New towns, old mistakes

New towns are much in the news at the moment – not least at the house builders’ house magazine, The Times.

Just this week, Emma Duncan’s column was apologising for the mess that post-war towns created and claiming the “next iteration” (you have been warned) needs to get five things right: place, politics, plan, people and money. No pressure then.

Let’s look at place, where Ms Duncan concludes new towns in prosperous parts of the Midlands and south-east have done well, while those in economically depressed areas haven’t. But then much the same could be said of old towns too.

“Don’t look at new towns as a way of reviving failing regional economies,” she quotes former TCPA chair Lee Shostak as saying. A pity perhaps, because house building is the approach of current planning reforms to, er, reviving failing regional economies.

“New homes create jobs and investment in construction,” warbles the planning consultation paper.

So where to build them then? Apparently, instead of “steamrollering decisions” (the planning consultation’s approach), the Government should find places short of investment and bribe local communities with a hospital or better roads or whatever.

Just think, as well as all those sprawl homes, you could have a motorway surrounded by distribution sheds and a hospital with insufficient staff and beds.

But then we’re into the nitty-gritty, a map of “housing demand” from consultancy Lichfields.

“It reckons that the Oxford to Cambridge Arc is the best bet,” she says, to no-one’s surprise.

All those consultants and developers who wasted all that cash planning for the last time that particular mega-sprawl belch was Government policy will surely agree.

And just to maximise profitability, er sorry, concern for housing the poorest in society, Lichfields also suggests the M3 corridor, the M20 corridor, mid-Sussex and north Essex.

Fill your boots, lads, there’s big dosh to be made.

But perhaps, instead of enriching consultants and developers, we could look back six decades, to a time when a major local authority embarked on a regional search for a potential new town location.

In 1961, the old London County Council published results of a two-year study into location of a new town anywhere south-east of a line from the Wash to the Solent. Its five criteria for a site were:

• No high agricultural value
• Adequate drainage
• Abundant water supply
• Good road and rail links (though not to London – it wasn’t supposed to be a dormitory)
• Attractive to industrialists

Highly productive farmland or lack of water ruled out absolutely everywhere north of the Thames valley, including the whole Oxford-Cambridge Arc. High-quality landscapes ruled out Kent, Sussex, south Hampshire and the Chilterns. That just left a narrow corridor heading west from London between the routes of the then-planned M3 and M4.

In the end, the LCC chose Hook, a small village close to the planned M3 (to London!) and a mainline railway (also to London). It planned a new town for 100,000 people, with all the early 1960s gizmos: Radburn layouts, pedestrian underpasses, deck-access town centre, concrete and cars everywhere.

It sparked huge local objections, including the local authorities, while support from the Government, who believed it alone had the right to dump new towns on people, was lacking. So Hook New Town never happened, though it may have helped the move into regional plans for “Area 8” in the Blackwater Valley and relentless expansion of Basingstoke.

But perhaps a better legacy would be to look at the work the LCC did on the constraints on major development in south and east England. In the 60 years since then, enormous development loads have been dumped on the regions, despite them having the most productive farmland in the country, water shortages and severe flooding threats from climate change.

But Tufton Street is in charge of English planning policy now, and the Government needs to sprinkle a little glitter of post-war optimism around before it unleashes house builders and consultants to accrue wealth beyond even their wildest dreams.

Jon Reeds