Politics

In praise of the New Towns: what Harlow can teach us about today's housing crisis

Philip Hammond's budget announcement of five new developments will be rightfully critiqued. But the new towns of the 1940s are worth revisiting—however unglamorous they may seem

November 23, 2017
Harlow Town Station in 1999. Photo: Ben Brooksbank/Flickr
Harlow Town Station in 1999. Photo: Ben Brooksbank/Flickr

There’s a statue in Harlow by Keith Godwin, called ‘The Philosopher’. Commissioned in 1960 to celebrate Harlow’s new technical college, Godwin’s philosopher is built from fiberglass but has a crumbling, classical grandeur in the way he looks over his shoulder, like Orpheus, tempted by the sight of vocational education. Except the technical college is gone now, and the philosopher stares at more non-descript mixed material housing in a manner that Nikolaus Pevsner called forlorn, but which looks rather more like confusion.

Harlow is celebrating 70 years since the New Towns Act built Harlow from a cartographical speck into a town with almost 100,000 residents, but it is not yet finished. It never will be. The philosopher might yet stare at a John Lewis, a football stadium, a Mosque. Harlow was born in a housing crisis and has stood through many decades to see another. The 1946 New Towns Act, was an initiative instigated by the post-war Attlee government, led by Nye Bevan the Minister for Health with responsibility for housing, to address a crisis caused by the unholy combination of baby boomers and the Luftwaffe.

We could learn a lot from Harlow. While it isn’t right to compare the present housing crisis—caused by the movement of different forces—to that of the 1940s, the solution remains the same and it remains simple: build, hard, and decentralize. Philip Hammond's Autumn Budget has just announced the creation of 5 New Towns in 'high demand' areas (a euphemism for the South East, one suspects) and a million homes along the Oxford–Milton Keynes–Cambridge corridor, a parabola of land about 40 miles north of London. It's an interesting rabbit to emerge from Hammond's hat, but there is little indication that it is more than a spur-of-the-moment partisan gamble.

We've also been here before: In 2015 David Cameron pledged a million new homes for Britain by 2020, a bold initiative that has trickled out, not least because David Cameron is now spending his days playing tennis and smoking regretful cigarettes from his Oxfordshire home. It was a pledge that slipped under the radar and lacked accountability, because it was hard to peg it to a specific project. The opposite is true of High Speed 2, the railway development started by Gordon Brown but championed by the Cameroons.

The opposite is true of High Speed 2, the railway development started by Gordon Brown but championed by the Cameroons. HS2 phase one runs from London to the West Midlands. The route out of the capital bisects two of the 1946 New Towns—Bracknall and Hemel Hempstead—and settlements designated in the 60s – Northampton, Redditch and Telford– speckle its northward journey. The architects of HS2 were but a glimmer in the milkman’s eye when these towns were being conceived and plotted onto giant maps in Whitehall, but governed by the same ambition to expand urban connectivity, they have ended up plotting the same course.

‘New towns’ was chosen as a term for the 1946 developments, in order to avoid saying ‘satellite towns’, (“...this term has been used in different senses and we purposely avoid it...”), because to propagate the notion that these towns exist solely to accept urban overspill was to feed the beast that they were escaping. By design, the towns should be within reasonable distance of a major city, yes, but this was as much to encourage industry as to create an M25 hugging ring around London. As a result, companies like BP, Virgin Atlantic and Amazon all have UK bases in these orbital towns. But the orbit is tight: Harlow is 20 miles from London, Hemel Hempstead 24, Crawley 28. At HS2’s top operating speed of 250 mph, 20 miles takes 5 minutes and suddenly the definition of a commuter town gets a lot broader, like the commuter belt itself.

Any housing built along the HS2 route has a huge advantage. High-speed rail is, to some extent, predicated on express trains, but there is still scope for creative problem solving here. HS2 is attempting, in a slightly cack-handed way, to redress an infrastructure imbalance between north and south; a 21stcentury wave of New Towns would only compliment that. You know what they say about bird murder and stones. In its current plan, HS2 will make no stops between London and Birmingham, a stretch of some 100 miles, which is terrific for busy Brummies but less welcome for the West Midlands at large.

But once the track is laid, there’s always potential to create a connection point that could open up a stretch of the country beyond the north-west London new towns. These towns already have enviable employment rates—at 84.9 per cent, Crawley tops the national chart—which suggests that, even if there were aesthetic missteps in the 1946 plans, the towns have successfully found their feet.

"The New Towns are a patchwork of political priorities"
The time is right. The average house price in London is £478,142; the national average of £125,237. In the capital, houses cost 10.5 times the average salary. Almost all the cities with achievable house prices are in the north (or Northern Ireland), but, conversely, the fastest growing house prices are predominantly in the south east. The question of where to invest will dog governments indefinitely, but the key is not to develop but to build. Yuppies are already migrating to Margate like wintering redwings, seduced by Kent’s existing high speed rail links—if you can offer the amenities of London or Birmingham or Manchester, along with a two-bed for £250,000, you don’t need to worry about your pitch. Build it and they will come.

The problem, historically, has been time. Harlow was designated in 1947. Frederik Gibberd, the appointed architect, who was one of the most radical designers of his generation (see Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral for further details), had his plans approved by the government in 1949, and house and road building commenced. Civic and retail buildings followed in the 1950s, with work on the town centre beginning in 1955. The population limit was raised twice: to 80,000 in 1952 and up to 90,000 in 1966.

Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson: they’d all been Prime Minister during the time that Harlow was being built. The New Towns are a patchwork of political priorities, reflecting the infrastructure that different governments were willing to indulge. They provided 2 million people with homes that sprung up from unoccupied land, circumventing the need to stack storey-upon-storey in order to have a city postcode, and half a century later the towns are affluent and swollen to bursting point.

But time may never be less of an issue than it is currently. Matthew Elliott, former Chief Exec of Vote Leave and not the first person you’d expect to line up behind an aggressive house-building programme, published a report in October on post-Brexit economic attitudes. The report found that there was overwhelming support for government intervention in the housing market, across all age ranges and economic outlooks. Cross-party consensus is emerging that the time is right for another ambitious house building programme. There are other issues in Britain that need to be addressed—the NHS, higher education, railways—but none have the urgency and bi-partisan approval of housing. Dennis Skinner has given impassioned speeches about looking back to 1945 before we sell off the NHS. For housing, we don’t need to go that far back: 1946 will do.