UTOPIAN DREAMS

A pioneering spirit and a commitment to modernist design, as the British New Towns were dreamt up.

The pioneers hitched up their wagons, left the cities, travelled to the fringes and built themselves a new place to be proud of. Frontier towns constructed on dreams of self sufficiency and healthy, happy lives. A utopian vision at its finest and brought to life across Britain in the post-war decades - albeit in truth a little less wild west and with rather more Westminster legislation.

Utopia has long been a preoccupation of the human condition, a place that seeks to offer the perfect conditions for life in every way. Utopia’s can be diverse and very personal, after all society is not homogenous and communities often have conflicting desires. But, as Oscar Wilde put it:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

Following the second world war Britain was in need of restoration, to heal the wounds, to clear the inner-city slums and to provide a better quality of life for the people. These very practical needs collided head first with modernism, which was gaining popularity as the dominant architectural language, in this new age of freedom and liberality.

Out of this cauldron emerged the New Towns Act (1946), from which more than 20 new settlements would be commissioned.

The Act allowed for the creation of New Town Development Corporations, public bodies responsible for completing the towns, they would be given significant budgets and, importantly, land acquisition powers, an essential first step.

The Minister of Town and Country Planning, Mr Silkin (subsequently Lord) made it clear that this must be a step away from suburban sprawl and towards a new plan, creating self sufficient, self contained settlements, built sufficiently far away from their parent cities, to ensure a green border and the preservation of substantial portions of the countryside.

Silkin’s reading on the new town concept had taken him back as far as Sir Thomas More, author of ‘Utopia’ published in Latin in 1516, in which he proposed a scheme of 54 new towns on an imaginary island, each 23 miles apart. As Silkin put it during the parliamentary debate:

“Incidentally, Sir Thomas More was beheaded, but that must not be regarded as a precedent for the treatment of town planners”.

(HANSARD NEW TOWNS BILL HC Deb 08 May 1946 vol 422 cc1072-184)

The discussions around utopias and new towns progressed from 1516 and in the late 1890s, Ebenezer Howard created the Garden City Movement, the most significant forefather of the British New Towns. Howard’s book ‘To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’, published in 1898, brought together the ideas of artists, writers and free-thinkers and led directly to the establishment of the privately funded Letchworth Garden City in 1903.

An improved and refined version, Welwyn Garden City followed in 1920 and the towns became examples of what could be achieved with forward planning and a commitment to a spacious layout with significant green space. Both towns sought to achieve self sufficiency, and both would later become prime London commuter real-estate, something that many of our contemporary New Towns would struggle with in time.

Still though, the garden cities would stick in the minds of planners, politicians and dreamers. Howard died in 1928, his legacy secure, his Garden Cities incomplete.

The first new town to be commissioned under the Act was Stevenage, in 1946. As the time there was already a small settlement of approximately 4,000 people here and before the ground had been broken local residents protested, changing the name of the town station to ‘Silkingrad’, in advance of the arrival of Lord Silkin. At a subsequent public meeting Silkin told the crowds:

“It’s no good your jeering, it’s going to be done”.

And done it would be. New towns housing thousands of people would follow across Britain. An arduous beginning to an ambitious, courageous, controversial attempt and one of the biggest town planning projects that had ever been undertaken. A utopian vision brought into reality on a grand scale.

It would be easy to declare the new towns as formulaic, bland places, but that would be dismissing a remarkable urban experiment that happened across the UK, creating places where people continue to live content and happy lives.