Reflooring doesn’t always make me think of planning. However, removing the underlay at my in-laws’ house recently revealed an undisturbed copy of The Times from February 1980. It was pleasant to travel back 42 years to read about my team, Nottingham Forest, on the march to their first of two European Cups, but what piqued my interest was an advert to entice people and businesses to Peterborough, dubbed “the Peterborough Effect”.
The promise of a new home to buy or rent, connectivity to London and “the industrial Midlands”, plus £1.60 per sq ft for new commercial floorspace, was reminiscent of a bygone era. However, the Peterborough Effect got my old grey matter working on the concept of new towns, and whether they could be reimagined to address the ongoing housing crisis.
Post-war optimism
The original New Towns Act passed its 75-year milestone last year, which was also the 75th anniversary of the first designated new town. Stevenage, along with the majority of other first-wave new towns, such as Harlow, were “ring towns” around London designed to accommodate population overspill from the capital. Part of a wave of post-war optimism, they aimed to provide suitable homes, green space and employment opportunities for incoming residents.
Harlow and Stevenage were intended to be standalone, non-dormitory towns. Until the late 1950s, new towns expanded smaller settlements, with the “ring town” concept restricting further outwards expansion, coupled with the presence of the Metropolitan Green Belt.
The Act legislated for development corporations with wide-ranging powers to drive forward development. Typically, these corporations existed for 20-30 years until a critical mass of infrastructure, homes, employment opportunities and services was established.
The second wave of new towns, from the 1960s until the last official designation of Central Lancashire in the early 1970s, looked to expand on larger, more established settlements, such as Redditch (32,000 residents on designation) and Peterborough (81,000). This meant that those in the second wave, which were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, had an existing centre and character.
Reasons for designation included new homes for the existing urban population (Redditch, Milton Keynes), but also for regeneration (Telford, Central Lancashire) and to act as an economic counterweight to London (Peterborough).
From the late 1980s there has been a noticeable shift away from new towns, with “urban renaissance” promoted by successive governments from New Labour onwards prioritising brownfield development and revitalising previously neglected centres and city fringe areas.
This approach coincides with the reduction in state intervention from the Thatcher administration onwards. By this period, post-war reconstruction and Victorian slum clearance was complete and, by the late 1990s, Britain had diversified away from its traditional manufacturing base. So the new towns of the past 25 years have been of a smaller scale. Examples such as Poundbury in Dorchester and Dickens Heath close to Solihull are effectively “bolt on” or dormitory settlements. Both address local needs rather than wider, more regional needs, as the earlier new towns had.
Market and state
What could we learn from this history? A number of new settlements are proposed, for example at Worcestershire Parkway, which could ultimately deliver 10,000 homes and new employment development. However, many of these new settlements lack an overarching organisation to manage growth and they struggle for initial capital to deliver essential infrastructure. Could a solution be delivered by the public sector – such as Homes England – as a pump primer for development? Should the New Towns Act of 1981 be utilised to designate new towns and create development corporations? Certainly, the corporation approach is being considered to manage potential growth with the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.
Do we need to think bigger – as with the earlier new towns? The first 25 years of new towns is the only time the country has consistently delivered more than 300,000 new homes a year and was the result of market and state working together. To truly “level up” and solve the housing crisis, perhaps greater government intervention is needed again.
Neal Allcock is a partner at Carter Jonas
