Origins
Over two million people in the UK live in new towns. The new towns idea originated in the British Garden City Movement. Letchworth (begun 1903) and Welwyn Garden City (from 1919), both in the English county of Hertfordshire, were the realisations of the utopian ideals of Ebenezer Howard. The ‘father’ of the Garden City Movement wanted new communities of homes with gardens, built around green spaces, with a distinctive town centre and local neighbourhood centres. A key principle of garden cities was ‘self-sufficiency’: they were to contain commerce, services and manufacturing jobs to prevent commuting and suburban sprawl. It was a nice idea, but it never really succeeded in the garden cities. Nor would it in the postwar new towns.
Howard and his followers also wanted the garden cities to create socially mixed and balanced communities, comprising all classes and occupations. But this vision was compromised as the middle-class residential wards in Welwyn and Letchworth were better provided for in terms of access to amenities.
Labour and the New Towns Programme from 1946
In 1945 The New Towns Committee was appointed by the incoming Labour government. Headed by Lord John Reith, best known for founding the BBC, it included leading town planners, architects and politicians. Its report led to The New Towns Act of 1946, passed in the aftermath of the air raids that destroyed many city centres, greatly adding to the housing shortage caused by the moratorium on house building during the conflict.
The original generation of new towns were built from 1947, the first and most totemic being Stevenage in Hertfordshire. It was opposed by many locals, and nicknamed ‘Silkingrad’ after the Minister for Town Planning, Lewis Silkin. As with all new towns its initial decade was managed into existence by a powerful development corporation armed with tools such as compulsory purchase of land and property, and Treasury finance. Locals who loved their rural small town community hated that. Yet it was Stevenage where Matthew Pennycook, The Minister of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, went to announce Labour’s intention for a programme of new towns in 2024 (Joel Budd, ‘The Shock of the New’, Economist 14-09-2014; article online but paywalled)
Welwyn Garden City was also in Hertfordshire, and was designated as a new town in 1947. This was in essence a testament to the umbilical cord in town planning between the Edwardian Garden City movement and the postwar new towns. Frederic Osborn, who was a leading planner in both Letchworth and Welwyn, served on the New Towns Committee in 1945 and lived in WGC until his death.
Eight new towns were built around London from the 1940s, and over 20 were built overall across the UK. They offered good housing and employment to thousands of working-class families. But therein lay a problem: the vast majority of people who moved from the older urban areas to new towns were working class, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. Most homes were rental, there simply was not enough suburban-style housing for owner occupation to attract the middle classes. The old Garden City ideals of socially mixed communities went unrealised.
In 1965 the Labour government passed another significant New Towns Act, which led to the creation of a further generation of new communities, the most famous of which has become Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. Now the largest of the UK new towns, it was generally a successful experiment in modern town planning. Most of its first citizens were ‘decanted’ from London from 1970, but it now has a very diverse population. The development corporation was more successful than its predecessors in growing a middle-class population: as well as for rent, many new homes were available for ownership.
‘New towns like Milton Keynes’…
It’s common for newspaper articles on the current government’s plans for new towns to argue they will be like Milton Keynes. But the picture is way more complex. ‘MK’ as its citizens call it was planned by the Labour Peer Lord Llewelyn-Davies and his team from 1967-1970 as a city for the motor car. Its gridroad system earned it the monicker ‘the little Los Angeles of Buckinghamshire’, an image conjuring up a free-wheeling motorised lifestyle of the future. The new city was also mostly built to low to medium densities.
Today, however, town planning orthodoxy favours high housing densities, public transport and an assumption against the motor car. Against the grain of the original master plan, the city centre is now packed with new apartments, and recently constructed residential ‘gridsquares’ in MK have taken on board this fashionable turn against private car usage. Yet they may unwittingly indicate current and future failures in new community planning. MK now has streets crowded with parked cars, because not enough garages and driveways were made available for lower-income groups in their higher-density small housing units. It’s a constant reminder that despite what the elites want – everyone taking buses and trains – most people who can afford a car will get one. And those who live in poorer housing areas will suffer environmental degradation as a consequence of inadequate planning for private car use.
What will the next generation of new towns look like?
