New Town Utopia

Citation preview

New Town Utopia Edited by Christopher Ian Smith

All contents copyright the individual contributors, 2018. All images (except pages 99, 100 & 111) are screenshots from the documentary film New Town Utopia (2017). Produced, filmed and directed by Christopher Ian Smith. Artwork credits: Mother and Child by Maurice Lambert (page 53) Why? by Clive Wakeford (pages 68-9) Animal Fresco by Wendy Taylor (page 70) The Chessmen by William Mitchell (pages 76-77) Book design by Mark Beechill and Christopher Ian Smith. Some material in this book previously appeared in Foxhole Magazine, Volume 2 (Autumn / Winter 2015). www.foxholemagazine.com www.newtownutopia.com

Contents

Introductions

4

Concrete Dreams: Selected Poems

13

Utopian Realities: Selected Writing

83

Acknowledgements

122

3

New Town Utopia

Introduction Christopher Ian Smith

4

Introduction

‘Basildon is complicated’, so wrote Norman Scarfe in the 1968 Shell Guide To Essex. He was right. In 1946, Lewis Silkin, the Minister for Town and Country Planning, delivered a lyrical and impassioned speech to parliament. In the midst of the Labour government’s radical post-war policy drive, he announced a plan to build ten ‘new towns’ across the UK. This initiative acted upon the findings of Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan and was inspired by Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden Cities. It addressed the major issues facing the cities of Britain - including the devastating impact of WW2 bombing and atrocious living and working conditions - by relocating families to new, purpose-built towns. Silkin’s speech expressed a desire to create ‘a new type of citizen’ who would develop through living in the new town ‘a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride’. He evoked Thomas More’s Utopia as an indicator of his ambition. The new towns and their early residents were invested with these post-war hopes and aspirations. Seventy years on, Basildon, part of the first wave of new towns, is a challenging place that’s been through difficult times. According to recent research carried out by its council, Basildon houses one quarter of the most deprived areas in Essex, the gap between rich and poor is huge - making it the 6th most unequal city in the country, and 29% of workers in Basildon earn less than the living wage. Art and culture seem to be a distant memory, and the town’s bleak reputation lingers. So what happened? This was the question that provoked New Town Utopia, a passion project encompassing feature documentary, video installation, and this book. I grew up in the town next door to Basildon (an online troll of the film called me ‘the posh boy from Benfleet’). When I was young I spent a lot of time there with my mum, and it felt different to the rest of the world as I knew it. Odd sculptures floated above the pedestrianised high street. The buildings were concrete boxes that gleamed on sunny afternoons, but amplified the sombre mood of dark wet days. It also had a cracking comic book shop.

5

New Town Utopia

Growing up in the 80s, a negativity surrounding Basildon seemed to swell and fester, known locally as something of a no-go area if you weren’t from the town. At a national level names began to stick - Basildon Man, Chav, Essex girl labels that were sometimes ball and chain, sometimes badge of honour. Unsurprisingly these weren’t coined by people from Basildon or Essex. A Sunday Telegraph article first identified ‘Basildon Man’, defining him as ‘young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren’. It was patronising, superior and fully intended to reinforce negative perceptions of successful working class people. Basildon has long been a political bellwether - it voted for Thatcher, Blair and Brexit. With this in mind, I hope that this project, through its focus on one town, reveals something about the state of the UK. In the 70s the town began a shift from being a socialist stronghold once dubbed “Little Moscow on the Thames” to becoming a Tory stronghold within ten years. This was destabilising change, as the individual trumped community in a town built upon communitarian values, with Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ policy at its heart. On top of this, the adversarial nature of British politics led to different parties in power (at national and local level) pulling the town in different directions while it was still growing. As Vin Harrop, a champion for the arts in Basildon, told me, ‘democracy does not build new towns’. Brexit happened two thirds of the way through the heavy-lifting on New Town Utopia, and it was a considered decision not to change direction or retrofit what had come before into a new narrative about Europe. I didn’t want this project to be defined by Brexit, however by its nature it will offer a perspective on the underlying influences upon the decision of 70% of voters in Basildon (a town with relatively low levels of immigrant residents). I returned to the town, decades later, and the fabric didn’t seem all that different, other than a few cracks here and there. There were new developments, and half the pubs were now blocks of flats. Most significantly, large swathes of the once bustling high street had been replaced by charity shops, betting shops, payday loan lenders and empty shops - like so many high streets across the UK. This local economy has been dispersed and shunted elsewhere, to Amazon, shopping centres and out of town cinemas, restaurants, bars, pubs… the biggest Tesco in Europe on the edge of town.

6

Introduction

That particular line from Silkin’s speech lingered, ‘a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride’. This aesthetic utopian dream was at odds with the mood that I gauged through time spent with Basildonians during my research. Although it’s true that many of the first generation ‘pioneers’ maintained pride about the town, what it represented, and the shelter it provided, I found that many from later generations were desperate to escape, and seemed to blame the town itself for many of their own personal ills. Some of those I met were artists, poets and musicians whose creative pursuits occurred either in spite of the town, or as a reaction against it. They were individuals with imagination, talent, fight and a shared belief in the positive power of self-expression. Their thoughts, work and memories are the narrative engine of the film of New Town Utopia. This book developed as a companion to the film, rather than a literary version of it. It finds its own path through the written word, hopefully offering both emotional and analytical insight into this place. It’s a book of two halves. The first section, entitled ‘Concrete Dreams’ is from the pen of poets, writers and musicians from Basildon. This is poetry, prose and drama - visceral, beautiful, tender and tough expressions from the heart of a town, and is accompanied by images taken from the production of the documentary film. The second section, ‘Utopian Realities’ takes a divergent approach. It consists of essays, extracts and contributions from writers, thinkers and journalists who offer an outsider analysis of Basildon and the new town experience. This wider context includes an extract from Silkin’s speech; several pieces focused on Basildon, including the story of the Plotlanders who were displaced by the new town; and for contrast, Owen Hatherley’s chapter focused on Milton Keynes. The final essay by Helena Rivera dives deep with an analysis of the negative public perception of new towns. Somehow, somewhere, over time, Lewis Silkin’s aesthetic and civic dream had faltered - in this project I try to understand why and how this happened, and what this means for Basildon and the rest of the UK. Camus considered Utopia to be ‘in contradiction to reality’. Basildon isn’t Utopia, but where is?

7

New Town Utopia

‘Are You Going My Way?’ Ken Worpole

8

Introduction

I spent local election night of May 1965 at Basildon Labour Club when, as they used to say, the going was good. I didn’t live in Basildon, but was working there at the time as a trainee civil engineer on the big Wimpey site at Dunton, where Fords were in the process of building the largest engineering research centre in Europe. Shortly after, having realised I was not cut out for the work, I resigned from my job and applied to go to Teachers’ Training College in Brighton, where I hoped to become an English teacher, putting years of public library borrowing to more productive use. Nonetheless, there were other connections to Basildon. Like many of the families living there, my own parents had moved from east London after the war, firstly to Canvey Island and then to Hadleigh, just down the road from the New Town. In Hadleigh I had joined the Labour Party Young Socialists which had close links with the Basildon branch, and we often socialized together as well as attending the same meetings and demonstrations. This was the time of the Aldermaston marches and the Cuban Missile Crisis. One noticeable thing about the composition of the different branches of the Young Socialists that often mixed together – Basildon, Southend and Hadleigh & Benfleet – was that the Basildon members were mostly young men, working as Fords apprentices, clerical workers or in the public sector, whereas in the other branches there were more young women, shop-workers, peace campaigners, as well as the daughters of working class bohemians. I think Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia, a project encompassing documentary film and this book, consciously or unconsciously reflects this imbalance – that Basildon was, and possibly still is, a town in which men take up most of the political and psychological space. Basildon was on the up at this time, however, and it seemed as if the best of American urban life and culture had suddenly arrived in the flat arable lands of south-east Essex. With it came wide dual carriageways, pedestrian underpasses and overpasses, fast food outlets, gleaming industrial sheds, and miles and miles of what the Americans would call tract housing, laid out in cul-de-sacs, or Radburn style neighbourhoods (another U.S. planning invention which made it impossible for the visitor to find their way in or out of the street network, deliberately so, in order to deter outsiders). This idealised New Jersey, blue-collar landscape is captured in Smith’s film, though its pioneering energy it has been hollowed out by de-industrialisation, high unemployment, greater social and geographical mobility, and a proliferation of consumer lifestyles and cultures that over time have largely dissolved the once powerful glue of class solidarity. It wasn’t meant to be this way. Actor Jim Broadbent’s avuncular voiceover in New Town Utopia, ventriloquizing the words of the Minister responsible for town-planning at the time, Lewis Silkin - whose dreamchild Basildon was - gently undercuts the grandiloquent language of the time, particularly Silkin’s ambitious claim that the New Towns were in the business of creating ‘a new type of citizen’. In later years Margaret Thatcher was to express similar views, though for different reasons, in an interview with Ronald Butt in the Sunday Times on 3 May 1981, when she said that, ‘Economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul.’ For Labour planning was the instrument of political hegemony, but for the Conservatives it was economics. We know who won. When Silkin suggested that at the end of the working day, the shop-floor worker and the board-room lawyer would head off to the same neighbourhood, one asking the other, ‘Are you going my way?’, the answer alas was ‘No.’ 9

New Town Utopia

For those interviewed in Smith’s film, the key missing element in the New Towns project from the outset was culture. Not culture as an established body of approved great works in the musical, visual and dramatic arts to be provided to a new generation, but culture as an expression of the ideals of free association, shared interests, creativity, public civility, opportunities and resources for non-vocational adult education, and support for voluntary organisations and community projects. Provision for leisure and culture however seemed to have been principally top-down, to the extent that one of Smith’s interviewees cynically says of the word civic: ‘I hate that word.’ The top-down approach was not surprising. For its first four decades (1949 – 1986), Basildon was administered by an unelected Development Corporation, first chaired by Sir Humfrey Gale, and subsequently by Sir John Stuart Macpherson G.C.M.G. The great and the good of the Development Corporation’s Board – nearly all men from the higher ranks of the civil and armed services – may have meant well, but they lacked the experience or will to consult and plan alongside the people who were going to live there. Lessons have still not been learned. The Labour government’s 1999 Urban Task Force repeated the same mistake. Established to review issues of social cohesion and urban degeneration, it was composed largely of architects, academics, planners and developers. The review panel contained no housing or community activists, no economists, no young people with their finger on the pulse of contemporary aspirations and lifestyles, no religious or community leaders, and consisted of twelve men and three women, none from Black or Ethnic Minority communities. The need for a new politics of urban renewal is now desperate, especially in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster. There was one great moment of collective self-fashioning in Basildon, and that came with the emergent punk and post-punk music scene, highlighted in New Town Utopia. For a few short years the town’s outpouring of music energized life, making it envied across the world, especially by the young, and, intriguingly, especially by the young in Communist Eastern Europe. All those who speak in the film recall this time with a sense of hope and enormous possibility, a moment when Basildon’s young people grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and put the town back on its feet again. Many of those interviewed speak enthusiastically of the original Towngate Theatre, as a remarkable laboratory and a melting pot that came into its own at this time. A demountable, prefabricated building, and somewhat scruffy inside and out, it proved its worth as a place that many local groups or organizations felt they could use as a temporary home or public venue. Band rehearsals, plays, meetings, live gigs, all came and went cheaply and enthusiastically, until the town council decided it was time to build a ‘proper’ theatre. Thus the New Towngate, an expensive monolith, was opened in 1988, proving costly to maintain, and largely unsuitable for small or informal productions. It seems to have sucked all the creative air out of the town in the illusory pursuit of a civic monument or palace of culture that nevertheless failed to establish itself as a creative centre for Basildon’s own would-be artists, writers, performers and musicians.

10

Introduction

Today the eight New Towns designated to take up London’s post-war population growth and reconstruction – Basildon, Bracknell, Crawley, Harlow, Hatfield, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City – are enjoying a series of significant anniversaries. Basildon celebrates its 70th birthday in 2019. The national sentiment about the New Towns which became excessively critical in the 1970s and 1980s, has swung back in their favour in recent times – perhaps because people now realize what happens when you don’t build affordable housing, once regarded as a right in a civilized society, along with public health and education provision, but seemingly no longer. The New Towns may have failed in creating a lively public life and culture - which historic towns and cities were able to support more easily through decades if not centuries of institutional development and a more mature commercial infrastructure - but they did provide well-built, affordable homes, in attractively landscaped neighbourhoods, which the first generation of residents - many of whom came from cramped, damp terraces and tenements with outside toilets – thought beyond their wildest dreams. Smith’s film focuses on a rather atypical group of male artists and musicians to speak for the town. Unfair perhaps, and certainly unrepresentative. Yet all those interviewed have clearly paid their dues, and have given more than they have taken from Basildon’s original utopian promise of a better life for all. The years of punk and do-it-yourself culture still seem to have constituted a high water mark in the town’s cultural history. With luck New Town Utopia - part of a vibrant new artistic movement of independent film-making, documentary history and social media production concerned with place and identity - will mark a turning point.

Ken Worpole is a writer on architecture, landscape, planning, design, and social history. He was a foundermember of openDemocracy, and is a senior professor at The Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University.

11

Concrete Dreams Selected poems inspired by Basildon

13

New Town Utopia

14

Concrete Dreams

Basildon Blue By Ralph Dartford I had this great big thing with this little new town flirt. But now she’s gone away Still wearing my Basildon Blue shirt. I bet it’s not tucked in, it’s flapping around her thighs, top two buttons strategically undone, A treat for some new boys eyes. I’m not saying that I’m jealous. I’m not saying that I’m hurt. I never really cared for her, but I loved that Basildon Blue shirt.

