Homes & Communities Agency

English Partnerships became part of the Homes and Communities Agency on 1 December 2008. This website is no longer being updated but is available for historical reference.

New Towns

New Housing, Warrington (Photograph)

There are 21 New Towns in England, established by statute and designated between 1946 and 1970.

History

In 1946 Great Britain faced a legacy of damaged homes and disrupted industrial infrastructure. The restoration of the nation’s war-torn cities provided an opportunity for improving urban conditions on a grand scale. New Towns were an important element in this strategy: they aimed to improve living and working conditions both in damaged areas and in wholly new settlements.

The father of the British New Town movement was the Victorian Ebenezer Howard, whose writing in the book Garden Cities of Tomorrow and the creation of his garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn were a source of inspiration for planners, legislators and politicians involved in the New Town initiative. The green and open quality of the New Towns and their successful balance between living and working owe much to Howard’s philosophy and practice.

In October 1945 Lord Reith was appointed chairman of a New Towns Committee. This committee concluded that New Towns were best created by government-sponsored corporations financed by the exchequer. The ‘resulting bodies’ were known as development corporations and they were able to acquire land within a defined area, ‘the designated area’.

The committee’s conclusions were embodied in the New Towns Act 1946 and immediately put into use with the designation of Stevenage, the first New Town. Of the 11 New Towns designated in Britain between 1946 and 1955, eight were London ‘overspill’ or satellite towns and were welcomed by the London County Council.

A number of New Towns were built for reasons other than city overspill. Aycliffe (1947) and Corby (1950) were designated to provide better quality housing for existing employment areas. Peterlee (1948) was intended to provide an urban centre and alternative employment options for a mining area.

Declining industries in these towns meant a switch of emphasis to attract new employment. Corby, for example, faced the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s and the closure of its steelworks in 1980. Today the town is a major distribution centre and has attracted companies such as Golden Wonder Ltd, R S Components and Oxford University Press. An Urban Regeneration Company has been established in Corby.

Commission for the New Towns and English Partnerships

By the late 1950s some of the earliest New Towns were coming to the end of their main development phase. The 1946 New Towns Act envisaged that as the towns grew the development corporation would eventually transfer any remaining assets to local authorities. In the end the government’s solution was to create the Commission for the New Towns (CNT), which from 1961 was responsible for managing and disposing of the land and property assets of the defunct English development corporations.

In May 1999 CNT merged with the corporate functions of the Urban Regeneration Agency (URA) to create English Partnerships, now the government’s national regeneration agency.

Resurgence of the New Towns

The early 1960s saw rising births and predictions of an increase in population of some 18 million by 2000. The New Towns Act was therefore reinvoked and a further nine New Towns designated during the 1960s. These included the expansion of Peterborough, Northampton and Warrington, the so called ‘partnership New Towns’, and the designation of the ‘new city’ of Milton Keynes, the largest ‘green field’ project.

The programme culminated in 1970 with the designation of Central Lancashire New Town.

Achievements and the future

The English New Town programme represented one of the most successful urban policies of post-war Britain. Together the English New Towns have accommodated over two million people; provided more than one million jobs; and have evolved into economically and socially successful communities. Many aspects of new towns were deemed to be world-class models of best practice to students and practitioners of planning and urban studies.

Milton Keynes is, for example, considered to be one of the most successful large-scale development projects ever undertaken in England, delivering homes, jobs, facilities and services to create a balanced community. New settlements are just one of the options being considered for managing growth in the south and east of the country and so towns like Milton Keynes will provide many valuable templates for future large-scale development.

Today the lessons provided by the New Towns are being reassessed and used to help deliver the government’s Sustainable Commmunities Plan. Regeneration is being brought about through a range of initiatives led by English Partnerships in collaboration with local authorities and other stakeholders to bring the New Towns up-to-date. Initiatives such as the Millennium Communities Programme, Urban Regeneration Companies, the Town Centre Renewal Programme and sustainable urban extensions (e.g. Upton, Northampton ) are all playing a part in revitalising New Towns and once again introducing development and design techniques that will be viewed as today’s models of best practice.

The complete list of the English New Towns is as follows:

Last updated: 29 August 2007

© English Partnerships 2003-2008