New Towns

In a sense new towns were not new, Victorian pioneers had created Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight to offer better living conditions to their workers. In my blogs on Middlesbrough, Barrow in Furness and Crewe I tell how Victorian industries created certain towns virtually from scratch. Elsewhere the growith of industry transformed many a rural village into Coketown to take the analogy in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times.

In the late nineteenth century Ebanezer Howard elucidated the concept of the garden city in his short book Garden Cities of Tomorrow. He advocated the combination of the best of both rural and urban. His ideas were put into practice first at Letchworth in the first decade of the twentieth century and then Welwyn some twenty years later. These were largely private enterprise and did create the balance of rural and urban as well as a self supporting community.

In the mid twentieth century government became seriously concerned at the overcrowding of many urban areas and the concept of satellite towns gained acceptance. These would be within fifty miles of the conurbation they were seeking to relieve and should be largely self contained for employment, housing, education, shopping and entertainment. The Second World War intervened but with a dramatic relocation of manufacturing business. It is said that 20,000 of 70,000 British industrial undertakings were relocated to escape enemy bombing.

The planning for new towns was undertaken by a committee under Lord Reith and including Sir Patrick Abercrombie who wrote the Greater London plan in 1944.

The new towns came in waves. The first under the Attlee government (1945-1950), the second under the Wilson government (1964-1970). Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale and Telford came in between and Letchworth a long way before. The Town and Country Planning Association website offers a short piece on each town (search by name).

A whole host of issues are taken into account in planning a new town. In the context of manufacturing the job ratio is key because manufacturing jobs require a great deal more land that do service industry employment.

Here are the towns designated New Towns in the 1946 Act together with the dates of designation. The links are to my posts on the manufacturing history of the towns.

Antrim (1966)

Ballymena (1967)
Basildon (1949)
Bracknell (1949)

Central Lancashire (Preston, Chorley and Leyland)
Corby (1950)
Craigavon (1965)
Crawley (1947)
Cumbernauld (1955)- built to relieve Glasgow’s over crowding and now one of the largest towns in Scotland, but with a reputation for architectural ugliness.
Cwmbran (Wales) (1949)