15

New Town Utopia

Pop By Ralph Dartford In 1978 only the ‘Pop in Cafe’, was open on a Sunday. Warm and lit amongst the shitten of the greengrocer, baker, the hateful bookmaker, who took all our fathers to the cleaners the day before Inside, there were men in lamb chop sideburns and tattoos. Chasing the pages of the News of the World, lighting a fag that illuminated a saucy vicar’s wife. There was Cheese on toast. Alvin Stardust on the Jukebox.

16

Concrete Dreams

The Pinball machine was out of order. The wizard never came to fix it. Someone even wrote letters to Jim. Once, twice, three times to nothing. And it’s 2015 now. The ‘Pop In’ a tale that old men tell their sons over yoghurt, blueberries and bravado. While the Aga is lit and the Columbian is inhaled And everyone reads of a saucy vicar’s husband on their iPhones.

17

New Town Utopia

18

Concrete Dreams

19

New Town Utopia

Do You Remember? By Olmo Lazarus Do you remember days as long as months. when the sun stayed up, and refused to fall. Skateparks, concrete by the old swimming pool. We’d listen to tinny music on age old phones. And enjoy the prose. of Strummer, Marley and Tim Armstrong. We’d sing along...sun was shining, we were rainbows...two We were piss poor in monetary terms, but my bank account held a different wealth. Cos we were rich in time, we were rich in love, we were rich in youth, we were rich in health. Do you remember awaking with no certain plans? And holding hands. And laughing loud aloud as if no on one was around. In the busy shopping centre. Chocolate milk, energy drinks, penny mix and bags of crisps. We retired to the rooftop car park for a sit down meal. Do you remember how it feels? To be truly free. That fleeting moment in life when old enough to decide. Where to go and what to be. Without a sense or urgency. Or responsibility. Just wrapping ourselves up in life’s rich tapestry. And drinking deep from the fountain of youth. Do you remember Wat Tyler park? Disposable barbecues, and gnat bites in dusk. And walking back past Pitsea dump. Watching a month long day decline. The last sun rays shine. And street lamps flicker on one by one. The day had to die, it always it’s fate. As luck would have it this planet rotates. And I find myself on a brand new page.

20

Concrete Dreams

21

New Town Utopia

I put my hand in my pocket, if I’m lucky now. I’ll sometimes find a few quid. I landed a job, and roof overhead. I made good since I was a kid. But when I go to the bank it coldly explains that overdraft charges apply. I've been spending my youth, I’ve got far less health and overdrawing on all of my time. You’ve got plenty of love, Mr. Lazarus, and you’re not completely insane. We could loan you some youth if you wish, or you could invest some of that time? I need the little time that I’ve got, I explain to the man who sits at the desk. And if you’re sitting comfortably sunshine, there’s something I’ll get off my chest. I spent all my time on time wasting, I gambled my health on late nights, I invested my love very wisely, on kisses under street lights. And yes my youth is running out quickly and I spend quicker than I could ever earn. But I’ll share with you, I’ve found to be true, these lessons I have learned. When my pockets are all empty, I’ll wave my Hoover flag. I’ll stand up proud and scream aloud, I’m broke but I’m so glad. Not for what I’ve got, but for all that I have had. You see... One day this body will be worm food. And soon the worms will be worm food too. Then the sun will balloon, to tune of a billion hot days. Factor five sun block won’t stop the clock, or electromagnetic waves. Because monuments will crumble, man will cease to be. It’ll melt down your mountains and boil all your seas. History books will burn, and money disintegrate. Nothing more will matter, when all matter evaporates. So when my pockets are empty I’ll wave my Hoover flag. We take nothing and leave nothing beyond the grave. Memories are all we have.

22

Concrete Dreams

23

New Town Utopia

24

Concrete Dreams

A Morning Fog By Ben Williams The world draped In spectral finery, Or rubbed out? Sparrows silenced; A still spider in its Dew-jewelled cobweb; Watery headlights like Glowing eyes, Cast down on Wet tarmac trails. A chance to Slip away unseen, To hide in the Damp folds of Robes that cover Concrete scars and Iron blemishes: The marks we make Upon the world.

25

New Town Utopia

26

27

New Town Utopia

Mist Descends By Olmo Lazarus Mist descends on another day in the ends that taught us boys to be men. Or rather taught guys to wear ties, to pretend to be men. We are all just boys, and by design or choice we refuse to let go. I couldn’t cut the umbilical on this town. Like a loving mother these streets took my hand. This tarmac held me up. The lampposts lit the way. The road signs provided advice. And the path carries me home. To where… Kids kick flat footballs that pound the walls of schools where I was taught. Seasons come and go, but concrete and stone are slow to change. Same faces crawl across corner shops to purchase pints of tenants. Cold hands grip cans and remember days when drinking in a park was a laugh. And that same guy still barks in indescribable tones at the bus driver on the number five. School kids titter at his funny mannerisms as I one did. He’s still here. And so am I. Few more lines across the eyes, a few greys that come to stay. But the day to day remains unchanged. Down at the winged horse there’s middle aged mods necking pints at the bar. I wonder if he believes that he’ll succeed and be a star. Or if the wishes just swishes down the bottom of his glass. Dreams washed up in foam in the midst of his moustache. And the scene remains the same. Few changes of staff, a lick of paint behind the bar. But these are actors in freeze frame. Like a movie still or a record on repeat.

28

Concrete Dreams

We still call Owen “Tuffy.” And I don’t know why. Nick-names remain although the stories that spawned them fade. ‘Cos mates resist change. We’d rather play at being sixteen in a land of dreams then face up to reality. And the record on a loop - like an old favourite film Provides a sense of security. Bangers blow bass lines up and down the road. The sounds of home. Although the beats grew from jungle to dubstep the basic sound remains the same. Sound-system-banger, hang around the car park at dark. With rust and subwoofer and a dash of burned petroleum. Only the best for the girls of our towns. Young lancelots’ noble steed; Ford Fiesta and mp3s. Maccy Ds or KFC. And courting begins on the black back seats. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t grand. But we make a stand. Make a claim for a patch of land. This grimy corner of English soil with all its disfigurements and ignorance embroiled is quintessentially my home. And although it may never grow and I may never go a little part of my heart’s blood will always flow. Towards ends that taught us boys to be men. Or rather taught guys, to wear ties, to pretend to be men.

29

New Town Utopia

Shane by Mike Parker I wonder What happened to Shane? He just rode away. My dad did that. No horse, no gun, no cowboy hat And what is sad, I never shouted “come back dad” Mum, the losing fighter, drowning in gin, Retreated to her corner Clanking among green bottles Her mind, from that day forth, Let no-one in. I miss my Dad, his toothless rage, His dockers fists, his mindless stare, Mum’s in detox, I’m in care Waiting for Shane, I know he’s there. The sad old house is vacant now, The windows gone, The doors kicked in. I see the shadows of our family tree, Now only me, The sole inheritor of pain, Nothing to do, but wait for Shane.

30

Concrete Dreams

31

New Town Utopia

32

Concrete Dreams

New Town Reliquary By Phil Burdett glass protecting butterflies reflecting faces two shapes, a toffee sky broiling threats of awkward rain the old new town yawns into shuttered mornings stretching limbs past the spring care for her & her child, show remorse again etched against the sacred, ritual bling secured in grey & pastel shop front mirrors under awnings high on mild crosses the crucified cling – fists of pain was it a saint that this old man’s memory misses? tight as a sailor’s knot – tethered to edifices towering layers of rooms to let – onward we stagger that impend & dampen in slight mist falling with grace - falling like reasons to forget was it his halo? peeled remnant of coatskin fragments of crisps & sumps of burping lager the nightly eucharist

33

New Town Utopia

34

Concrete Dreams

35

New Town Utopia

Brooke House by Mike Parker I served life there, one and twenty years, My marriage was born, suffocated and died in its gaunt corridors. The sad dark yellow paint mourned its own creation. The old lady Brooke. She did not age well, Like some Roman leper catacomb she rotted obscenely in the public eye A monument to tastelessness, a tombstone to design, a blight in the sky A major public expression of gaunt and empty planning, And now, a huge embarrassment, little more Though once I loved her like a whore When she was a fresh as the first whisper of spring The poor, dishevelled ugly thing Old mother Brooke, hostess to ten thousand ragged tragedies, May you never know your crimes.

36

Concrete Dreams

37

New Town Utopia

Undertown By Phil Burdett red brick spleen & angst for Gertie for her rose is not a rose here where browngrass protests in the thin clay gaps mutis mutandis the fields smell more of horse these blithe, fractal days since the concrete flowered books sweating quietly nervous in the angular library like priests at a Stockhausen lecture garlicky knowledge tall windows - blue, tinted do we have a name yet? derivative of some old farmer add hill to old hill & there you are doomsday knit & purl up above these stout trunks pastel flags hang limp as grandmaternal skirts unshaken by the gusts of words & stupid they stare down through heat phases greaseproof paper distortions exoskeletal shopping trolleys rolling slow through Sunday’s savage lines, roof & awning jigsaw foliage maggot-pecked tree, metal, leaf, stone beyond – in limp curves of air slithery polythene blue sham of liquid smeared by an eager child - random hypnotic over the baize, gelid falsities of the park what shall we call her? pram meat & mewling ingrate Chloe’s a pretty name Julie at number 32 you know, Dave’s Julie – with the Volvo? called theirs Chloe my father hoses lettuce in a tray sour dandelions guarded the greenhouse skirting the year I begged for a pet

38

Concrete Dreams

he drags a last clutch of unfiltered smoke & stubs his crushed corduroy dog-end in the lid of a jamjar upturned we called the tortoise Elvis painted his name across the shell & dad said it looked like ancient scrabble squares we laughed & sometimes sat in striped deckchairs with ice-cream cones our treasured green allowance between split fencework & trellis or spectral with sparklers in bonfire smokelight time stuck tight to semi-detached walls rectangular sepulchres - candle haunted in stepless streets sure that Lucifer works the night pulleys his puppets jerk at the shopfront displays no pulse, dead town, grey wind Elvis plods the fresh-mown lawn where do you fancy this year? Murray in personnel says Malta’s nice what's wrong with the Isle Of Wight? your mother burns easy remember that weekend break in where was it? blood dry on infidel walls – baked clay totems Murray, you know, wife just had a baby solemnity of bricks – piled in dust of revolutions grandma won’t fly at her age – her veins there's always Ventnor, that blue B&B with the hanging baskets meet me at Brooke House or under the lollipop clock that’s wrong always wrong or in the bland parks between factories heavy ground so bodied, deathwarm swollen with boneless Pocahontas an exotic miracle queen of the Bata estates perhaps she slid on interlacing slivers down the river past lowing dockyard klaxon fresh from the end of graves

39

New Town Utopia

Brooke House, yes or by the dead winter fountain Mark loves Deb in magic marker scrawled on the tit of a nude stone mother astride which the dull child sits aghast icicles extend her Ophelian locks wintering in a real winter of sledge & fizzing frostbitten toes something is celebrated flags above the spiky church of glass they weren’t there yesterday mute tongues keeping sniggering secrets of royal babies, olympiads & world cup losses limp strangefruit corpses - dishcloths awaiting eddies then burst open, proud as blood phoenixes from the sad collapse restored flutter in the whittling rain as redbrick tans to russet in the car spray crimson & yellow leaf – stains on wet plastic tubs sloth children drape jumpers on bike racks & thrill to lip-stuck punk girls casually sat around the broken lift tableau of decadence & revolt & in Hammer horror echoes a janitor whistles something of Christmas in the stunned tinsel & baubled ache of the bright chrome mall & nobody lives here in this well-lit box of heirlooms on spindly tree crescent where sweet wine from the Algarve rots in the cabinet & the Aldertons snip at their hedges The Bowdens polish the BSA exhaust & shine the tank & the kids, the kids they all smile from their porches like abducted waifs in Super-8 did you see the game? soft drizzle on cardboard sounds like a frog newtown edgeland - baitbox, flies - never offside, never linesman was ten yards behind the play

40

Concrete Dreams

fish not biting - pecking the mossy film of reflections under the brown heavens Sunday football whistles from the distant park mother reads the cackling columns & mint sauce congeals in the hooped egg cup some of England is here – brushing sideways its bootblack curls their women evaporating old & young Ambre Solaired & Parma Violated & it is out of our reach & even elite - if we so choose so very not for the likes of us - the churning calendar creamy skins preening to mirrors of calcified flesh not for us – this surface vulnerability big things threaten the hush out in the vivid air & January lays a strip of dull snow over centrally heated lofts blue slates, steaming air-vents, cool bags over the bald, grumbling shell of earth beneath which we renegades wait like judgement day coffins snipering at the call to arms - gunshots from a never ending war symphonic wail of siren & ricochet yelps beautiful conflicts in guerrilla backstreet shadow but already the doubt sniffs fear in our nape Feel the stiffening hairs loosen a cordal grip shifting away from our sights as we blather of age until one weekend I’m in town paying rent two months overdue & already flowers adorn the hair of my comrades placards describe our failings in slang alien & abbreviated – urging masses to pulse & at first the hackles tremble - we must fight! but it is soon Sunday - there are no late buses & the beer garden has a kids area they’ve painted over the graffiti in the bus shelter & it is sudden evening tea, sponge cake – two cats are in the cushions & look there - already the places at the barricades have been taken

41

New Town Utopia

42

43

New Town Utopia

Commuter Ruin By Ben Williams I have tired of lens-flare dawns, that world of Fields and woodland, of East End yards and City towers, refracted through the grimy window glass Of trains that ride their too-familiar tracks. I have tired of washed-out mornings, of anonymous lives Behind the façades of once-proud, eye-sore Tenements, the dream-drained and the dispossessed Trapped in brick-balcony, washing-line lives. I have tired of bruise-blue evenings, that violent Promise in the wine-fuelled yak of my involuntary companions, The nicotine-stained traders and Mojito-drowned secretaries Hurtling through their coke-haven years. I have tired of sleep-starved nights, the whine of Sirens and the hiss of rubber on tarmac in the lamp-lit gloom, The never-dark of bright, refrigerated garages and Stink of fat-soaked, fast-food vans. Instead, bring me again that sanctuary of damp, forest floors, The chatter of sparrows and patter of rain, Bring me the cleansing peace of the restless sea, That beautiful tabula rasa of ocean’s waves and tides.

