Conference looks at the lost art of the new town

The great irony of the UK’s desperate need for strategic thinking in how to plan, design and deliver new towns, suburbs and extensions to towns is that we are — or were — world leaders in how to do it. We didn’t just invent the new town, we delivered a whole network of them.

“We know how to do this,” Bartlett planning professor Peter Hall told the audience at the New New Town conference held last week in Bethnal Green, east London. “We’ve just forgotten.”

“Buried in Hertfordshire, Sussex, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, we have the authentic blueprint for modern life”, said Joe Kerr, who chaired the event organised by the Architecture Foundation and Urban Drift to discuss new towns past, present and future.

Hall’s brilliant 15-minute summary of 110 years of UK new town history, from Ebenezer Howard on, was not of isolated experiments or theories. “We did it... you can see it from the air,” he said.

Letchworth, Welwyn, Hatfield, Stevenage, the whole network of connected new towns — with housing, employment and green belts, disliked by architects and utterly unremarked — is quietly working. It’s an unbelievably successful strategy, one still vaguely being used, by which London became the core of a vast network of towns in the South-east. It just happens to be a strategy the intelligentsia doesn’t like that much.

Former Milton Keynes chief architect Derek Walker’s description of that town revisited a remarkable project, which, incidentally, is exquisitely drawn — a grid grafted into the English landscape as a flexible framework around which a city could grow.

Landscape was conceived on a quality with Stowe or Stourhead. Some 20,000 trees were planted. There was a “family” of high quality infrastructure elements, including seats and bus stops. Everything was based on the family unit. “You must design a city you’d live in yourself,” said Walker. “Not an elitist cell but a vehicle for family development and growth”. Again, architects and the intelligentsia are sniffy — but its population loves it.

As the conference moved from “past” to “present” to “future”, we saw how the wheels came off such impressive public planning. We entered a world where we are not building nearly fast enough — at half the rate houses were built in the sixties; where government leaves everything to the market; where, Hall explained, we don’t even attempt to capture the increase in land value for the public purse in the way new towns used to do; where our whole ideology, and that of the new towns, is supposed to be based on transport links and connectivity, said Town & Country Planning Association chair David Lock, but the transport authorities won’t play. (They won’t even put in a station unless they get 60% of surrounding land values.)

Development corridors exist only where there aren’t enough nimbys, while the effects of “super malls” on drive-distance town centres is still unknown. And it is the tiny, isolated “eco-towns” — market-led and maybe with as few as 5,000 people each — that are supposed to carry all our advanced thinking.

The network of connected new towns is unbelievably successful, but disliked by architects

It was notable that as the conference looked forward in time, the projects became smaller and were more likely to be a retrofit or a regeneration of an existing, “old” new town. Michelle Provost of great Dutch urban designer and theorist Crimson showed Hoogvliet, the “welcome into my back yard” (wimby) project, where the practice instigated a ground-up regeneration of a sixties Dutch new town, including Fat’s extraordinary landscape of hobby huts and an amazing community centre, plus a separate remodelling of a doomed slab-block block for the town’s 1,100 single mothers.

Almere, another new town retrofit, came up many times, while Nick Johnson of Urban Splash showed the developer’s “twisted tradition”, New Islington, another live example of ground-up community work taken into money-making development —with its sensibly modelled Will Alsop masterplan, its Poundbury-on-acid, Fat-designed terraced houses, and its community butty van and cider orchard.

But these examples have nothing like the mainstream role Milton Keynes had. Neither Fat not Alsop have had life exactly easy, and Urban Splash has not managed to build a project yet in London, where major commercial practice regards them as too far out. Projects are happening, even infrastracture projects, but it feels as though these occur only with immense difficulty and with the prevailing system still against them.

If the Architecture Foundation had really wanted to promote optimism about new towns, the programme should have started with Nick Johnson’s great, active critique. “We’re not being radical enough to rethink the way we make decisions about how we make communities,” he said. For a start, he’d scrap the Town and Country Planning Act. The day would have then ended with Peter Hall’s reminder that “we know how to do this”.

Instead, the audience seemed the most optimistic. At least half were students — and they are the ones who’ll actually be doing it.

New new town: what the past can teach the future

Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, Bethnal Green, east London

February 20-21

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