![]() ![]() Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. ![]() What makes the situation especially delicate is that the New Towns tend to employ younger men, school-trained and experimentally inclined, who see their plans vetoed by older men whose chief experience is legal and administrative rather than creative. And while the Development Corporations claim that it is precisely their job to try new experiments, County Planning Officers have proved reluctant to sanction any departure from customary standards, partly no doubt because they fear that others in their bailiwick will then claim similar privileges, but still more (some New Town planners allege) because they lack imagination. Though on paper they have wide powers, for everyone on their schemes they have to obtain the approval of other bodies, notably the County Council. Chief of these is the discovery that the Corporations are far less powerful than had been imagined. In addition to these individual setbacks, there have also been shocks of another kind, affecting all the Development Corporations equally. ![]() ![]() Despite Ministerial protestation to the contrary, this does not seem to have been taken into serious consideration when the site was chosen, and the fate of the whole plan may depend upon the expert report, which is now being analysed. Most serious of all, the entire programme at Peterlee, in County Durham, has been held up whilst the possibility of subsidence owing to coal-working is being investigated. At Hemel Hempstead, where there are 200,000 existing inhabitants, intense opposition developed against the proposed new town-centre, which involved scrapping many existing buildings and creating an impressive water-garden and shopping-street much of Jellicoe’s imaginative, if controversial, plan disappeared in the attempt to reach a compromise. At Crawley, Thomas Sharp’s original plan was abandoned, and a tighter, more economical version designed. Stevenage, handicapped by having three Corporation chairmen in two years, seems unable to finalise its master plan, and is being overtaken by later starters. And in any case two years is none too long to prepare the plans for a town in which people may have to live for twenty or thirty generations.Ĭertainly there have been mistakes and delays. He sees nothing of the preliminary work: the sewage problem alone is enormous, and there are more obscure difficulties, such as disposal of surface water after storms. “About time, too,” is probably the reaction of the ordinary man. At Harlow for instance, the first group of 98 houses is under construction, and all the other towns designated for the London overspill have made a start, except Hatfield while at Newton Aycliffe, near Darlington, 41 families are already housed in permanent pre-fabs. Budgets, bureaucracy and public backlash appear to account for initial mistakes and delays, but Taylor seems optimistic that the enormous social venture is still set to “achieve the outstanding success which lies so nearly within its reach”.Īfter some two years of preliminary work, several of the New Towns are now beginning to build their first permanent dwellings. In this article written a few years into the ambitious social experiment, the journalist and author Gordon Rattray Taylor evaluates the progress made so far. In the first phrase of the project, the “New Towns” of Harlow, Basildon, Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead were developed to entice people out of the urban sprawl of London and into modern settlements outside the green belt. The New Towns Act of 1946 sought to restore the nation’s housing supply in the aftermath of the Second World War. ![]()
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