44

Concrete Dreams

45

New Town Utopia

46

Concrete Dreams

47

New Town Utopia

More Brooke House By Mike Parker There stands she, A queen in tatters. Victim of progress And social matters. I served life in her 21 years I saw chav birds Become old dears. Did my time Among the dregs Her glaring front And her open legs I salute the sacred cow So unwanted now She dominates the town Her knickers truly down There are those that pray For earthquakes every day The Renaissance is due And she’s getting on the way.

48

Concrete Dreams

49

New Town Utopia

50

51

New Town Utopia

The Thing She Said By Ralph Dartford Of all the wonderful things my mother said, her final words meant most. She was sat in her kitchen. Stick thin, cigarette in. Beautiful. A touch of Hollywood still. She only had days left. She worked it out. She had to pass it on. A route for living before the dying. Her eyes set upon mine, fierce with love. She lifted a glass of wine. Heavy as all the years. Red, like blood. “Go live your life, try to do everything. Don’t stop! Never know your place.” It’s five years on now. Where do I start?

52

Concrete Dreams

53

New Town Utopia

54

Concrete Dreams

55

New Town Utopia

56

Concrete Dreams

Streetlights and Spotlights By Olmo Lazarus These street lights are spotlights Under which they perform Our young Montagues and Capulets Pirouette in scenes of idleness And in times of stress Turn the best written tragedy on its head Happiness is a state of mind And on our streets you find Kids can pull apart misery Inject some love, some energy A ‘fuck the world’ philosophy And repackage it as comedy Do you want to see real bravery? Then see the sixteen year old, latch key kid The ‘streetwise professor’ who ran and hid Because today her living room is no man’s land He raised his voice He raised his hand ...at mum again She crept through mine fields in her kitchen Through her hall she crawled to sounds of war To sanctuary of anonymity To the sanctity of the neutrality of the streets Now under phone boxes and orange lights she now recites her best routines She keeps her mates in stitches ‘cos out here she’s a queen Out here she’s... Herself. She can’t talk about what goes on indoors But their applause is the closest she got to being noticed today WELL, I HOPE A VICTORIA CROSS IS ON ITS WAY To these silent soldiers who soldier on in our estates across the night ‘Cos that’s our closest fight There's a civil war that’s waged between brickwork walls And where it seems so many more young kids fall Than in any foreign fields I’m sure.

57

New Town Utopia

58

59

New Town Utopia

Come On Down This theatre fragment was part of ‘5 Minute Warnings’, a play cycle by Vincent O’Connell, performed by Basildon Youth Theatre in November 1988.

They watch a game show on TV. Lots of raucous audience laughter, cheers, yells, claps: lots of inane prattle from the host as constant background noise. The light from the TV screen shines in their faces. On trays on their laps are sloppy, strangely coloured TV dinners, which they occasionally eat with a fork. They are glued to the screen. She picks up the remote control, which lies between them, turns down the volume. He picks the remote up, turns sound back up. HER When a rabbit knows it’s about to die, it screams a terrifying scream you wouldn’t believe it was capable of. When I was young, I mean really young, and the estate at the back of the house was just... land, and trees, and ponds, I saw this rabbit attacked by a dog. It went (she screams a terrifying scream). Eventually, HIM If I had a car like that, I’d be happy. HER What? HIM I would. I’d die a happy man. HER Eat your tea. HIM I’d give...me eye teeth don’t seem enough somehow... me right arm...and the left...I’d give both my arms for a car like that and I’d die happy. HER I’d like to see you happy. She picks up the remote control, turns the volume down. Just as she appears to be about to speak, he picks up the remote control and turns the sound back up. Eventually,

60

Concrete Dreams

61

New Town Utopia

HER If I had to say when was the happiest moment of my life - say I was on a game show and that was the question I had to answer, to win you a car, say - I’d say it was the day when you were watching the tele and it just spontaneously exploded and you and the house and all its contents were consumed in flames and no trace was left, no trace at all, of you, your life, sir or any of your meaningless acquisitions. That’s what I’d say. HIM What? HER It hasn’t actually happened yet, but we live in hope. HIM What? HER I said eat your tea, it’s getting cold. Eventually, HIM This is my very favourite programme - well this and the one a bit like it - it’s got everything you want, all the ingredients. It’s got money. It’s got nice things. It keeps you guessing. Everyone smiles and cheers. And no-one goes away empty-handed, so it’s fair as well on top of everything else. I like this programme and the one a bit like it. You can switch off. Enjoy yourself. HER That's what I’d like to do alright. Switch it off, switch you off, where’s your switch, what’s on the other channel? She picks up the remote control, points it at him, pushes several channel buttons trying to retune him. It doesn’t work. She throws down the remote control. Eventually, HER Can I switch it over now? I said can I switch it over now, I want to watch the news. HIM Do I want starving babies brought into my front room? No I don’t. Do I want fires and disasters before I go to sleep or have a beer? No. Rapes, murders, mass killings, do I want that on top of my supper? I don’t. HER I want to watch the news HIM What you want -

62

Concrete Dreams

63

New Town Utopia

HER They said last night HIM New coat, new pair of shoes, that I can understand HER On the news they said HIM Holiday abroad, even, but when you say you want HER There might be a war, they said, it was on the news HIM Do I want a war in my front room? HER Flashpoint, accident, recriminations, revenge attacks HIM I don’t want a war, I want peace and quiet, is that too much to ask? HER The words they use, they worry me. I want HIM Want, want, want HER I want to know what’s going on, to understand He continues watching the game show. HER I dreamed last night. I haven’t had a dream in years. But last night, I dreamed all night. Flashpoint. Accident. Revenge. The words, they...scorched through my brain like, like bullets. I dreamed the sky went dark, the sun was blotted out, it rained. Everything it rained on got burned. Everything and everybody. (Directly to him) Don’t you care at all? HIM Don’t you listen, I said no, now shut your row. He picks up the remote control, points it at the TV, and presses the volume button. The sound of hysterical laughing, clapping, cheering gets louder and louder and louder. She puts her hands over her ears and tries and tries to scream, but no sound comes out of her mouth. The light from the TV screen intensifies, then blackout.

64

Concrete Dreams

65

New Town Utopia

66

Concrete Dreams

67

New Town Utopia

68

69

New Town Utopia

70

Concrete Dreams

Claim By Phil Burdett the only white knight in the kingdom slopes by on sad horse in my exploded imagination in the omphalos of roundabout by the metal sculpture mind stripped by cheap culture thin paint, figures in fables do we pray or snigger? the bedlamite rolls his blank dice shouts snake eyes & dismounts no Mingus slipping notes fat through air vents in the cool air of the frozen fish aisle no Ginsberg goosing the melonfruit bliss it was that dawn to howl a snake of fetid bohemians peeks into the mouth of the council offices as more ice cracks & plunges from a brutal pigeon ballet on to the inching turmoil of saturday cars

71

New Town Utopia

A Councillor’s Funeral By Ben Williams It ended in a plain, wooden box, This life that barely touched mine, Of a man whose passions I knew In only one dimension, Yet who played so many roles On a small, urban stage. He was borne aloft by strangers, Not family, friends or comrades, Carried in solemnly through A church he rarely frequented, For a ragged congregation To mourn and remember. Friend and foe united in that Shared awkwardness in song, And Jerusalem’s dark satanic mills Were the estates and edifices Of his own quiet legacy, his Agency mostly lost now in the Reviews, revamps and rebuilds, Or swallowed up by those Neon monuments to fun Built on the edge of town. And as we mourned this man We knew, but didn’t, we glimpsed The soldier, poet, lover, husband, Father, grandfather and widower In the plain and painful words of Those who loved him most. Then, on that cold, grey day, After all was said and sung, We old antagonists, in tired suits, Older, wiser, fatter, sadder, And also somehow lesser, Greeted as long lost friends, Hands clasped, tongues dulled, More in common than not, Quietly wondering what those Town hall nights of spite and fury - Irrelevant then and now forgot Were really all about.

72

Concrete Dreams

73

New Town Utopia

74

Concrete Dreams

In The End This theatre fragment was part of ‘5 Minute Warnings’, a play cycle by Vincent O’Connell, performed by Basildon Youth Theatre in November 1988.

This is how it will be. You will be drinking your tea Or watching your TV, Complaining about the weather. To whoever will listen. In London, at rush hour, the tubes will stop in the tunnels. And the lights will go off. The TV will go black. The weather will go black. And the birds will stop singing their evening tunes, because the birds will sense it. The drunk will omit to ask for the price of a cup of tea. The bag lady will forget her bags. A car will crash but no ambulance will come. A baby will start crying. One baby. Its crying will fill the street. No one will comfort it. There will be no-one to comfort it. And its crying will fill the city. Still no-one will come. And its crying will be audible throughout the land. But there will be no-one to hear it. This is how it will be. You will be drinking your tea Or watching your TV, Complaining about the weather On the floor, curled up, a baby, crying. Then; Hands pushed down on faces, fingers tearing at mouths, bodies closing and opening, paroxysms of pain, shudders of horror, howls, screams, abuse and weeping - a picture of hell. The sound dies away. Still bodies. In the middle, the baby still crying.

75

New Town Utopia

76

77

New Town Utopia

78

79

New Town Utopia

80

81

Utopian Realities Selected writing about Basildon and British new towns

83

New Town Utopia

New Towns Bill (Hansard, 8 May 1946)

Lewis Silkin

It is a long cry from More’s “Utopia” to the New Towns Bill, but it is not unreasonable to expect that that “Utopia” of 1515 should be translated into practical reality in 1946. There have been many other warnings about the ill effects of the growth of London and other large towns. […] The demand for the erection of large numbers of houses and the need to rebuild war damaged towns are pressing. Between the wars some 5 million houses were built, and the effect on the countryside and on our towns has been almost calamitous. Enormous areas of agricultural and market gardening land have been lost to these islands for ever. Large numbers of people in the towns are living in grossly congested and overcrowded conditions, and there is almost always a serious lack of open space, particularly in the poorer parts of our towns. The majority of the population being more and more divorced from the countryside, many people are forced to live at a considerable distance from their work, and are involved in long, tiring, and expensive daily journeys. Many towns have built new housing estates on the outskirts. These have largely failed in their purpose of providing a better life for their people, and have almost invariably become dormitories consisting of members of one income group, with no community life or civic sense. Today there is a need for additional houses, possibly equal in number again to those built between the wars. Are these to be built on the outskirts of our towns, with the same lack of planning and ill consequences as before? If so, I dread to think what sort of place this still fair land of ours will be in 10 or 15 years time. This is our last chance. Many of the houses now to be built must be carefully located in new self-contained communities, if the existing evils are not to be aggravated. On 5th March last I announced in this House that the Government intend to carry out a programme for the planned dispersal of a substantial proportion of the population of London to areas situated 20 to 50 miles away, and there to create homes and work for the people so moved, in new towns, or by the substantial enlargement of existing towns. The evil, of course, is not confined to London; it applies almost equally to such places as Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, Portsmouth and Plymouth, each with a population for which it cannot provide housing within its own boundaries ranging from 40,000 to 250,000 people. In many of these cases, the building of new towns is the only satisfactory method of providing accommodation for the overspill population. Apart from the problem of congestion with which I have just dealt there is also in various parts of the country the case of scattered villages whose inhabitants depend on natural local resources for their living, and where these sources have declined, where, for instance, local mines have been worked out, the inhabitants are left high and dry. The only solution to permit of their living near to employment is also the creation of a new self-contained town. […] It is essential that a sufficient amount of industry shall be available to enable every worker living in the town to find his work there. The new towns will have much to offer to industry. The industrial zone will be carefully located to provide the maximum convenience for industry, good roads and rail facilities and sidings, and plenty of room for expansion. Many industrialists who at present have factories in congested surroundings in large towns, without proper convenience or room for expansion, will welcome the opportunity of moving and of carrying on their industry in new, modern, up to date, clean, light, airy factories where they can expand, and where their workers will be within walking distance and can enjoy the opportunity of living healthy and contented lives. […] 84

Utopian Realities

The towns will be divided into neighbourhood units, each unit with its own shops, schools, open spaces, community halls and other amenities. But it is possible to be lonely even in a neighbourhood unit of 10,000. I am most anxious that the planning should be such that the different income groups living in the new towns will not be segregated. No doubt they may enjoy common recreational facilities and take part in amateur theatricals, or each play their part in a health centre or community centre. But, when they leave to go home I do not want the better off people to go to the right and the less well off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other, “Are you going my way?” I am sure a greater amount of comradeship is assured by a quarter of an hour spent in going home together, than by an hour spent in an institution. I have known people to sit together on a committee for years without ever getting on speaking terms. I do not want to repeat the experience of Welwyn Garden City, where the town is divided into two by the railway, the workers on one side, and the middle class on the other and “never the twain do meet,” except at the railway station. I should like to encourage the corporations to be daring and courageous in their efforts to discover the best way of living. I want to see the new towns gay and bright, with plenty of theatres, concert halls, and meeting places. I should like to see cricket and football played by the youth of the town instead of being watched by them. I want to see them producing first-class amateur teams and I should like to see golf courses made available for all. Golf is not a rich man's game in Scotland; why should it be so in England? The new town should provide valuable experience in the best use of leisure, a commodity which is, and should become, more and more plentiful. […] It is a remarkable thing that friendliness, neighbourliness, comradeship, and the spirit of helpfulness - all these things are only seen in the villages and in the slums. The spirit of the slums is indeed remarkable. If there is trouble, ill health or any of the many misfortunes that befall people living in those conditions, the neighbours are eager to come to the rescue, to take charge of a child or look after the household while the mother is in hospital. A hundred and one neighbourly jobs that need to be done, are done. But when the slums are cleared, and the people transferred to a new housing estate, all this friendliness and neighbourliness seems to disappear, and families become isolated units, each contained within the fortress of the new council house, and nothing seems to get them closer together. Our aim must be to combine in the new town this friendly spirit of the former slum, with the vastly improved health conditions of the new estate but it must be a broadened spirit embracing all classes of society. The former slum dweller, or dweller in the poorer part of a town, has a good deal to learn from those better off, and vice versa. Our towns must be beautiful. Here is a grand chance for the revival or creation of a new architecture. The monotony of the inter-war housing estate must not be repeated. We must develop in those who live in the towns, an appreciation of beauty. I am a firm believer in the cultural and spiritual interest of beauty. The new towns can be experiments in design as well as in living. They must be so laid out that there is ready access to the countryside for all. This combination of town and country is vital. Lack of it is perhaps the biggest curse of the present-day town dweller. I believe that if all these conditions are satisfied, 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. Cicero said: A man’s dignity is enhanced by the home he lives in. I say, even more by the town he lives in. In the long run, the new towns will be judged by the kind of citizens they produce, by whether they create this spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship. That will be the real test, and that will be my objective so long as I have any responsibility for these new towns. Lewis Silkin was Minister of Town and Country Planning in the Labour Government of Clement Attlee from 1945 until he retired in 1950.

