Forging the New Jerusalem: Recollections of a New Town Planner

I was trained as an economist and I wanted to use my economic capability in planning in some way or other; this was immediately after the war. The New Towns were then the big thing; the New Towns Act had been passed in 1946.

I worked on Peterlee, County Durham which was a New Town in a mining area. I was only there for a year from 1949 to 1950.

In 1951 I went to Crawley in Sussex, one of the London ring New Towns, and I worked in Crawley for five years and I lived there for ten years.

My role was mainly carrying out social and economic research as a basis for planning. So in Peterlee I worked on an analysis of the existing population and tried to work out their needs because it was a large mining district. The idea was to put a New Town in the middle of all the mining villages and so we had to forecast what sort of people would come to live there, their age distribution, their occupation, that sort of thing. I also worked on possible industries for the New Town.

In Crawley I was called a research officer. I was directly responsible to the Chief Executive, and I had a small unit of my own. We did a variety of things, the most important thing being keeping a check of all the new people who moved in to provide statistical information. In those days it was fairly easy to do this because rents were all collected on the doorstep in Crawley and I think it was probably the same in the other New Towns at that early stage, although this changed very much later.

They had trained Housing managers who went around collecting the rents, getting to know the tenants and helped with their problems. And another thing was that they collected information for us. Everybody who came to the New Town had to fill in a form stating their age, the ages of their children, where they were coming from and so on. Because of this system of collecting rents off of the doorstep we were able to keep our information up to date.

So we knew when people had babies, we knew when people had lodgers, we knew when people left. We kept a check on the population and this was a basis for forecasting what the population would be in the future. For instance, how many schoolchildren there would be. This was fed to West Sussex County Council which was providing schools in the New Towns.

We gave them fairly accurate predictions on how many age groups and how many kids there would be, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily provided the school because they were strapped for cash. That was a battle which the New Town tenants took part in.

Harold Hill was what was called an ‘out-county estate’ and it was built by the London County Council. The difference between the New Towns and the ‘out-county estates’ was that people could commute back into London to work. That saved the authorities the difficulty in providing employment.

New Towns were different in that they were intended to be self-contained in that everybody who lived there had a job there. And in the early days that was how it was because the only way you could get a house in Crawley was if you had a job there. Although that changed as time went on.

The answer is one word, money. It was a big political issue in the early days. The plans were great, they showed all the amenities, the parks, the schools, the hospital on the model plans but that didn’t mean they could build them. There were two problems, the first being that although the Development Corporation was responsible for creating the New Towns it only built houses and factories, and it left everything else to different authorities such as the local County Council. They were responsible for building local playing fields, swimming pools, and schools, that sort of thing. But authorities didn’t get extra money so it was a genuine difficulty for them. They had to find additional funding with no extra help from the government or the Development Corporation. In the New Towns Act the Development Corporations did have the power to do anything in the New Towns so legally they could have provided the swimming pool, hospitals everything. But in practice the government exercised very tight financial controls over them. The main problem was that money was not available.

They were relatively minor problems. There was no real shortage of labour. Building workers came from all over to work on the New Towns because it offered steady employment, big contracts. They were mostly well organised in the building trade unions so they got reasonable rates of pay. There was no real difficulty with that. As for building materials, well there were occasional shortages but it was never a major factor.

Once they got into their stride the New Towns were able to build new houses very rapidly indeed. In Crawley and certainly at Harlow they got up to 2,000 houses a year, which is quite a lot. The problem with the housing was that the rents were high.

I don’t know whether that applied to Harold Hill, but in the New Towns although they had a subsidy from government; the rents were still high compared to the corresponding rents in London. Comparing the rents in Crawley with those in Hammersmith or Battersea, which was where the people were coming from, it was probably about between 25 percent and 50 percent more. The reasons for this were that the London councils could spread their costs over the whole housing stock which included lots of older houses and they could cross subsidise. The New Towns couldn’t do that because all the housing was freshly built and it really needed an additional subsidy to allow for this and this is one of the things that we campaigned for. No the rents were high and it was a major problems for the tenants.

This is a very interesting issue. Planners and sociologists always say that we must have mixed communities, different classes must live together, learn from each other. I don’t think that in practice that it has ever worked. What happened in Crawley was that in the early days only the Development Corporation built houses so all houses were built for rent and they were all more or less of the same standard and everybody moving in was offered one of these houses.

In the early days a number of managerial and professional people did go and live in the ordinary houses. You would find a factory manager living in the same street as a lot of his workers. But this didn’t last all that long. After a time, about five years, the Corporation started selling sites to private builders so the private developers moved in and built houses for sale and these houses were of a slightly higher standard but they were also segregated. The tendency was for professional people to go a buy these houses.

