New towns were a disaster. Why are we thinking of doing it again?

All the principles of Howard’s garden cities were applied and, pretty much everywhere, those principles failed. Britain’s new towns, for all that some are now OK, were without question a failure.

In 1898, Ebeneezer Howard published ‘To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’ which, in its 1902 reprint became ‘Garden Cities of To-Morrow’ and in doing so set out a great deal of what became modern town planning and especially what often gets called development management. The heart of Howard’s thesis was his belief, probably justified by the realities of urban life, that cities were grim, unpleasant, overcrowded and chaotic:

“There is, however, a question in regard to which one can scarcely find any difference of opinion. It is well-nigh universally agreed by men of all parties, not only in England, but all over Europe and America and our colonies, that it is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts.”

I am, as you know, an advocate of suburbia and the three magnets model Howard opens his book with sums up why:

The ‘three magnets’ model endeavours to explain why it is simpler to create places that are both town and country than to attempt the mitigation of problems inherent in the traditional rural-urban division. But Howard believed also that this ideal place had to be created purposefully, without direction (in Howard’s mind by men like him rather than the state as became the case) the trend of a depopulating countryside and overcrowded slums would continue. Howard did, at least, put his money where his mouth was (although most of the money came from people such as George Cadbury and William Lever who had already developed garden suburbs, Bournville and Port Sunlight, linked to their industry) and helped set up firstly the Garden City Association and the Garden City Pioneer Company and, when Earl Grey sought to sell the Letchworth Estate, First Garden City Ltd, which bought the estate.

One of the principles of Howard’s garden city is that the functions of society and economy need to be separated - zoned. Thus agriculture, industry, commerce and housing are placed apart from each other so their bad effects, I guess we’d call them ‘negative externalities’ these days, don’t damage other functions. If Walter Christaller is the godfather of strategic planning then Ebeneezer Howard is responsible for zoning and the urban master-plan. And here lies the problem. Howard didn’t like the suburban development he saw around England’s cities seeing it as piecemeal, opportunistic and, the worst sin for Edwardian liberal intellectuals, unplanned. It suited Howard and others to focus on the self-evident problems of those cities rather than the suburban expansion that had, as people became richer, begun to mitigate those inner urban problems.

Howard, like Cadbury, Lever and Rowntree, was an advocate for a patrician approach to housing little different to the early municipal housing advocates who gave us Ripleyville and other Bradford developments. Working class people would be rehoused (the assumption was, still is, that they haven’t the capacity to do this of their own volition) in better places designed by great and grand people with a liberal social conscience. Obviously the commercial development of suburbia didn’t fit the model for two reasons, it wasn’t planned and it was predicated on the opportunity of ownership. Those 19th century capital owners, for all their social conscience, didn’t believe that the people who worked in their factories could aspire to property ownership. Howard indulged this vanity and helped create the idea that housing was a sort of social service (but only for the working classes).

Which brings us to the idea of new towns. Everyone accepts that the post-WW2 new towns development was a child of Howard’s 1898 book. As were the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), the anti-sprawl arguments of Patrick Abercrombie, and in the USA the birth of zoning and urban growth boundaries. Meanwhile the unregulated market followed railways, roads and Howard’s ‘town-country’ to create a different suburb. Sometimes this involved some sort of state planning but mostly it was those terrible things you learned about in ‘O’ level geography - ribbon development, sprawl and what the intellectual descendants of Howard saw as ‘uncontrolled’, ‘soulless’ and dull. In the ‘battle’ to create suburbia, Letchworth was a twee footnote. The real story was told by John Barwell Cator, by the Metropolitan Surplus Lands Committee, and a hundred or so private developers who rolled out England’s semi-detached landscape. There were no grand plans, no committees of the great and the good, no academics or great architects. There were just developers, designers and architects who did a day job meeting the desires of people wanting to escape the unpleasantness of inner city life.

New towns, however, were a reaction to the terrible creativity of private developers. Instead of allowing the organic growth of a city, instead we’d apply a tourniquet called a green belt and designate places beyond that belt (a thing vaguely derived from Howard’s ideas but more an elitist reaction to the suburb - “Your vile suburbs can offer nothing but the dullness of the grave” as Edward Bulwer-Lytton sneered) as suitable for the development of towns along, sort of, the principles set out by Ebeneezer Howard in the days before the motor car. And we built them, Crawley, Swanley, Stevenage, Harlow, Basildon, Slough and Corby. All sculpted in concrete and designed to rehouse the urban poor in corporation homes far from the places and communities that shaped those people. Some, because of access to good work, have succeeded but many - Skelmersdale, Washington, Cumbernauld and Cwnbran - became bywords for decaying brutalist dystopia. All the principles of Howard’s garden cities were applied and, pretty much everywhere, those principles failed. Britain’s new towns, for all that some are now OK, were without question a failure. Until right-to-buy and angry councils broke the state corporations, new towns were badly managed authoritarian disasters.

We should have learned. Cutesy places like Letchworth aside, the adoption of new towns as a way to meet housing needs resulted in badly designed, inhuman environments that ticked boxes for all the architects and urban designers but did nothing for working class families decamped from London, Glasgow or Liverpool. So when the government, media and supposed experts tell us that the solution to our housing problems lie in a new generation of new towns - garden suburbs, garden villages and all the rest of the tweeness - driven by state powers of compulsory purchase and much talk of ‘value capture’, we really should head for the hills. New towns were a failure. Howard thought about places with a population of ten to twenty thousand all self-contained, zoned and managed. Instead we built Easterhouse and Kirkby.

The best suburbs weren’t designed as new towns but were built entirely speculatively by a host of private builders. Whether it’s Alwoodley, Worsley, Sutton Coldfield or a hundred other extensions to existing towns, the private developer created 21st century England. And most of it isn’t dreadful. But instead of learning the lesson of the 1930s - let people build on land they own - we are back with new towns, the failed experiment of the 1950s and 1960s. Today these will come with a set of other policy prescriptions -walkability, cycling infrastructure, zero carbon and sustainability. No thought will go into how people actually live or to the idea that we might like to make it a little easier or better for people to live how they want to live.

Meanwhile, Labour adjacent consultancy WPI has rolled out a new towns strategy - giving us 12 places, from Leeds through Huntingdonshire to South Gloucestershire where the government might be able to get away with a big(-ish) new town. We’re back to people in a London office sticking pins in a map as a solution to the UK’s housing crisis, all predicated on the terrible idea that newly created, vaguely accountable and state-owned “New Town Development Corporations (NTDCs)” will be given the power to seize land at low values, develop to get higher values and then pocket the difference to spend on ill-defined ‘infrastructure’.

New towns aren’t a bad idea if they’re done the way Ebeneezer Howard envisioned. But when they are developed by the state with the explicit objective of stopping private suburban development (or at least such development undirected by the state), then new towns are a really bad idea. And to cap it all none of this stands any chance of fixing Britain’s huge housing problems.