85

New Town Utopia

The New Town Solution

Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward

Essex is becoming the dustbin of London - James Wentworth Day, The Book of Essex The turning point in the history of the plotlands in South Essex as elsewhere, was the Second World War. In the first place it brought an end, finally, to the agricultural depression. Land, which had been parcelled out into plots but never sold, was returned to farming. The activities of the War Agricultural Executive Committees ensured that whoever owned it and whatever the cost, neglected fields and derelict scrubland would be brought back into cereal cultivation. In the second place, the war brought a mood of public resolution to build a better Britain once it was over. In terms of planning town and country in the South East, Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944 was accepted in principle by the postwar government in 1946, including his proposals for the Metropolitan Green Belt and for a ring of New Towns beyond it. South Essex, with a new town between Laindon and Pitsea, coupled with Green Belt restrictions on new development, was to be profoundly affected by these changes. A third effect of the Second World War on the plotlands was the very heavy bombing of East London, and especially of the dockland boroughs of Stepney, Poplar, West Ham and East Ham. As at Canvey Island, many families evacuated themselves or were bombed out and moved permanently to whatever foothold they had in the Pitsea, Laindon, Vange or Billericay districts. They were joined after the war by other members of their families returning from war service. The extreme housing shortage after the war was, in a general sense, more the result of six years of no housebuilding and the result of the lowering of the average age of marriage and the consequent rise in the rate of household formation and in the birth rate, than of the actual number of houses destroyed through bombing and the wartime postponement of maintenance; but the combination of all these factors meant that many people were living in accommodation which had never been conceived as permanent, while some plotland houses, like city houses, were sub-let, room by room. Until the census of 1951 (the first for twenty years) the local authorities had only a vague idea of the total number of people living in the ‘sprawling wilderness of South Essex’. In 1950, Mr (later Sir) Bernard Braine, then Member of Parliament for the Billericay constituency, remarked that: the previous Minister assumed that there were only some 17,000 people in the area. Goodness knows, that was large enough. I have had a careful check made, and I am satisfied that there are some 27,750 people living in the designated area.1 The designation he was referring to was that of 7,800 acres as the site for Basildon New Town. When the first round of New Towns was proposed under the 1946 Act, there was in many cases intense opposition, not only from local residents and landowners, but from the local authorities. Basildon was almost unique among the new towns in that the local authorities petitioned the government for the area to be chosen as a new town site. Harlow in North-West Essex had been designated and it was proposed that Ongar should be expanded as the second Essex new town. But Essex County Council and the then Billericay District Council

86

Utopian Realities

made representations to the Minister of Town and Country Planning that the Pitsea-Laindon area should be selected. They were joined by the County Boroughs of West Ham and East Ham who saw the place as the natural overspill town for their boroughs, many of whose former citizens were already living there. At the first round of designations, the joint application by the various councils was rejected, but after a further delegation to the Minister, the area was accepted. The name Basildon was selected as the village of that name was at the centre of the designated area. […] If the local authority was almost unique (the only other example is Easington, County Durham in the case of Peterlee) in seeking the designation of its area as a new town, the inhabitants were almost united in their opposition. Residents’ Protection Associations were formed in Pitsea and Laindon when word got around that the Development Corporation intended to acquire the freehold, by compulsory purchase, of all sites in the designated area. In vain the first chairman of the Development Corporation faced angry meetings of residents, explaining that ‘The Corporation will not acquire any property in this area until such time as they want to use it or the land on which it stands’.2 The passionate feelings evoked by the idea of freehold possession were evident at these meetings. The local paper reported that ‘One man asked if this was justice after fighting for their stake in the country for six years. Another said “But you don’t think we would do it again. We won’t fight for rented property”.3 However, the same paper reported on the same day that ‘A young man stood up and said, “I am a property owner, not by choice, but because I needed a home. I bought a bungalow in Laindon and I have no opposition to the New Town. He said that Laindon was going to fall down anyway”.4 […] The policy of starting the development of the new town in the empty centre and spreading slowly over the years into the more populous plotland sites of Pitsea and Laindon, seemed both sensible and humane just because in many cases it allowed the original settlers, with the greatest actual and emotional investment in their homes, to live out their lives without disturbance. It was in any case virtually imposed on the Development Corporation by the Government’s Housing Accommodation Direction in the early years, telling public authorities not to demolish unnecessarily. But this policy also brought a great deal of uncertainty in its trail. ‘Basildon was built on heartbreak’ is a local saying among old inhabitants, and people still speak bitterly of the lingering death of Laindon as the shops in the High Street gradually closed down, one by one. […] By the 1980s the Basildon Development Corporation is on the verge of extinction, its task completed. It has fulfilled its function in promoting the growth of a vast, populous and industrially successful new town, as effective as any other in the country, and a financial asset to the Treasury which originally provided the funds for its development. There is little visible evidence left of its plotland origins. It has even provided one of the few examples of plotland sites reverting to ‘natural’ woodland.

87

New Town Utopia

In 1950 it was possible for a naturalist to write: Wander further afield and enjoy scenes of attractive beauty, but avoid Laindon! There was never a town like it! It is interesting, if despairing, to compare lovely One Tree Hill with the hideous scar that man has inflicted on the countryside which, not long since, was equally lovely.5 […] Time changes our perception of the environment, including the plotlands. As the last vestiges of Basildon’s origins disappeared, there were voices among the Corporation’s board members and its staff arguing that there should be some kind of plotland museum to commemorate the original reasons for the town’s existence. Should not one of the original plotland dwellings be preserved for this purpose? At a meeting of the Development Corporation in 1979, Derek Senior proposed to his fellow board members that an area should be set aside at Dunton, the last corner of the New Town’s territory, for do-it-yourself smallholdings, where the building regulations and planning controls could be waived, experimentally, just to see what happened. He was heard in astonished silence, and in the following year the Secretary of State did not reappoint him. But in 1983, the Corporation, with the assistance of the Countryside Commission, made Dunton an ‘informal recreation area’, a place for picnics and rambles, and a plotland museum. A few of the old bungalows remain in the overgrown gridiron of grassy tracks, and one of them, ‘The Haven’ in Third Avenue, has been restored to its 1930s state. A waymarked trail takes the visitor on a mile-long plotland walk, while the Corporation has published A Plotland Album: the story of the Dunton Hills Community, full of evocative stories and snapshots from the families who lived there, and telling the story of their home-made landscape.6 Thus in thirty-five years, the Basildon plotlands have shifted in the official perception from the status of a rural slum to that of a distinctive and unique part of our environmental inheritance. This chapter was originally published in Arcadia For All: The Legacy Of A Makeshift Landscape by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward.

88

Utopian Realities

1. Cited in in Barker, Theo (1978) The Long March of Everyman, 1750-1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2. Branson, N. and Heinemann, M. (1971) Britain in the 1930s. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 3. Glynn, S. and Oxborrow, J. (1976) Interwar Britain: A Social and Economic History. London: Allen and Unwin. 4. Helpful sources on changes in land ownership from the 1870s onwards include Douglas, Roy (1976) Land, People and Politics, 1878-1952. London: Allison and Busby; Liberal Land Committees (1925) Land and the Nation. London: Hodder and Stoughton; Sutherland, D. (1968) The Landowners. London: Anthony Blond; and Thompson, F. M. L. (1963) English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 5. Sharp, Thomas (1932) Town and Countryside. London: Oxford University Press. 6. More generally, helpful sources on outdoor recreation in this period include, Brunner, Elizabeth (1914) Holiday Making and the Holiday Trades. Oxford; Childs, W.M. (1921) Holidays in Tents. London; Ministry of Labour (1938) Report of the Committee on Holidays with Pay Cmnd. 5724. London: HMSO; Pimlott, J.A.R. (1947) The Englishman’s Holiday: A Social History. London: Faber and Faber; and Walvin, J. (1978) Beside the Seaside. London: Allen Lane.

89

New Town Utopia

Not for the first time, I died in Basildon

Magnus Granath



Not for the first time, I died in Basildon Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is a broken winged bird That cannot fly. - Langston Hughes

JG: Magnus, do you have many friends in Basildon? MCG: Everybody in Basildon is my friend.

In the poem, Zima Junction, the Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, says: “Breaking the earth in our new found land, we were dizzy with joy and dreams.” Yevtushenko is referring to the Virgin Lands experiment in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s when groups of eager young communist pioneers were sent to open up the vastness of the Russian lands to the east of the Ural Mountains. It was like that when we moved, in 1958 to Basildon in the flatlands of south Essex. Instead of the vast tractor plant at Magnitogorsk, we had Ford Tractors at Cranes Farm. For the harvester plant at Chelyabinsk, we had York Shipley in Nevendon. The SovCom workers housing project was substituted by the Basildon Development Corporation. We were part of a vast scheme in social engineering on a scale that Britain had never previously seen. However, instead of tilling the virgin earth we sweated on the light industrial estates making cigarettes for Carreras, perfume for Yardleys, and television valves for Marconi. The official version has it that the Cockney population were bombed out of the East End by the Luftwaffe during the war and that it was an act of kindness to move them out. This, combined with ruling class guilt over the privations suffered during the depression of the 1930s, began the impulse to create a New Jerusalem for the working class once hostilities ended. The Beveridge Report of 1942 had created the blueprint for this new and better society. Sir William spoke of slaying the five giants of ignorance, want, sickness, idleness and squalor in the creation of this new society. With the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government in 1945, the opportunity came to create the New Jerusalem along Soviet planning lines. The optimism of the age meant that it was overlooked just how inefficient centralised systems of socialism state planning were. The real reason for the move east was that, for the Great and the Good of 1945, the East End was an infestation to be ignored; a moral sewer, hopelessly beyond any form of redemption. It was a symbol of a working class that was both degraded and beyond the control of the state. The answer, according to Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Report of 1948, was to build new towns on the thinly populated lands around London. The impulse was to wipe the slate clean and start again in the belief that a morally improving environment would create a morally improved person. […]

90

Utopian Realities These experiments were given initial form by the Hertfordshire Garden Cities of the 1930s – Welwyn and Letchworth, under the inspiration of Ebenezer Howard. These were built on the spacious principle that a ‘garden is irresistible to a man of a wholesome mind’. Here a new way of life could be pursued by the congruence of spaciousness and pleasing design. By the 1930s, Letchworth, in particular, had acquired a reputation for what George Orwell rather contemptuously called ‘sandal and nuts’ socialism. It was the Letchworth ILP Summer Schools, with their espousal of progressive utopian ideas, that goaded Orwell into his famous denunciation (in The Road to Wigan Pier) of ‘every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’. For Orwell, the Letchworth middle class socialist was summed up by the two men who got on his bus while riding through the town. ‘They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top the bus. The man next to me murmured, “Socialists” as who should say “Red Indians”. Every generation has its discontented minority looking for a different way of life. In the 1930s, they flocked to Letchworth, particularly those who had tired of the tyranny of the ‘meat and two veg’ diet of the inter war years. By 1935 the town boasted seven vegetarian restaurants at a time when the whole of London could barely muster the same number. For the ‘simple lifers’ who flocked there, the principle was even more simple – ‘more air, less alcohol’. For Orwell, a meat-eating, chain-smoking, beer-swilling despiser of the middle-class socialists, the lure of Catalonia must have seemed irresistible. The garden cities – socialist and otherwise – provided the imprint for the cluster of new towns ringing London that were constructed in the fifteen-year period after the Second World War. The major difference was that Ebenezer Howard and Henrietta Barnet had been substituted for a ‘we know best’ state. In hindsight it is difficult to share the optimism of the early planners in relation to human nature. During the past three years, I have visited Basildon, Bracknell, Harlow, Stevenage, Cumbernauld, Crawley, Skelmersdale, Hemel Hempstead, Milton Keynes, Peterlee and Washington. All of them are products of the New Town movement. Those architects in Peterlee, committed to building houses with flat roofs using ‘non-traditional building materials’, might reflect on the reasons why, for the past two thousand years, houses have been built from stone or brick with an apex roof. These towns have, in general, but with some exceptions, resulted in a degradation of the environment. This is despite the fact that, in a minority of cases at least, attractive housing has been built using good quality materials. […] In Basildon, however, in the 1950s, we still lived in an age of optimism where anything was possible including building enough houses to satisfy demand. We did not realise that our freedom was being bought at the expense of others. We were sold the myth that the new town was built on empty, disused agricultural land waiting to be filled by those tired of London noise, dirt and overcrowding. This was a lie. The area that today comprises the new town was a series of small towns and villages – Laindon, Vange, Pitsea, Nevendon and Basildon itself. These were viable brick-built communities containing something like twenty thousand residents, many of whom had their property taken from them with minimal compensation by a central government determined to build its New Jerusalem. A photograph taken in 1949 shows a group of protesters gathered outside the offices that were the headquarters for those surveying the area in preparation for the announcement of new town status. Amongst their placards were ‘Stop this Legalised Robbery’, ‘Freehold Property is our Birthright’ and ‘1914-1918. 1939-1935. We Defended England. Now Does England Defend Us?’ By a bureaucratic slight of hand land was purchased at low agricultural valuations and then sold for commercial and industrial purposes at much higher rate. Once again the property rights of the minority were steamrollered by central government claiming to be acting in the interest of the majority. In the manner of a Chinese Communist government flooding the home of a million people for Three Gorges dam project in the name of common good, the owners of legally-held freehold property found their rights stripped away. This was a soviet-style central planning with no acknowledgement of individual rights or liberties. More than five thousand people lost their property with no right to appeal. Whilst they were not sent kulak-style to some eastern gulag it could be argued that the gulag came to them.