The other thing that happened was that a lot of better paid people brought houses outside the New Towns in surrounding villages and in nearby towns like Horsham. So there was segregation and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it.

It was a crucial issue in the New Towns and I suppose certainly in the ‘out-town’ estates such as at Harold Hill. The majority of the people moving in in the early days were youngish couples with young children and who were about to just start their families. They were the people who mostly needed houses and hadn’t had the chance to get them in London. The industries that moved to the New Towns were those that were expanding and wanted to get out of London, and expanding industries tended to employ younger people.

So that was a factor that was concentrating the age groups in the 20s to 30s and the under 10s.

This presents problems for the future.

If you have a neighbourhood of 5,000 or 10,000 people then it starts of with a lot of kids and you need a tremendous number of school places, but later as they grow up the numbers drop. In the long-term it sorts itself out but in the early days in was a problem. Initially they couldn’t do anything about it because they needed all the houses for the workers moving in but later certainly in Crawley and I think in other New Towns they actually made a point of offering houses to the elderly relatives of those already living there. They built a number of small houses or flats suitable for a single people and a lot of granddads and grandmas came in, which was very good. It was good for them and it was good for the town. But you were never going to get a totally balanced age structure in the new communities.

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I can’t remember a particular figure, but it was probably two-and-a-half to three. Actually we found that married couples of the same age group in Crawley had fewer children than the national average. Which was interesting and we wondered why this was. We speculated that this was because the people who moved to New Towns married later, this was figured because people who married early were higher on the housing list. We hoped to get some confirmation of this but the Development Corporation refused to allow us to ask people how long they had been married. So we never got confirmation but I’m pretty sure this is what happened. So I think that families in Crawley would have been smaller than those in Harold Hill.

Oh yes, in the early days this was very successful. In the fifties there were a lot of industries in London who for one reason or other wanted to get out. They wanted to expand. There was often a lot of planning restrictions and by-laws in London. Crawley certainly, and I think Harlow and Hemel Hempstead, attracted all the industry they wanted in those early days. In fact industry done very well out of it because they had workers decently housed and five minutes cycle ride from the premises. Productivity increased.

No. There were no financial incentives. Some of the other towns such as up in County Durham had a lot more difficulty in attracting industry because of their location.

No. This is something we did monitor. Very few moved back. But how could they move back? Despite higher rents in Crawley they wouldn’t have been able to get anything in London. They would have gone to the bottom of the waiting list. Private renting was expensive and most the places were not very healthy. It would have been very hard for people to move back. To be fair my impression was that very few people wanted to move back in spite of the local difficulties – local rates were higher, rent was higher; goods in the shops were more expensive.

· Were they the principle complaints of the new residents?

Rents were the principle complaint but the other one was the lack of amenities. There were lots of campaigns run to get schools; hospitals, meeting places and they were successful. It was a result of this pressure from below that made the authorities get moving.

The Tories certainly wanted the New Towns to go ahead. One of the things that got Macmillan in power was his boast to build houses faster. So they wanted the New Towns to be built. They didn’t hold them back. But they put up the rate of interest on the rate of borrowing for New Towns so that affected rents.

That was very noticeable. I could take you to Crawley and to two different neighbourhoods built at the beginning and end of the building programme and you would immediately see the difference in the size of the houses. Some of the early New Town housing was some of the best that has ever been built. It was cut several times by the Tory government.

This is a very contentious issue amongst planners. The ideas of neighbourhoods were a good one and it worked. The idea that that each of the neighbourhoods would be centred around the schools, maybe a church, a pub, a meeting place. I think that socially this works. Just one small example being that, if mothers pick up their kids from the primary schools then they can go to the shops at the same time and this is very convenient.

Of course it has changed in a number of ways. The type of shops has changed there are no greengrocers, everybody is going to the supermarket which is outside the neighbourhood. These shopping parades now tend to be different.

The neighbourhoods were not designed for the current level of car ownership and use which we now experience. Parking is very difficult, with residential streets congested, they are not as safe as they used to be. If the rise of car ownership had been foreseen then they would have been planned a different way. It ought to have been foreseen. I can remember a friend saying in the fifties, ‘Look at the number of cars that the car manufactures are geared up for turning out. Where are they going? If they are going to make cars then somebody is going to use them.’ It should have been foreseen but precisely what you do about that is a problem.

You have a place like Milton Keynes which is a third generation of New Towns which was designed deliberately for car use, so apart from a central area, things were spread around. So you have a community centre in one part, a pub in another part and you spread the traffic and you don’t get congestion. Well this is perfectly true and this works, but the other side of the coin is that public transport doesn’t work. It is very difficult to live in Milton Keynes and not own a car. In a place like Crawley even now you can live without a car because the town centre is still within walking distance for a lot of people. We have to find a form suitable for public transport as well as the car and we still haven’t found that ideal balance yet.

