On 2nd May 1946, Lewis Silkin, the Minister of Town and Country Planning, stood up in the House of Commons to present the Second Reading of the New Towns Act. He set out a vision of places that were so well-designed, so uplifting, that “we may well produce in the New Towns a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride”. Silkin’s vision was undoubtedly utopian, but was set against a backdrop of total destruction, a country shattered by six years of global warfare, whose cities were bomb-damaged and slum-ridden.

What followed was four decades of New Town development, with a variety of design approaches from the classic Mark 1 New Towns like Stevenage and Hatfield, with their pedestrian shopping precincts and low-density housing, to Cumbernauld’s whacky ‘megastructure’ and the Americanised grid of Milton Keynes. Each has a clear architectural vision, and was very much design-led, but all sought to follow the guiding principles of Lord Reith’s New Towns Committee, which included a separation of traffic and pedestrians, socially mixed communities, a sense of belonging and ‘economic self-containment’ – the provision of jobs within the towns themselves.

And so to 2024, where the current government’s New Towns ambitions are also significant. They have described the initiative as “the largest post-war housebuilding programme”, which, given the scale of the first three waves of New Town development, is going some. There is a New Town Commission yet to come, but what is striking is how far the language of New Towns for Labour is a departure from Silkin’s vision. The Government’s focus is on a combination of speed and self-sufficiency; this is about addressing the need for vast quantities of new homes. It’s pure pragmatism, a functional route to an essential end product: more homes.

A few weeks ago, our Strategic Planning team looked at how to avoid the unintended consequences of New Towns. But for me, there’s a lot to be learnt from the New Town Committee’s principles. Self-sufficiency and the creation of mixed communities with a real sense of place and identity are principles to guide any good mass-planning activity. There’s much to be said too for these places being self-sufficient, attractors of investment, capable of generating their own life, and not relying on existing infrastructure. But we must be cautious of the design pitfalls of new settlements. Many New Towns were designed with the idea that private car ownership would persist in perpetuity, and land was seen as an almost infinite commodity. One would be unable to justify the approach to transport and densities that some of the original New Towns exhibit today, and while this reflects their ambition at that point in time, these issues have been ‘baked in’ and can prove hard to unpick. The principles of the earlier New Towns are sound, and their aspirations admirable, but within half a century of construction, they are sometimes having to be reimagined and replanned at a grand scale.

The ‘new’ New Towns will undoubtedly be ‘of their time’, reflecting contemporary attitudes to architecture and design; and this will be a key part of their sense of place. Although the new generation involves planning at an unprecedented scale, we must learn from the past. Labour’s approach to New Towns appears to see them as a pragmatic, functional tool, rather than a utopian vision; in my view, there’s benefits to carrying that approach into their design, too.