91

New Town Utopia Independent English men and women, a mid-twentieth century version of the yeomen of England, now found themselves, courtesy of the burgeoning new town, the clients of the state. The collusion between the politicians, the judiciary and the civil service ensured that one community was destroyed. It is a matter of judgement whether its replacement was in anyway superior. […] Fifty years ago, in the stasis of the post-war years, it was assumed that the working class was not meant to be aspirational. Give them a watertight house, and elementary education, free health care and a modestly-paid job and the world could carry on indefinitely as if 1955 represented the end of history. Today, in the new, thrusting post-Thatcher Britain where we are all bewildered by the pace of change, it has become a way of life. It is difficult to overstate the optimism that was left at the time for those who had escaped the grim cramped life of inner London. Within the authoritarianism imposed by a lack of choice, a whole new vista opened up to us. It was a grand view of gardens, parks, countryside, neat brick-built houses, open airy schools, bright modern shops and willing citizens revelling in the munificence of government – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ In 2003 it all looks rather different. Talking to the elderly of the town – those who arrived as young adults in the 1950s – there is now a pervasive sense of disillusionment that the dream failed to live up to their expectations. The promises of the good life have not been kept. As Nigel Birch put it to Harold Macmillan at the time of Profumo crisis: “Never glad confident morning again.” It is now impossible to imagine that the state would ever again have the confidence and self-belief to create such a community in the hope that it could transform the quality of peoples’ lives. We truly believed, fifty years ago, that it would be possible to build that shining city on the hill if we all pulled in the same direction. Lewis Silkin, the Minister for Town and Country planning, told a packed meeting in Basildon in 1948, the year before the construction of the new town began, “Basildon will become a City which people all over the world will want to visit. A place where all classes of community can meet freely together on equal terms to share common cultural recreational facilities.” Such was the optimism of what could be done. Mr Silkin had made an identical speech in Stevenage in 1946. The subsequent newspaper report contains the following quote: ‘After the statement that “Stevenage will, in a short time, become world famous”, there was laughter from the audience’. And so we moved to Basildon, thirty miles to the east of London on the flatlands of the Thames Estuary. The area had already been the subject of two experiments in alternative living. In the decade before the First World War, there had been a tentative attempt at a communal enterprise when Joseph Fels, the wealthy soap manufacturer, offered the use of Sumpner Farm to the Poplar Board of Guardians, in East London. The Laindon Farm Colony, as it became known, was founded with the intention that young men should be gainfully employed in the wholesome countryside away from the corrupting influence of the city. The limits of the activities seem to have been digging a reservoir and constructing chicken sheds for the ubiquitous local poultry trade. With the coming of war in 1914, the enterprise collapsed and most of the young men volunteered to fight. For some of them, the experience of living in the Essex countryside was to be repeated with their involvement in the Plotlands community in the decades after the Great War. In turn, their children and grandchildren would become the first inhabitants of the new town that now covers Sumpner Farm. In the years after the First World War, a generation of working class Londoners made the journey to the east. Many thousands bought a five pound plot of land from distressed farmers, and their agents, who emphasised the health-giving properties of the Essex air and the advantages of embracing the country way of life. Several hundred bought plots from the Dunton Hills Estate that formed the core of what became known as the Plotland community. Plotlands-style residences were erected all over southern Essex from Rainham in the west to Fambridge in the east. Whatever the defects of the Dunton/Laindon Plotlands community in terms of physical facilities, they were more than compensated for by the empowering sense of ownership that creating their own community had brought about.

92

Utopian Realities It may be argued that the modern character of the southern half of Essex was moulded by this aspirational migration in the first half of the last century from some of the most deprived parts of London. Like the Diggers on St George’s Hill three hundred years previously, they now owned their own little share of the riches of the earth: a small piece of England. Responding to advertisements in newspapers like Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, the reluctant Londoners would catch the LMS steam train out of Fenchurch Street and would alight at Laindon before walking the few miles to their plot. Those with a little extra cash would use Old Tom’s charabanc for the journey from Laindon Station. Over the coming months and years, they would travel out at weekends and, using mainly scrap materials, construct their own paradise in the Essex countryside. Without proper drains and mains supplies, some of the Plotland houses, built on unmade roads, degenerated into less than perfect rural idylls attached to a septic tank. The criticism that they were rural slums is a gross misrepresentation. Most of them were part of a neat and tidily-maintained rural paradise. With names like Iona, Hilltop, Glencrest, Maple Leaf, High Tide, Wendover and Coombe Cottage, the oozed a pride of ownership that was impossible to replicate in the vast mass of social housing built a mile to the east. I was particularly impressed by Lansbury, in Fourth Avenue – a touching tribute to the great socialist hero of the East End. This rural idyll was built by the Young family who were East End Dockers five and half days a week and rural pioneers in the flatlands of Essex on Saturday afternoons. […] When Basildon New Town was built in the 1950s and 1960s, Plotlands houses were demolished by the thousand. It is in the nature of government to resent people who show initiative, who create something for themselves that is not under the direct control of the state. The authorities propagated the myth that the whole area was a rural slum in need of demolition, that all the residents were elderly, and that the community was dying out. None of this was true. In 1984, bullying local government had pushed through a series of compulsory purchase order that forced out the last residents and summoned in the bulldozers. It was not that the land was needed to build new social housing; it was simply that the Plotlands community did not fit in with the municipal vision of what the area should be like. Better a nature reserve than people living outside local authority planning controls. By the August of 1984, the whole area was empty and waiting for the ‘improvement’ to begin. In that summer, I wandered along Hillcrest Avenue, Hilltop Rise and Glenwood Gardens. The names might have come from one of those tennis club encrusted, wealthy outer London suburbs yet all the houses were deserted, just waiting for the final destruction. They had the feel of an American Wild West ghost town from which, with great suddenness, the population had fled. As I wandered past the neat little houses, I realised for the first time that, although the men and women that comprise government may be perfectly decent people individually, they are, collectively, given some sort of rationale, capable of acting in a grossly unjust manner. And here was the result of this misguided ‘we know best’ attitude. For anyone who wishes to see a Plotland home, The Haven on Third Avenue in the Langdon Nature reserve is today preserved as a museum. The name is a clue to the respite that such a home gave from the ceaseless energy of London. Its preservation is the local council expiating its guilt. Must of the visitors to the Museum and to what remains of Plotlands are elderly people accompanied by their families. It is clear from their gestures that they knew Plotlands when it was a flourishing community. The most familiar sight is an elderly person stopping by a piece of scrubby land near one of the unmade tracks to indicate with hand gestures that this was where their little home once stood. Now it is just a barren plot filled with blackberry and hawthorn bushes. The accompanying families usually stand for s moment in silent reverence in remembrance of things past.

93

New Town Utopia The remains now lie underneath the Langdon Country Park. The only things left are a few gateposts, plies of brick rubble and the remains of an old Anderson Shelter – relics of the hopes and dreams of thousands; this little Arcadia out in the Essex flatlands. The Archers of Canning Town, the Warren family of Bow and the Westons of Plaistow, all now gone, they lie only within the confines of memory. In my thoughts, there were only two sorts of Plotlands days; those of midsummer when it was hot and still and middle-aged men stood with their torsos burnt brick red from the sun, and those when the weather was wet and foul and the uneven, rutted roads were covered with deep puddles and the little houses seemed to sway in the November winds. […] Three miles to the east of Plotlands, parts of the New Town are in trouble. The air of decay and depression is palpable. The causes are complex but the core reason is because the town lacks the personal imprint of the experiences of the inhabitants. People are more likely to take pride in where they live if they have constructed it with their own hands and had sweat pouring from their brow the result of their committed labour. In our age, this may be impractical but the lesson is that, unless people are engaged in crucial decisions as their communities are formed, any sense of ownership and engagement is likely to be minimal. This principle is at the core of Mr Blair’s communitarian vision. Travel the road in South Essex that runs from Billericay to the north through Crays Hill, Ramsden Bellhouse and then to Wickford as it skirts around the northern environs of Basildon. This is a land of aspiration sprinkled with stardust where Essex dreams come true. The ranch-style mini-Southforks on the Thames sit in the flat and muddy clay pueblo of south Essex. This is where, last year, I bought an English bull terrier puppy from a couple so heavily tattooed that I called them (to myself of course) the illustrated bull terrier breeders. It doesn’t have much of ring to it but it was accurate. Was it my imagination or did I see Princess Anne cruising the lanes of north Basildon, hidden behind the tinted glass of her Range Rover looking for a new bull terrier? I can imagine her standing on the ranch doorstep clutching an old-fashioned handbag: “You with the tattoos, we have to come about the dawg.” If Basildon is the half land, the staging post on the way out of the poverty of the East End, then the hacienda – little pieces of coastal Spain that lie to the north of the town – are a fully realised Essex nirvana. […] The roads forty years ago were crowded with a much wider range of vehicles than today, even if many of the cars had one wheel less than a full set. The planners of the post-war years failed to anticipate the rise of mass car ownership during the affluent 1950s as the town was being built. The result was narrow roads with few garages, limited parking spaces and large scale parking on the verges. Curiously, even after the rise of something approaching universal car ownership, the planners continued to build as if the motor car did not exist and the failure to provide adequate parking would somehow will the wretched machines away. We felt like the Waltons in Little House on the Prairie who had been cut off from civilisation for many months. “Look! There’s a Woolworths.” “A Woolworths!” we would chorus back. Once while out walking with my father (it must have been around 1959) we came across a large sign in a field. It said, in bold letters. ‘This is a vision of the future. On this site will be built the most modern shopping centre in Britain’. Each day I would walk past the field and watch with fascination as the shopping centre emerged from the Thames flatlands. It was, indeed, a vision of the future but it failed to turn into that shining city upon the hill. […] There was a time for optimism but it slipped through our fingers in the early 1980s. By the late Thatcher years, Basildon was the town of Raquel’s – the club where the tragic Leah Betts met her ecstasy-fuelled death. Many years before it was called the Mecca where, as a twelve years old, I saw Tottenham’s finest – the Dave Clark Five. I had to leave after half an hour, blood coursing onto my borrowed Beatle jacket, having been clumsily elbowed on the nose.

94

Utopian Realities Out of town sits the Festival Leisure Park, a dream-induced landscape of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, UCI Cinemas, TGI Fridays, Nandos, Jumping Jaks Nightclub and Hollywood Bowl. At night it has a dreaming quality to it, a temple to unrestrained hedonism not even leavened by a prosaic Homebase or Currys. I partially close my eyes in the darkness so that the image becomes a fuzzy blur of colour. A partial retreat into sanity is possible at the Chicago Rock Café at ‘Bas Vegas’. The website guide tells us it has ‘panoramic windows that offer a spectacular view of the vast car park where you can witness fights from the comfort of a slightly moist vinyl armchair’. It is true. Sitting there in a late summer evening in the gathering Essex twilight, I witnessed two fights, serious scuffles really, one of which results in the flashing blue light of an ambulance hurtling across the car park. Queuing at the entrance to Jumping Jaks on a winter evening, I feel that I stand out. It is mainly young women, late teens perhaps early twenties, wearing small black dresses exposing acres of white goosepimply flesh. A small group of them, the worse for drink I assume, are chanting at me ‘where did you get that hat, that dirty rotten hat?’ I smile inanely and put the offending object in my pocket. Ice is just starting to form on the car windows. There is the obligatory puddle of vomit by the bushes. It is not the management’s fault but it inadvertently sets the tone. I am frisked twice by door security. This reassures me. Inside a gob of chewing gum has been stuck beneath the table where I am sitting. I press my leg against it. The atmosphere in the half-darkness is predatory, and endless boisterous, edgy happy hour with standard chart pop music, industrial strength lager and Bacardi Breezers. A vaguely sinister young man asks me if I ‘want some puff ’. I don’t know what it is so I decline. If I arrive early enough then I can buy a drink and get one for free. I sit there with two drinks in front of me. Guard your drinks ferociously although I don’t imagine that I am a high priority target for drink spikers. The shaven-headed, earring-toting dealers are out in force. Or is it just my imagination? When you reach my age everybody under thirty looks like a drug dealer. The bouncers also have clean-shaven heads, the standard disguise for male pattern baldness. They try to look menacing but they cannot quite make it. The clientele are shaven-headed. In fact, I am the only one who has a full head of hair, excepting for the little patch that I artfully disguise. […] Many years ago I had a motorcycle accident in Basildon. It happened before Basildon had a hospital of its own so I was rushed to Southend General Hospital with a variety of broken bones. As I was lying in the road with the small finger of my right hand hanging off, contemplating the nature of life and death, a kindly man came out of a newsagent and gave me a bottle of R Whites Cream Soda. Then he lit an unfiltered Park Drive cigarette for me. He even shaded me from the sun with his newspaper. Such small acts of consideration lodge in the memory. Some of my friends thought I had been killed and rushed to my house to hear the worst. At least, I hope they rushed; I suspect they probably sauntered casually in order to be disabused that I was merely rather bashed about. I was touched however by their concern as you never can tell what people really think. As I later observed it was not the first time I had died in Basildon. Extracts from a chapter first published in Searching for the Promised Land (2004) by Magnus Granath. Magnus Granath is a teacher and writer who grew up in Basildon.