The New Towns Taskforce, appointed in mid-2024 is a strong team. Headed by Sir Michael Lyons, a former BBC director (think John Reith, a nice historical echo there) it synthesises expertise in architecture, town planning, housing policy, construction and civil engineering. Its first meeting was held in Milton Keynes in the summer of 2024 and it will report its plans in 2025. The form of the new towns, their location and the delivery vehicles are right at the heart of its work. (The New Towns Taskforce – GOV.UK)
One influential company seeking to influence the direction of travel in the new towns was Create Streets. Their ‘gentle density’ approach favoured Poundbury style residential areas, and vibrant town centres, possibly with a continental dash of trams and café culture. But the outfit was axed by the Housing Minister in mid-November 2024. (The strange death of the Office for Place | Nicholas Boys Smith | The Critic Magazine)
One question now is whether the design of new towns might jettison the imprints of Poundbury and its copycats, and aim for a more cheapskate higher-density pattern. Take the train from Slough to Paddington where hundreds of blocks of flats of varying quality are being thrown up, and you might get a vision of new towns built without the family unit in mind, where blocks of new flats and streets of tiny boxy houses prevail. (New towns and grey belt: Healthy placemaking or just housing numbers? | The Planner)
The building developers will also want to maximise profit by insisting on the most economical materials and highest numbers of units per hectare. But the New Towns Taskforce should really insist that many new homes are built with gardens. The most successful areas of new towns are not crammed with houses, as favoured by Richard Rogers, but resemble well-planned suburban housing estates with convenient access to local facilities.
Where will they be built?
A number of online articles anticipating locations and the findings of the New Towns Taskforce have sprung up in recent months. (Potential Locations for Labour’s New Towns – Urbanist Architecture – Small Architecture Company London) Cambridge, with nearby Cambourne and Northstowe, is a key contender. So too are Milton Keynes and the M1 corridor and Ebbsfleet, both for their proximity to London and key transport links. Cities of the West Midlands, Manchester and Merseyside in the North West, and the prosperous southern town of Reading are also candidates for accelerated urban expansion. Bicester in Oxfordshire, a labyrinth of new housing estates, could also do with a proper master plan.
What’s noticeable here, however, is the extension of existing areas and their merging under a so-called ‘new town’ status. This is what happened to Northampton, for example, after 1967. There seems to be little appetite for designating large swathes of open countryside for tabula rasa new towns. (Peter Foster ‘Building new UK towns needs radical approach, says task force chair’, Financial Times, 4-10-2024; article online but paywalled)
Delivery problems
Political skill sets: Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, is clearly out of her depth, grasping around for solutions to problems she doesn’t fully understand. Her interview with Trevor Phillips on SKY TV on 8 December 2024 showed her pitiful lack of grasp of detail. (Angela Rayner just made a mistake so jaw dropping it shows Labour are taking us for fools)
The problems that ‘two homes Rayner’ seeks to address are manifold:
The speed of construction: by its own admission the Government isn’t anticipating ‘spades in the ground’ until the end of this current Parliament. This is a very different scenario to the accelerated delivery of new towns following the 1946 and 1965 Acts, where spades and diggers were soon in motion.
Town and Country Planning Acts: the need to reform the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and its subsequent iterations is a controversial topic of debate. Freeing up land on greenbelts is often mooted, but rarely delivered. Large-scale new housing in rural areas is frowned upon, and politicians keep on making the mistake of promising that precious countryside will be spared new developments. A recent article in The Planner, the journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute also draws attention to the centrality of the national government in delivering the earlier new towns, whereas this government likes to come across all ‘local democracy’ and argue for locally-led initiatives. Conversely it also states its ‘Plan for Change’ will trump local governments’ objections to large-scale development. Given the quality of local government is very uneven across the UK, however, a departure from the earlier model of powerful development corporations with extensive financial and structural support from central government is unwise. Labour seems confused over the central versus local government problem in the delivery of mass housing. (New towns unboxed: The challenge of creating new settlements | The Planner)
Nimbyism: local populations also vary in terms of class, ethnicity and age. A much larger middle-class population lives in rural England than in the 1940s and 1960s. Coupled with the rise of rural second-home ownership by wealthy city dwellers keen to maintain property values and their escapist rural idyll, an articulate and well-financed campaign comprised of Range Rovers and Barbour jackets will challenge any proposals for new towns .They will be strongly supported by the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England.
Size: a clear tension exists between the super-sized new towns like Milton Keynes and those smaller towns built during the 1990s and since 2000. MK now has upwards of 200,000 citizens, but ‘sustainable’ new developments such as Northstowe near Cambridge aimed at 10,000 dwellings. Nor have they aimed for self-sufficiency but have a marked dormitory feel about them. (Northstowe: The broken-promise new town built ‘with no heart’ – BBC News) Large master planned new towns would be better enabled to pursue goals of self-sufficiency, militate against commuting, and to provide much-needed volume housing. Yet the preference, and the realities of finance and land availability, and opposition to large-scale town planning, may well favour a continuum of smaller new communities and urban extensions. That will only shave the edges off the housing shortage, it won’t do much to recreate the heady days of 300,000 new homes per year achieved during the 1950s.
So the big question is: will an impressive, sizeable and popular wave of new towns get built in the 2030s, or will they become, in words Angela Rayner used in a television debate during the 2024 General Election, ‘an abstract failure’? If the new towns add up to very little, this will symbolise the failure of Labour to deliver its much vaunted 1.5 million new homes.
