New Towns: What Can We Learn From History?

From Garden Cities to New Towns: The Background

The New Town policies originated from the Garden Cities Movement, inspired by Ebenezer Howard, who sought to combine the benefits of town and country in smaller settlements. Disturbed by Victorian city overcrowding and poor conditions, he envisioned settlements capped at 25,000 people, with new ones created as populations grew. Howard’s prototypes, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities in Hertfordshire were built in the early 20th century and remain influential.

Howard, alongside Frederic Osborn, established the New Townsmen group to advocate for dispersal and new communities. By the 1930s, there were proposals for settlements encircling London. Osborn, a Welwyn resident, became a leading figure in post-war New Towns. The 1930s also highlighted regional imbalances, with London’s prosperity contrasting with the North’s decline and unplanned suburban sprawl, raising concerns. The 1940 Barlow Report called for decentralisation and better housing in New Towns.

The pivotal moment came with the 1944 Abercrombie Plan, proposing towns 25–30 miles from London. The 1946 New Towns Act empowered the government to designate sites, create Development Corporations, and acquire land. Criteria included transport links, site suitability, and proximity to employment.

While Howard’s ideas were key, other influences emerged, such as Radbur , in New Jersey, which pioneered car-centric planning, separating vehicles from pedestrians and organising homes into neighbourhood blocks—a model adopted in many New Towns.

The first wave of New Towns in the late 1940s and 1950s was London-centric, with Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead, and Harlow, among others, alongside regional examples like Peterlee and Corby, and three in Scotland. A second wave in the early 1960s under Harold Macmillan expanded to areas like Redditch and Washington to address overspill from cities outside London.

The final and arguably the most successful wave came after the 1964 South East Report, recommending mor, and large, towns further from London to meet rising housing demands. This led to Milton Keynes and expansions in Peterborough and Northampton, with populations far exceeding Howard’s 25,000 limit. This phase extended into the 1970s.

With the arrival of the Thatcher government in 1979, the political weather shifted away from New Towns and towards a more laissez-faire, private sector-driven approach to housebuilding, though green belts remained protected.

So, what does this all tell us about what is possible and desirable this time, and what lessons can be drawn for future planning?

1) The original New Towns were not that significant a contributor to housing numbers

The original New Towns loom larger in the post-war narrative around housing and planning than they deserve based on number alone. According to a United Nations report from 1973, housing starts in New Towns had constituted only about 2.5% of total housing delivery – although for affordable housing, the figure was somewhat higher at 5%.

A recent report from the Centre for Cities puts the figure slightly higher, at 3.3% over the forty years since the original act; this may be because, as it says, the rate of building was highest in the 1970s at around 5% of the total, perhaps reflecting the particular success of Milton Keynes, the last New Town.

Another way of looking at this is via population. The UK population grew by 14.3m between 1946 – when the first new town was approved – and 2011, while the figure for the designated new towns was 1.6m. By this measure, about 11% of the population increase was accounted for by New Towns.

This is more flattering, perhaps due to the disproportionate number of families attracted to the settlements. Nevertheless, this still means that 89% of the population growth was accommodated more organically in existing areas.

Given these relatively low figures, it might be worth returning to the question asked by that same UN report in 1973: Given the effort and finance put into the New Towns, what was being done to improve planning and conditions in the communities in which 97.5% of housing starts were located?

Centre for Cities, meanwhile, noted that to make a meaningful contribution to supply, the wave of New Towns now being announced would need to be much larger than anything seen in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s.

2) Making them a more significant driver of housing delivery will be difficult

If the policy is to be successful, then it will have to lead to towns being built faster and at a larger scale than in the 50s or 60s.

The reaction to the first-ever New Town – Stevenage in Hertfordshire– gives an indication of the opposition the government will have to overcome. There were demonstrations and petitions, and the local MP was vocally opposed. This film clip from the era gives a flavour of what was happening.

General opposition to development has, of course, substantially increased since then. Building new towns at anything like the scale required to make a difference will mean the government will have to face down a lot of very vocal anti-development campaigns.

3) Urban Extensions are probably more desirable than discrete settlements

The policy context – and the attractions of city and town centres – have changed considerably since the first half of the twentieth century. We have a greater understanding of the importance of cities and economic agglomeration. We no longer think of them as congested places, whose populations needs spreading out. Any desire to ‘escape the city’ is as likely to be due to high house prices as a desire for a quiet life. Indeed many think tanks would argue that our cities’ economic problems are because they aren’t dense enough; they need to be allowed to grow both upward and outward. That way, the ‘agglomeration benefits’ are maximised.