95

New Town Utopia

Basildon: Birth of a City

John Grindrod

Postwar British New Towns are rather like Depeche Mode singles. There’s the early, most famous ones: Harlow and Stevenage the New Lifes and Just Can’t Get Enoughs of the programme. There’s the cool, difficult later ones like Cumbernauld and Runcorn akin to Personal Jesus or Barrel of a Gun in their provocative complexities. Then there are small mid-period obscurities: Newtown in Wales or Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, lost somewhere in the narrative much as The Meaning of Love or Get the Balance Right have been. Slick Milton Keynes with its pounding regular grid roads is driving dance-music crossover Enjoy the Silence. Basildon, with its brash image, its associations with the highs and lows of Thatcher’s eighties and the private bungalow craze of the 1920s, could be Master and Servant in all its clanking, provocative swagger and perverse vulnerability. Or perhaps, with a bleak litany of inhuman capitalist peccadilloes, ‘Little Moscow on the Thames’ is Everything Counts. But, of course, for all the fun of playing the ‘which Depeche Mode song is your new town’ game, things are much more complicated and interesting than that. New towns have suffered from derisive jokes since their inception: just throw ‘Milton Keynes’ in as the punchline to more or less anything and you’ll have people who have never been there rolling in the isles. Perhaps it’s the upstart positivity of dreaming that new places are possible on an island that has built its identity around heritage industries and petty snobbery. It might be the wonkiness of postwar design: all those prefabricated panels, monopitch roofs and concrete walls creating strange space-age environments. Maybe it’s the obsessions of postwar planners that have done for them, gifting the new towns with a surfeit of roundabouts, complicated house numbering and Teletubbies landscaping. Basildon is different. It’s more likely to be referenced as an election bellwether or the home town of Ford car workers or a series of 1980s synth giants (those creative children of first generation town pioneers) than it is as part of the New Town experiment, and in this it is unusual. Mention Telford, East Kilbride or Crawley, and their origins as New Towns spring immediately to mind. With Basildon, that seems just one of many competing narratives. As a town it gives off conflicting vibes of great confidence and Essex swagger, masking the more humble, insecure and poor working class roots that have made the place so close-knit, and the poverty and unemployment that have marred the town’s history. Basildon would become the ninth English postwar new town out of 21, and was designated on 4th January 1949. Its unique circumstances began with the clearances of thousands of ad-hoc ‘plotlands’ homes – hastily improvised structures dismissed by many as ‘rural slums’ – places which had been erected in Laindon and Pitsea over the previous 50 years. When Lewis Silkin, the minister responsible for that first wave of postwar new towns, came to Laindon High Road School in 1948 to sell his vision to a largely suspicious and fearful local population of villagers and plotlands dwellers, he hit an inspirational note. ‘Basildon will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit,’ he said. ‘It will be a place where all classes of the community can meet freely together on equal terms and enjoy common cultural and recreational facilities. Basildon will not be a place which is ugly, grimy or full of paving stones like so many large modern towns. It will be something which the people deserve: the best possible town that modern knowledge, commerce, science and civilisation can produce.’ Even the grisled Tories of the local council were impressed by Silkin’s inspiring socialist imagery. They saw opportunity in the idealism, money in the myth-making.

96

Utopian Realities

Many of the existing townsfolk had gone to great pains to build their own homes here. But they had once been residents of overcrowded Industrial Revolution slum areas of London’s east-end, places like West Ham. Now Silkin was asking them to help make space for their fellow east-enders who had been made homeless by blitz damage. The first new residents of these towns were builders and their families, as they rushed to erect enough of a recognizable feeling of place as possible. They were constructing the dream of planners like Patrick Abercrombie, who wanted to reduce the population density in large cities by moving residents out to satellite towns beyond a green belt. This would create more parks and open space for everyone, and decentralize modern industries, like electronics, car manufacturing and petrochemicals. Building was swift: the 1,000th home was finished just five years after the new town had been designated. In this place of historic private speculation and enterprise revolution came in the form of development corporation houses, all of which were for rent. It wasn’t until 1959 that the first new private homes were built for sale. At that point the modern Basildon we recognise today was born, helped along by Heath’s early-70s government and their pre-Thatcher experiments in Right-to-Buy, where residents were offered the chance to buy their development corporation-rented homes. Frank Schaffer, who had spent seven years in charge of the government’s New Town Division, wrote in his 1970 book The New Town Story that Basildon was ‘only a few miles from the proposed third London airport at Maplin and is one of the major economic growth areas proposed by the Strategic Plan for the South East. These factors are bound to have a beneficial impact on future economic and social development of the town.’ In numbers terms it’s been a runaway success. The initial idea had been that Basildon would house 50,000 people. By the time it was designated that had already risen to 80,000. Today 183,000 people live there. Okay, so some of the more ambitious schemes have evaporated: that Maplin airport, so beloved of Edward Heath, came to nothing. Yet the arrival of GEC-Marconi in 1954, the Ford manufacturing plant a decade later and Yardley in 1966 helped keep the town booming for decades. By the 1980s that boom was waning. Unemployment in the town took a huge leap: From 940 in 1974 to 5,060 in 1980 and 10,000 in 1984. For all of its prosperous sheen, Basildon was as vulnerable to change and political effects as anywhere else. It is in the multi-layered history of the town that you can see the complex issues of today. The conflict between the poor, aspirational working class and a patrician planning establishment; the rivalry between council and private housing; the constant growth for over a century, and the clearing away of successive waves of development and idealism. There’s been a failure to protect the best of what is there, be it plotlands or New Town, and a desire to see that the solution will always come from something new, an outside force that might sweep in and save everything. In this it finds echoes in many of the other new towns. But aside from all of this, it’s the swagger that makes Basildon feel different. Many of the new towns have reached this new century limping along in parlous states. Basildon, like Milton Keynes, is still growing. And change is forever on the cards. Here the search for novelty continues. John Grindrod is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain and Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt.

97

New Town Utopia

Geoffrey Goes To Basildon

Gillian Darley

Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed post war urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City, head high, that evokes Geoffrey Jellicoe. While Freddie Gibberd, moustachioed and with self-confessed melodramatic tendencies (which he revealed on Desert Island Discs many years later) did nothing quietly, Jellicoe did a huge amount of essential housing work, both during the war and after, pressing on to the next commission, the next site, without undue noise. He designed seven strictly functional schemes for the Ministry of Supply in 1941-42, urgently needed accommodation for war-workers, largely in the West Country. He alleviated their strictly functional nature (which, as Finn Jensen points out, included a room specified as an air raid shelter) by his sensitivity towards the topography of each site and its existing landscape. As master planner at Hemel Hempstead in 1947 he married that experience with an increasingly inventive landscape approach, in particular later on with the central (newly restored) Water Gardens. He was beginning to enjoy himself after the rigours of running the Architectural Association during the war and the years of highly circumscribed architectural practice. Working in partnership with Francis Coleridge and Alan Ballantyne, the latter based in Plymouth, Jellicoe’s office was busy in the mid 1950s including housing for Basildon New Town. Guided by the objectives of the Abercrombie Plan (1944) to deal with the ‘sprawling growths’ around Billericay, Laindon, Pitsea and Wickford and to ‘concentrate and to a certain extent to urbanise the central areas of these towns’ the Basildon Development Corporation had begun to systematically erase what Abercrombie’s report saw as the disorder of the plotlands developments (their ‘ownership…shrouded in mystery’). The first wave of neighbourhood house building at Basildon involved experienced architects and planners who were nevertheless required to abide within disappointingly restrictive and parsimonious limits. Perhaps to keep cheerful in the face of all this, Jellicoe embarked on a scheme of his own, encouraged by Pilkington Brothers, the St. Helens based glass manufacturers, to think far beyond the boundaries of the rational, the possible, the tried and the tested. From 1937, the company had strenuously attempted to engage members of the architectural and engineering professions with the limitless potential of glass. After the war, the Glass Age Development Committee was formed, consisting of Geoffrey Jellicoe, Ove Arup and Edward Mills. They were licensed to dream and as Steve Parnell shows [AR: 5 Feb 2014], the results usually appeared as multi-page advertisements (or advertorials?) in the Architectural Review. Schemes ranged from the razing and rebuilding of Soho as a series of twenty-four storey glazed towers to an airport structure, Skyport One (1957), and an inhabited bridge, the Crystal Span (1963). However nothing touched the ambitions, playfulness and forward thinking of Motopia, an entire city, which appeared in two issues of the magazine in late 1959, illustrated by Gordon Cullen’s highly effective visualisations, and then as a more discursive book, under Jellicoe’s own name, in 1961. A little sketchbook, recently donated to Drawing Matters, shows Jellicoe toying with these ideas back in 1956/7 and for a moment eliding them with a new approach for Basildon, where Sylvia Crowe (the distinguished landscape consultant who was also working, much more happily, at Harlow) had admitted being depressed

98

Utopian Realities

99

New Town Utopia

100

by the site, the soil and the client. In a note written to Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (to whom Jellicoe gave the notebook in 1984, and has now presented it to the Drawing Matters collection) he was asked ‘to see if it were possible for ‘Motopia’ to be built at Basildon new town. It wasn’t but it suggests fun in the landscape’. The sequence and application of many of the sketches is not clear, but here and there the essential grid and the circular nodal points of Motopia emerge, along with pavilions and playful forms that might have suggested insertions in the ambitious city centre. In the book his introduction made clear that this city plan was a design for ‘a new setting unencumbered by what already exists.’ The utopian objective was ‘an ideal environment that would give us the best of all worlds’, an ideal town ‘in which the traffic circulation were piped like drainage and water; out of sight and mind, to go as fast as it likes, to smell as it wants, and to make noises.’ Jellicoe separates ‘mechanical and biological man’, the car being transposed high above, onto the terraced housing at roof level, and leaving the intervening landscape for the designers of the town ‘to do with it what we will’. There are discernible links between Basildon and Motopia (and, inevitably, between Motopia and Le Corbusier). In the book Jellicoe wrote that a single tower block, here housing offices rather than flats as in Harlow and Basildon, would house the traffic administrator, the key figure in it all, a kind of Benthamite (or Foucaultite) controller whose role in this Home Counties Panopticon is to adjust the pinch points, the volume and congestion involved, almost like a flight controller. In such a highly coordinated universe the cyclist is considered ‘an anachronism…No cycles are allowed in Motopia.’ Waterbuses and electric trains, moving walkways and paternosters will be the essential links in the chain between the regions devoted to the car and to the pedestrian. Jellicoe can be seen in a 1959 Pathe news clip, Glass City of the Future, darting around the model and pointing out its features alongside (a silent) Edward Mills, as the commentator explains that the 30,000 residents of this town ‘will never know the meaning of road accidents’. Although Jellicoe had been firm that he had no site in mind, for the purposes of the newsreel audience, wanting facts, it was located on a thousand acres at Staines, Middlesex and priced at £60 million. The shimmering futurism of Motopia, on the page or on the screen, was a world away from the pragmatic realities of Basildon but the little sketchbook offers a slender connective thread between the two and what might have been – so much fun in the landscape. Gillian Darley is a writer, author and broadcaster and President of the Twentieth Century Society. She was Director of Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Landscape Foundation (1994-97).

101

New Town Utopia

When Britain (Briefly) Fell In Love With New Towns

Christopher Beanland

“Modern girls and modern boys: it’s tremendous!” So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth’s 1981 film Gregory’s Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish ‘New Town’. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren’t just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. Perhaps now we’re truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain. Most cities we live in haven’t been planned at all, they’re the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It’s planning on the most piecemeal scale. But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt’s dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures. Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands’ Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the “dark satanic mills” era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.

102

Utopian Realities

However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals. It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly. “Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,” points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O’Flynn’s bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she’s very careful to point out isn’t Madin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces. “I love the high-profile public art,” says Croft, “Especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.” Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor’s itinerary as Durham Cathedral. In the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it’s an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative. The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham’s outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism.

103

New Town Utopia

The expanded towns like King’s Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn’t get a hospital for 13 years. In John Grindrod’s groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns “sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation’s desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.” Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: “I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It’s one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of ‘place’. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.’ It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7” single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the protoGregory’s Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre. Yet what’s remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. “The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,” he says now. “As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town’s only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced ‘Book here for Scotland’. It had a fantastically urban quality.” JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes’s masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as “a ceremonial slum” and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) “shit” around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London. Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain’s ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town’s services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. “I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!” says Catherine Croft. “That’s unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.” Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – “the death of the soul.” And he lived in a suburb.

