by authors and occasional 'Policy Forum" debates. The third section covers reviews of current books and other occasional media.