No I don’t think so. They were an inspiration. There was a lot of argument about the Garden Cities. Some people thought that the densities were too low; that they were romantic cottages. That wasn’t the essence of Howard’s message. Howard really did start the movement for self-contained communities where people could find most of what they needed for a decent life. It was always easy to get from the periphery of the town to the centre and also that you could easily get out into the countryside. These were Howard’s ideas and I think that they are still valid. It certainly influenced the New Towns movement.

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· A book I’ve been reading recently is Lewis Mumford’s ‘Cities of Culture’. How much of an influence was that book upon your thinking?

It was one of the books that influenced me personally. I can remember now finding it on the shelf of the public library and thinking, ‘God, this is just what I’ve been looking for.’ It’s great stuff Mumford, but philosophically he’s very idealist. He sees everything as ideas; he doesn’t understand the social basis that results from economic changes. But nevertheless it is very stimulating stuff, he’s one of the few people who thought about cities in their totality and what they mean to people. I would certainly say he was one of the inspirations.

I think British planners considered themselves in the vanguard and I think they were. A lot of ideas carried out in Scandinavia for instance were originally from this country. In fact, they did it better. Some of the satellite towns around Stockholm were of a superior design.

All the New Towns look very much alike. They were designed much of the time by the same type of people, young and enthusiastic architects. There was quite a bit of exchange of information and ideas. The Ministry did have quite a big section dedicated to the New Towns. This was staffed by sociologists, economists, planners, and they used to have meeting which I used to attend on behalf of Crawley. It was there that people from all the other New Towns exchanged ideas, it was quite stimulating.

I was aware of it because I was a Marxist in the Communist party with a thorough analysis of society. I was very much aware that although the New Towns were successful their example wouldn’t be followed because a. it was too expensive and b. they were too successful. It was showing people what they could do if organised together in an efficient way.

Absolutely. Not all of course, but the majority of planners viewed the New Towns as a political experiment. They really believed that they were creating a better future. A lot of them were very starry-eyed about it. They thought that if you simply gave everybody a decent house and a decent environment then they would be changed, but of course it doesn’t work like that. They are still being exploited.

There was practically none. It brings in the question of paternalism. Even the progressive people, and there were many of them involved, tended to very much take a paternalistic attitude towards matters. I call it a Fabians attitude of the experts know best – we want to give you a better life, but we’ll tell you how it’s going to be done. There was very little conscious effort to encourage tenant participation. It was all very well organised when people were thinking of moving to the New Towns, they brought the workers down in coaches for the weekend, they gave them lectures on the plans, they showed them the different house types. And this was all very good, but they didn’t ask them what they wanted. The participation came from below; it came as a consequence of political campaigning by the Communist party, the Labour party. They were all very active in pressing the government to do the things that they promised such as building the hospitals, the schools, etc.

It’s mainly because of the whole privatisation stamp of this government. Private is good, public is bad. The essence of the New Towns is that they were public enterprises. There was a lot of private capital involved but public authorities coordinated the thing and once you start talking about that this is out. The Town and Country Association – the successor to the Howard’s Garden Cities Movement – are currently calling for the building of New Towns.

They are lobbying very hard to have the new form of developments as New Towns and they are saying that setting up Development Corporations can only do this. The Act is actually still on the statute book so there’s nothing to prevent the government doing this, but this is very much against the way that this government approaches matters.

The other issue that the TPCA mention but are not pushing is the thing which was very close to Howard’s heart which is getting the increased land value for the benefit of the community. This of course is a major political issue. At the moment you buy land and you buy it at the value for development. If you buy development land it is very expensive. In the New Towns Act the land was brought at its existing use value so if it was a farm it was bought for the price of agricultural land, but the Tories changed that sometime in the fifties. That is a major factor that makes a hell of a difference.

They proved that you can create better conditions, for all their deficiencies they were still better places to live in than the average council estate. They still are. When I go back to Crawley now I think that this is a good place to live. So it is a vindication of planning. They are also a vindication of public authority with the powers, and to some extent the money, to do a job. You can make criticisms that they were not democratically accountable, not accountable to the local people, but that is not a problem that is capable of solution. The sort of people that were appointed to the board of the Development Corporation were mostly business men with a few right-wing Labour councillors chucked in for good measure. Their main aim was to provide a profitable field for capitalist enterprise. There is no doubt about that. The Chairmen of the Crawley Development Corporation was a guy called Sir Thomas Bennet who was an architect and then a big business architect whose clients were industrialists. He used to give an annual report and the main point he made was that the industries were saying that they were making more profit in Crawley.

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