104

Utopian Realities

It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker. Civilia didn’t make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This “Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire”, according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association’s New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions “people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.” Christopher Smith’s forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. “New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,” he says. “But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.” The current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. “We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,” says Lock. “It’s one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.” The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain’s potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of ‘place’ front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique. And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they’ve often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia’s spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It’s an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger. Christopher Beanland is a freelance writer based in London. He covers subjects around architecture, arts and cities, and has been published in The Guardian, The Independent and The Huffington Post. This article was originally published in The Long + Short for Nesta.

105

New Town Utopia

A Short Interview With Jonathan Meades

In 1946, Lewis Silkin expressed his ambition that the new towns would create a ‘new type of citizen, with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride’ - what did the first wave of new towns achieve? JM: I have no idea save that it is telling that the first generation of children born and brought up in them couldn’t wait to escape. A common criticism of the new towns is that they were designed and implemented for working class people by unelected development corporations, staffed by middle and upper class planners, designers, artists and architects. How successful were the development corporations in achieving their goals? JM: Social mobility was greater in that era than it has become. By no means all architects were ‘middle and upper’. And there was a consensus across the political divide about the necessity for such developments. The welfare state was, if you like, the nationalisation of noblesse oblige. And that would remain till Thatcher came to power and replaced ‘compassionate’ conservatism with sauve qui peut Manchester Liberalism. You’ve referred to the ‘concrete-inclined herd’ and you yourself have lived in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. Will we see people moving to Basildon in search of the psychological and physical benefits of a modernist living space? JM: The idea of people moving to Basildon now that modernism is belatedly widely appreciated is perhaps not that far fetched. But what London boroughs’ former social housing have over the new towns is their very location. Hampstead is more desirable than Harlow, Bermondsey preferable to Becontree. New garden towns and villages are being developed in order to ease the housing crisis. What lessons could be learned from the previous iterations of new towns and garden cities? JM: The lesson that should have been learnt is not to repeat the exercise. Build in cities. Reclaim empty properties. Squat. Letchworth and its avatars have all become commuter towns. That is the already decried fate of places such as Cambourne. Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist, and film-maker.

106

Utopian Realities

Milton Keynes: Buckinghamshire Alphaville

Owen Hatherley

Milton. Keynes. Surely it’s partly the name that explains why this is the most famous and/or notorious of the several New Towns designated and built by the Labour governments of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. Combining John Milton, poet of the English Revolution and of Paradises Lost and Regained, with John Maynard Keynes, the reformist economist who helped prevent a second revolution, it marries epic national poetry with careful reformism, the perfect Old Labour combination. Alternatively, it conflates Keynes and Milton Friedman, the economists respectively of the postwar consensus and of the post-1979 apotheosis of capitalism now collapsing around our ears. This seems highly appropriate given that Milton Keynes, a pet project of the Harold Wilson administration, was largely realised under Margaret Thatcher and hence Britain’s token ‘successful’ new town, its charms (principally, its shopping mall) advertised on television right through the 1980s. It's always a crushing disappointment to learn that the name just comes from one of the villages incorporated into this town – or rather this ‘non-place urban realm’, this being the term (borrowed from the American sociologist Melvin J. Webber) that the planners used to describe the dispersed, indeterminate motorcity they were creating. In its privileging of the car, its relative lack of council housing, with the government eventually laying out little more than the intricate, almost traffic-light free roads, Milton Keynes is Non-Plan actualised, managing to keep elements both of its utopian promises and its bland, kitsch Thatcherite reality. A New Career In A New Town In 2007, perhaps uncoincidentally the year that Milton Keynes celebrated its 40th anniversary, Gordon Brown’s government announced that ten 'eco-towns' would be built on various sites across Britain. These towns were to have been sponsored by state largesse, but developed by institutions ranging from the Co-Operative Society to Tesco – PFI cities, if you will. Settlements of around 50,000 people, apparently designed to be self-sufficient and ‘carbon neutral’ - nowhere near as ambitious as a Milton Keynes, but nonetheless a resurrection of an old Labour idea that English middle-class common sense had dumped in the ‘failed’ category. Protests ensued almost immediately in practically all of the areas that were slated to have an eco-town next door, fronted by a motley selection of local celebrity leaders, from Judi Dench to Tim Henman’s dad. There’s little doubt that eco-towns were more about property speculation than they were a product of ecological enthusiasm, and there was much justified criticism that these were disguised commuter suburbs, with no infrastructure and no industry – just as Basildon or East Kilbride eventually were. Yet the opposition seemed driven more by hatred of the idea of city-dwellers ruining what Clive Aslet, ex-editor of Country Life recently called (on the subject of Milton Keynes) ‘22,000 acres of formerly good hunting land’.1 As if on cue, at a protest in front of Parliament some held up placards declaring that these Eco-Towns were mere ‘New Towns’. And apparently we all know what that means - towns full of ‘eyesores’, concrete cows and unsightly proletarians, bereft of the ‘heritage’ that so obsesses the British psyche. It became clear that these people hated the very idea of new towns, of any dispersal of people across what is - in terms of space, if not population - a still overwhelmingly green country.

107

New Town Utopia

A couple of years and a property crash combined with the part-nationalisation of the banking system later, it’s all rather beside the point, as new housing that only 6 months ago would have sold for absurd sums sits empty. If the government by mid-2010 is a Labour one, perhaps one or two eco-towns might eventually get built, and if Tory, none. Even given the justifiable reasons for hostility to the eco-towns, there’s something rather sad about the opposition to them. In essence, the conviction is that any new town which stressed its ‘newness’ would necessarily be ‘soulless’, or ‘ugly’. It’s notable that the only major new town begun since the late 1960s is Prince Charles’ pet project, Poundbury, with the stealth new town of Cambourne in Cambridge’s ‘Silicon Fen’ similarly retardataire. Poundbury’s planner Leon Krier is an apologist for the Nazi architect and politician Albert Speer, whose pompous classical edifices would, if Hitler had won the war, have transformed Berlin from a modern metropolis into the neoclassical showpiece ‘Germania’. Speer wanted to design new buildings that somehow didn’t look new, with their eventual ruinous state centuries hence factored into the design - a ‘theory of ruin value’ that has been embraced in Prince Charles’ new town, where buildings are apparently predistressed to give them an old, distinguished appearance, and where any technological innovation post-1780 is (at least officially) verboten. There's a long history of these places, of course. The 18th century produced model towns as diverse as Tunbridge Wells and Bath, all of them based on vistas, clean lines, an urban representation of scientific and mathematical concepts. Yet most were new towns for the rich, those who could afford the new spaces’ light, air and openness. The late 19th century saw contrite industrialists plan ideal settlements like Saltaire or Bourneville; and in the 1900s-20s Ebenezer Howard, a very late-Victorian combination of crank and pragmatist, pioneered the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn. Yet when people talk about New Towns they don’t mean the garden cities, which, like precursors to Poundbury, used antiquated materials and winding street patterns in order to simulate historical accident. Rather, they mean the post-war new towns. They mean concrete precincts and cows, glass shopping centres, flat-roofed houses and roundabouts. They mean Cumbernauld, with its central shopping centre that was an architectural cause celebre for a few years and an ‘eyesore’ for decades more; they mean Crawley or Stevenage, towns which were intended to be self-sufficient but became just another part of the commuter belt. With regard to the years since 1997, however, Milton Keynes has taken on some new meanings. This ‘suburban city’ that has yet to receive city status (when it applied, it was absurdly passed over in favour of Brighton and Hove, a place with no meaningful independence from London) is on the one hand, the opposite of professed urban policy. Unashamedly diffuse, the original plan for a non-place urban realm is implacably alien to the ideas of ‘urban renaissance’. The idea that social life would occur in piazzas and on the street was anathema – Milton Keynes doesn't have streets. Unlike the new areas of Southampton, there are real social spaces slotted into its relentless motorised grid. Yet with its acres of speculative housing and its economy of business, leisure and retail, Milton Keynes exemplifies the unspoken urban policy of expanding the suburbia of South-East England as whole acres of streets lie derelict further north. Plans for Milton Keynes’ expansion and urbanisation have, though, faced major opposition. Things which are pejorative outside of ‘MK’ – suburbia, minimalism, underpasses, grids, motorways – are here defended trenchantly, by various local campaign groups. The first thing we (adoptive) Londoners noticed in Milton Keynes was space. Sheer, vast, windswept open space, which one could call desolate if that desolation wasn’t evidently so popular with its users. This is helped by the striking planned vista that hits you when leaving the train. A 1982 station square designed by the architects of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (Stuart Mosscrop, Derek Walker and Christopher Woodward2) is one of the most remarkable Modernist set-pieces in Britain, a bracing landscaped plaza flanked by three perfectly detailed Miesian blocks, with the old British Rail logo prominent. This is Alphaville in Buckinghamshire, and it’s like a bucket of cold, fresh water in the face, initially shocking but sharply refreshing. Like the same architects’ Mall nearby, the relentless grids plugged into another grid suggest the mock-utopian Continuous Monument of the leftist Italian architects Superstudio, the grid behind all planned towns elevated into an advancing object that consumes the whole world. If it does follow in Superstudio’s footsteps then it does it quietly, with skateboarding teenagers in the middle of it. After passing through the plaza we have to learn, as in London’s Barbican Centre, a new way of walking, using the black steel portes cochères and the remarkably

108

Utopian Realities

well-kept ‘redway’ underpasses rather than instinctively walking into the fast roads. Hailing as we do from cities with an exceedingly badly kept 1960s infrastructure (me from Southampton, Joel from Bradford) we’re almost amazed to see clean underpasses, a little glimpse of what our hometowns could have been like had anyone cared enough. Quite soon after passing under the first redway, we are in the new hotel district, with most of the glass/wood/render blocks, such as Barratt Homes’ characteristically named ‘Vizion’ (flats atop a Sainsbury’s) displaying what will no doubt soon be known as ‘early 21st century irregular windows’, but although the architecture is familiar, the landscape is not. The new buildings provide only a slight contrast to the Californian postmodernism across the majestically named Midsummer Boulevard. Both forms would be at home in other ‘enterprise zones’ at the Americanised edge places, like Heathrow or the Great West Road. Here, though, they make more sense than does their rude irruption into historic cities like Southampton, leading to the feeling – which sticks with us throughout – that Milton Keynes is the only city in Britain to have made Post-Fordism look pleasant. This is partly because of the remnants of the earlier era – when blandness threatens, the sci-fi side of the old new town reappears, as when the wonderfully clunky 1980s neo-Constructivism of The Point stares down the new blocks. […] While the motorcity manages to encompass both the car and a huge amount of public space, for an established city to follow it would necessitate an impossible level of redevelopment – and the idea of a ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ Milton Keynes, is, for all its verdancy, surely a contradiction in terms. Milton Keynes works, but it is the only place in Britain where the fossil fuel economy really does work, because everything else has been subordinated to it. What is more, it’s the only place where it can work, so as a model it is worse than useless – worse, because its example has been emulated elsewhere without the amenities and networks that the original planners left behind here. Aesthetically though, the non-city is fascinating, haunting, a truly beautiful illusion, an oasis. Even the new ‘dense’ areas are overtaken by its limpid quietude. So The Hub, a series of towers around a square which attempts to introduce an ‘edgy’ (as its architect Glenn Howells puts it3) urban grain into the city, is cold and serene. The new areas of Milton Keynes, the new spec flats and hotels, recreate in a more dense form the same Ballardian voids as the original 1970s city, although if the trend goes further it could face becoming Reading or Basingstoke with more efficient roads and a couple of unusually elegant buildings. Today however, Milton Keynes is still the non-place it was planned to be. And why not? The idea that a city should exist for youth and ‘vibrancy’ is a tired combination of baby-boomer nostalgia and romantic guff about the virtues of poverty’s dirt and noise, a long-in-the-tooth idea that is as amenable to knock-it-up-cheap developers as are the developers’ cul-de-sacs. Perhaps after the unseemly noise and blather of the boom, the non-city’s calm, serenity and order could offer us a way out. Today, Milton Keynes feels like it’s in a weird state of suspension – the beautifully managed car economy obsolete and environmentally destructive, its economy of retail and finance doomed. Perhaps one solution could be for it to embrace the destiny of all planned towns, and become an administrative city - the capital of a sane new England, modern and rational. That is, if the diplomats don’t mind living in Barratt homes. Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defence of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and New Statesman. This chapter was originally published in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.