Furthermore, the idea of the original new towns was for them to be economically self-sufficient. However, most have become commuter settlements, with people usually travelling long distances to London or other centres. So why build them further away rather than on the edge of cities, which should theoretically provide for more economically and environmentally sustainable commutes?

Part of the reason governments have always liked the idea of discrete new towns is that despite the likely opposition, is it might be easier to cope with than if more homes were built in the most obvious places. That’s for the simple reason that fewer people are already living in areas that are slightly more remote from cities. So, it’s political expediency, not economic desirability, that is driving some of this.

To be fair, the government has clarified that some of the so-called ‘new towns’ will be urban extensions. But it might be better if most of them were. The exception might be a location where good quality infrastructure, such as mainline railway stations, already exists, but homes are few and far between or where it could fund much-needed new transport links.

There are some exceptions, but as demonstrated in Montagu Evans’ recent report, Future Shock: The Coming Wave of Office Obsolescence, there’s been a tendency for jobs to concentrate more in cities over the past few decades- places like London, Manchester, Cambridge, Bristol and Edinburgh. The best way to provide good-quality housing within reach of those jobs is where transport infrastructure already exists – or can easily be extended or newly built.

The problem is that many people live in these areas already – or, instead, on the edge of the city nearby. They’ve moved there, presumably, to be on the edge of the built-up area and near the countryside, and don’t like the idea of their area becoming more urban. So, there is even more potential for vocal and sustained opposition to development.

So even if New Towns are likely to result in opposition, it may be a less difficult (if still not easy) route to mass housing delivery – even if the most economically and environmentally sustainable locations are elsewhere.

4) If we must build discrete new settlements away from the main centres, make them larger than the early New Towns

Our view of cities has changed a lot since Ebenezer Howard’s time. They were then thought of, in the UK at least, as the source of all evil. Today, we know that ‘agglomerations’ have all sorts of benefits to businesses and individuals, particularly for how ideas and businesses come together. This is why cities are more productive than small towns and why big cities are usually more productive than smaller cities.

This is very evident in some recent trends in the UK. Small towns have lost their employment base and have often been the most hit by retail vacancy issues. The UK already has a relatively high concentration of small towns by international standards. Indeed, the proximity of so many retail centres to each other may explain vacancy issues, and arguably, this means we lose out on some of those agglomeration benefits. Together with the relatively low density and poor accessibility of many of our cities, this may explain part of the UK’s problem of low productivity.

It’s worth noting that the most successful of the new towns – Milton Keynes – was also the largest, albeit more a new city than a new town. Some of the problems of the first wave of new towns may be related to the fact that they were, in fact, too small. Even as commuter towns, they were possibly too small to provide sufficient services to be truly vibrant. So, it might be better to opt for a smaller number of bigger settlements.

5) The new settlements should have a wider range of housing types

New Towns have suffered from a relatively uniform housing stock, mostly aimed at traditional families from upper working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds, with skilled manual workers as the largest group. Contrary to popular belief, they were not primarily populated by slum dwellers, as slum clearance displaced far more people than New Towns could house. High rents excluded the poorest, while middle-class households often chose traditional suburbs.

The housing was dominated by semi-detached houses and short terraces in a post-war style, with flats being rare except in a few locations like Harlow or the Scottish New Towns. This reflected the family-oriented profile of early residents, as well as the social housing focus. However, changing demographics—smaller households, more single people, childless couples, and elderly residents—demand greater diversity today.

This implies that for New Towns to be successful today, they will need to provide a broader range of housing types – flats and traditional terraces in the centre and detached houses further out. They will also need to build in a range of tenures besides social rent and owner-occupation, notably build-to-rent and senior living.

This is for various reasons: firstly, as explained above, the demand profile is much more varied than when the original new towns were built; secondly, many groups will not be able to access mortgage finance immediately, so a wider range of possibilities will need to be provided.

If the government relies on mortgage-backed owner-occupier purchases, the build-out rate will likely be relatively low, as the number of potential buyers who can access finance in a given area and time will be limited. Mortgage providers may also be concerned about concentration risk (which, given the relatively dispersed nature of housebuilding in recent years, has not been a recent issue). And while social housing may be able to play a significant role, given recent budget increases, it won’t solve this problem.

So, new towns will need social housing, for-sale private housing, and various build-to-rent and senior living facilities. Indeed, they could offer the scale of investment in the Private Rented Sector that so many funds are looking for.

6) The new settlements need denser cores

In the 1950s and 1960s, New Towns prioritised low-density neighbourhoods designed around car use, resulting in lower core population densities than traditional towns. For example, in the first-generation new town of Crawley, its core areas typically house 5,000–8,000 people per hectare, compared to over 9,000 in parts of Chichester or Lewes and 20,000 in central Brighton & Hove. At the time, higher densities were often seen as undesirable, influenced by outdated ideas that cities were unhealthy and car commuting inevitable.

This low-density model also shaped features like pedestrianised shopping precincts, now often struggling with vacancies and dated layouts. The spread-out nature of these settlements discourages walking or public transport use and makes public transport harder to sustain.

A density gradient—with higher-density flats near rail stations and retail & leisure cores, medium-density housing in surrounding areas, and family homes further out—could address these issues. This layout would encourage walking, improve town centre vibrancy, and enhance public transport viability.

Notably, densification attempts have not always been widespread in some existing New Towns. In Milton Keynes, for example, there was some opposition through the ‘Urban Eden’ group, which wanted to retain many of the features of the original masterplan and resist attempts to copy what it called “overcrowded, user-unfriendly” cities elsewhere.

7) Land will remain an issue

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities were not just about layout, design and health. They came at a time when land reform – and land values – were at the heart of political debate. This continued for much of the early part of the 20th century.

The post-war Labour government nationalised development rights (creating the modern planning system) and introduced a 100% “betterment” tax on the difference between existing and development use values. The end result was that landowners didn’t sell.

The Conservatives revoked this in the 1950s, but the debate around ‘development gain’, what is a reasonable amount for the state to take, and how this should be done rolled on, even if it was not so much of a political hot potato. Debates around section 106, affordable housing provision and the community infrastructure levy are the modern incarnation.

The New Towns, however, took a different approach. The New Towns Act enabled the government to earmark sites for development and acquire them at agricultural use value. Sometimes, these were built out by the state; in later cases, plots were sold off with planning consent to developers. The difference in value could be used to fund affordable housing, community facilities and infrastructure.

This approach was controversial among landowners, and successive legal challenges – and government shifts – led to the 1961 Land Compensation Act. This introduced ‘hope value’ in the 1961 Land Compensation Act, which stipulated that landowners were to be reimbursed not just for the value of their land at present (EUV) but also for its potential value for a conceivable and practicable alternative use.

This has enabled landowners subject to CPOs to apply for a “Certificate of Appropriate Alternative Development”, indicating what alternative uses may be available, enabling this ‘hope value’ to be priced. This made New Towns more challenging to achieve, and in any case, under the far more laissez-faire approach of the Thatcher Government in 1979, they became completely anathema. New communities where they were developed were private sector-led, typified by Bradley Stoke near Bristol. Even under New Labour, which introduced the very New Town-like Ecotowns policy, saw them as being developed on land already owned by the public sector.

So where to now?

Through Michael Gove’s Levelling Up Act, the previous government has already watered down the 1961 act, allowing hope value to be removed in certain circumstances. These include “the provision of housing, development or regeneration schemes where they include public sector led affordable and social housing, health or education uses, and are justified in the public interest.” The bodies permitted to buy land in this way include Local Authorities, Homes England and Development Corporations.

Labour promised further reform in its manifesto, and the first King’s Speech pointed to this being contained in a Planning and Infrastructure Bill to be published next year. It is worth noting that none of the new powers available to the likes of Homes England have yet been used, so it will be interesting to see whether the changes will make any difference or whether the processes remain too controversial, time-consuming and expensive to be used.

The ‘infrastructure’ section will also be interesting. One of the problems with Labour’s previous ecotowns initiative, and indeed the idea of ‘grey belt’, is that it is not necessarily near existing rail or road links or economically vibrant parts of the country.

The industry will be awaiting the pronouncements from the New Towns Taskforce. It remains to be seen whether – as with Labour’s ecotowns – it will choose sites based on political expediency and public land availability rather than economic and environmental sustainability. What is needed is new homes where there is housing demand, where there is (or can be) infrastructure, and away from treasured landscapes. Surprisingly, there are plenty of sites like that – if the government can face down the opposition. New Towns, though, may not be as central to unlocking the housing supply conundrum as the Government thinks.

For more information, please contact Jon Neale.

*This research has been prepared for general information purposes only. It does not constitute any investment, financial or other specialised advice or recommendations, and you should not, therefore, rely on its contents for such purposes. You should seek separate professional advice if required.