1. See Clive Aslet, The English House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008) 2. The latter of whom dismissed the place with a curt ‘back of an envelope job’, to me in conversation, before going on to explain it as inspired by the welcoming, civic U-plans of 1930s town halls. 3. Richard Vaughan,‘Watch This Space’, Architects Journal, 29/11/07

109

New Town Utopia

The New Towns Programme: Unpicking the stereotypes created by ‘experts’

Dr. Helena Rivera

Britain has a nightmare, and its name is housing. At the heart of the nightmare is the sheer expense. The average house costs five times the average person’s annual income, not far off record highs. And they’re going up too. (The Independent, 2014) Today England faces a housing crisis indebted to chronic problems of supply. The relentless media coverage on this subject portrays a grim and urgent reality whereby ‘the shortfall in homes in the south of England will reach 160,000 in the next five years’ (The Guardian, 2014). Members of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who own or manage around half the rural land in England and Wales, have validated this concern. They introduced a policy report on Tackling the Housing Crisis in England in 2013 stating that the housing supply in England was struggling to keep up with demand through a shortfall of ‘more than 230,000 homes a year’. However, an idea has been in constant repetition throughout twentieth century English history that through new planned communities we can solve the chronic problems of housing supply. These have adopted various guises: Industrial Villages (1850-1888), Garden Cities (1898), Homes Fit for Heroes (1919), New Towns (19461976), Millennium Communities (1997), Eco Towns (2003), and more recently coming full circle, locally-led Garden Cities (2014). Although the ideas behind these new communities differ profoundly, they are united by one key characteristic. Collectively they aim to increase housing supply by creating large-scale development areas underpinned by an ideal or aspiration specific to their time. The New Towns programme 1946-1976, for example, is a formidable example of how a single planning policy can be interpreted, delivered and managed. In the aftermath of the Second World War, New Towns provided a template for both physical and social reconstruction of England. The planning ideology for New Towns was one of creating balanced communities as set out by the Reith Committee in 1946. Through a national policy aimed to abate the housing crisis, there would be a redistribution of the population to a series of satellite towns strategically placed at a 20-mile radius from London. This was prepared as a Greater London Plan of 1944 by Patrick Abercrombie (Figure 1). The New Towns programme provides quantifiable evidence of how post-war housing supply was solved (tempered) through its vast house-building programme. Nevertheless, since the 1970s politicians have wanted to disassociate their policies from New Towns; housing reviews are hesitant to use the term New Town. One explanation may be that New Towns represent a moment of policy radicalism in the planning system, but the idea of Modernity provokes discomfort so they are not celebrated. The New Towns migrated between 60,000-90,000 new settlers to its mark 1 towns alone. These pioneers that witnessed the ‘place grow into a town’ provide an invaluable opportunity for reviewing the past. Re-appraising the New Towns programme by highlighting the importance of the pioneer is important. But similarly is trying to understand why new Towns have become synonymous with ‘the dirty word’ of modernism. Without oversimplifying we could ask: If planning does not learn from the past, what happens when planning learns from its pioneers? There is a mismatch between ‘activators’ and ‘ordinary people’. Discerning this nuance has

110

Utopian Realities

Figure 1. Communities: Proposed extension of existing built-up areas and sites for new satellite © Source: Original map presented to the Minister of Town and Country Planning (Abercrombie, 1944)

111

New Town Utopia become both a personal preoccupation and a professional interest. It appears that in the pursuit of building new communities, we have employed the planning system to manage problems of housing supply, without a concerted effort to learn from the past by using and integrating localised experiences of past policies. A primary objective throughout this research was to interrogate the existing representation of the New Towns programme. What are the specific stereotypes that have been created (and perpetuated) by experts regarding New Towns that have led to their popular characterisation as unbalanced communities, and what is the local perspective of these stereotypes? In this specific chapter, I address the first question by limiting the enquiry to experts and what I refer to as ‘helicopter specialists’ of the New Towns programme who do not live or work in a New Town but contribute to its legacy through academic writing, policy reports and professional advice in their role as planners and architects. The data collected is analysed as a selection of five thematic stereotypes and has been presented as a chapter in this book as a special commission for the filmmaker Christopher Smith. To address the second line of enquiry about local perspectives, two separate case studies based in a mark 1 New Town were conducted and separate books written for each. These books are about Harlow and Hemel Hempstead is limited largely to the collection of local voices. This includes original pioneers, existing local residents, local authority civil servants and original New Town designation material. By sustaining a discourse exclusively based on a bottom-up enquiry, these books provide an alternative perspective for rethinking New Towns and generating important historical as well as contemporary reflections. They help us understand the degree to which the New Towns programme is represented through a biased subjectivity. It exposes a host of new revelations regarding the issues we have forgotten that should be readdressed within the current discourse regarding building new communities. For this particular book chapter the local voices of Harlow and Hemel Hempstead have not been included and the focus is specifically on the ‘Expert View’ and the five stereotypes it has created around the New Towns Programme. In 1953, the Architectural Review magazine published a damning verdict written by J. M. Richards called ‘The Failure of the New Towns’ where G. Cullen declared the towns as victims of ‘prairie planning’. The article was significant as an example of influential bad press that dogged the fate of New Towns. It became a reference point for literature on New Towns because it offered the first professional opinion on the progress of New Towns; written by Richards who was a key figure, acting as editor for The Architectural Review, for The Architect’s Journal and for a time, as architectural correspondent for The Times. Given that the first wave of towns were designated in 1946, issuing a verdict of failure in 1953 is possibly a bit premature. If architects and planners were instrumental in preparing the plans for England’s post-war reconstruction programme, the media and political representation in its early years held the key to issuing a verdict of success or failure. Most current and historical discussion on New Towns has been mainly documented through an expert-driven writings that show the perspective of either academic or professionals. This has created a specific and limited understanding of New Towns. The discussion about New Towns has been written in a way that can be categorised within three types of criticism. Firstly, there are claims that planning under the welfare state was too preoccupied with bureaucratic procedure and expert administrators to realise an adequately defined social policy of ‘a balanced community’. Secondly, is the criticism that New Towns planning ideology overly relied on the vanguard Modernist movement to provide mass housing in what is often described as ‘naïve’ generating ‘mass-produced barracks’ or ‘concrete monstrosities’. Lastly, New Towns are portrayed as a failed experiment of an enlarged state under a nationalised economy. Balanced appraisals do exist, but for a programme of this scale and importance in policy direction, they are few and far between. There is little recorded and published evidence accounting for the New Town experience from a localised, pioneer perspective and this has proven problematic for the mobilisation of criticism regarding the bias in the programme. This chapter focuses on a different empirical analysis that is equally important and missing form the historical understanding of New Towns. It presents the expert voices and how their discourse has created some very specific, often negative, stereotypes about New Towns. It focuses specifically on the characterisation of New Towns as communities doomed for failure in their ideological pursuit of balance. The characterisation has been thematically classified as belonging to five stereotypes that are clear example-based observations which will help make New Town’s negative image less abstract.

112

Utopian Realities

Stereotype 1: A case of New Town Blues or suburban dystopia? A result of the Architectural Review’s 1953 article was the emergence of New Town Blues (NTB) as a concept. This is defined as ‘a name created by the national press and given to the initial depression experienced many new residents who had left family and friends to move to a new home environment’. It is a term that experts and literature rely on to describe the emotional side of the New Towns experience. Whether this was a genuine medical or physiological condition is difficult to ascertain, and the concept is one that was tested amongst residents in the case studies in order to understand if the phrase was used inside New Towns by the pioneers, or whether it was applied mainly by visiting sociologists and journalists. Experts provided a range of arguments to justify the term. Firstly, the cause of NTB was attributed to social consequences that loneliness and anxiety felt by migration led to a certain type of depression. Secondly, the physical characteristic that New Towns were new, without infrastructure or amenities made them difficult and isolated places to live in. Thirdly, the economic model meant New Towns were built with a gender-biased employment structure, with a male-dominated workplace forcing women to be housebound and unemployed. These reasons perpetuated a stereotype, particularly with reference to the early days of New Towns, and portrayed them as isolating, depressive, and angst-ridden places to live in. There is also the suggestion that the creation of the term New Town Blues illustrates nothing more than a general desire (in some factions, such as the media) to stigmatise new developments. Stephen Ward, a well known planner and historian that has studied New Towns, explains that the phenomenon is not particularly new, and that municipal housing estates in the interwar years had previously created a similar effect: ‘suburban neurosis’. This assessment of suburbia as a terrain of aesthetic and psychic abjection is illustrative of the characteristics that underpinned the critical view: architectural uniformity and demographic homogeneity. Since New Towns were not inner city experiments and instead aimed at redistributing the population on a regional scale, a rather simplistic discourse emerged around their urbanism being little more than extended suburban urbanism. The physical characterisation was further justified, as pioneers were leaving their New Towns in search for work outside of their self-contained town structure. However, this change has more to do with the arrival of the automobile in the 1960s and is less a reflection of New Town Blues, as is commonly portrayed. There was admittedly a dispersal of pioneers during the 1960s once car ownership became a reality, offsetting the in-built problems of New Towns and their inadequate public transport system but the long-term impact of the arrival of the automobile deeply affected the self-containment aspect of New Towns. Residents could suddenly choose to look for employment outside of their industrial zone, possibly at other New Towns or even in London. During interview, Stephen Ward confirmed there is a significant link between self-containment and mobility in New Towns explaining that “within [the New Town], the better you did, the more you wanted to move out but also - importantly - people started to get cars and they could live a more dissociated life from the ideal of self-containment because society became more mobile”. This assessment shows there was an aspirational value of breaking away from the self-containment model. In other words, departing from the New Town became a status signifier. This is an important clarification in the process of New Towns being characterised as suburban developments, or victims of the New Town Blues. Nonetheless, the arrival of the car eventually resulted in New Towns developing a ‘commuter-town’ characteristic. Stereotype 2: Design driven stereotypes of New Towns as mostly Modernist projects Experts also created a critique solely around the architectural legacy of the New Town project, which has proven problematic. Richards became a key figure in the debate surrounding the experiment, with particular emphasis on their Modernist values. However, Modernist figures were scornful of the New Town programme, for it was too sentimental and they claimed it was a type of one-sided argument for the Garden City movement. This created a difficult premise for New Towns because while the pure Modernists harbour disdain for the programme, and monopolise the professional media coverage through Richards’s vast influence, traditionalists find the programme too modern.

113

New Town Utopia From a design and planning perspective, New Towns are completely unique. They offered professionals of the 1940s and 1950s a tabula rasa on which to test ideas that were supposedly vanguard and contemporary. On the one hand, the motivation driving planners, architects and engineers was to use the opportunity of masterplanning as a way of breaking down the social divide through a rearrangement of the traditional urbanism. On the other hand, there was a very prominent influence of Modernism that embraced clean lines and utopian design, from the house through to the commercial and industrial facilities. While a city like Brasilia, built predominantly by Oscar Niemeyer, has received much coverage and analysis in debates regarding Modernism, mark 1 New Towns are rarely made reference to in this literature. But in terms of offering a Modernist test bed, New Towns should really be at the forefront of the architectural and planning discourse. David Etherton, an architect born and raised in Crawley, talked about his years studying in the Architectural Association during the 1950s, and how Modernism was deeply embedded in the pedagogic process1: There had been some radical multi-storey housing proposals for Crawley [New Town] and this is when the Roehampton Estate [in London] was being planned, and that was all AA [Architectural Association] people and as students it was a much more attractive example of housing to look at. However, Etherton believes that the New Towns were actually pared down versions of Modernist ideals, because although high-rise towers were proposed in Crawley, ‘in the end they opted for a much more conservative model of terrace houses with a front and back garden’. He thinks the planners and architects felt that this type of housing was a less startling way of enticing people to come and live in a new place, and a way of distinguishing the New Towns from London, which were considered ‘salubrious’. This reflects media representations discussed earlier arising from the Modernist frontrunners. Despite Etherton’s claims that the New Town was a conservative model within the contemporary architectural debates, there was actually a significant level of innovation through the New Towns, so much so that interviewees repeatedly stated ‘too much innovation’ as one of its downfalls. This variety in experimentation has led inexorably to some very successful examples of architecture and planning techniques and other less successful ones. As the ‘failures’ received press coverage and theoretical analysis, an overall impression amongst experts emerged that New Towns were actually monotonous and lacking in diversity. It could be argued that too much innovation was detrimental to its own legacy and has fuelled particular stereotypes about failures in Modernism. This discrepancy may explain the architect Christophe Egret’s analysis that appears contradictory: while lacking diversity on the one hand, the programme was too ambitious on the other. Stereotype 3: New Towns are nothing more than large council estates One of the problems about the New Towns, and they were good in their time, and we need to remember we are talking of an idea that came nearly 100 years ago… one of the bad things about new towns, especially post-war New Towns, are they are all single-class. It was taking a poor estate in the slums and throwing them into New Towns. (Interview with Lord Richard Rogers) When Lord Richard Rogers (leader of the Urban Task Force and former advisor to the Mayor of London) claims that New Towns are ‘all single-class’ with ‘poor people from the London slums’, there is clearly a misrepresentation of who the New Towns were built for (a balanced community) and how they were populated (through a process of industrial decentralisation). The stereotype that New Towns are nothing more than large and unmanageable housing estates has been a key premise for the demise of its policy. One explanation may be related to the characterisation that New Towns are a manifestation of suburban urbanism, and this has been traditionally considered one-dimensional in terms of social class. Another explanation may be the architectural discourse supported particularly by an anti-Modernist lobby that blames the poor state of contemporary housing on post-war system-built experiments and temporary accommodation that became permanent. The architectural merit of New Town housing is seldom associated with their legacy, and when the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) made a visit to Harlow as part of the CABE panel to investigate New Towns, one representative said the group was very impressed2. Harlow was especially recognised, throughout the four visits, as having a high quality of design and planning with some amazing architectural properties. Its degradation due to lack of maintenance, was its pitfall claiming.

114

Utopian Realities Maintenance is a key element in the discourse on the residual local authority housing of the 1950s-1960s. The academic interviewees repeatedly supported the notion that the Right-to-Buy differentiated the housing stock in a way where the ‘good stock’ was sold off, and the ‘bad stock’ remained in the ownership of the council. This had a devastating impact on New Towns, because they eventually became unmanageable large ‘housing estates’. This stigma is further perpetuated by the common belief, not only that New Towns are large housing estates, but that housing estates are bad. This change in attitude was created and supported particularly by the political debate around home ownership. The Conservative government of the 1970s fervently persevered with its agenda of creating a home-owning nation by portraying council housing as being housing for the poor, immobile and uneducated sector of society. Even today, key interviewees representing government agencies emphasised that New Towns did not work because they were large housing estates ‘born out of the welfare project’. Given the opportunity, it was preferable to become a home owner than rent state-owned housing where a central authority controlled even the ‘colour of my front door.’ On the one hand, this meant that the councils lost their good-quality housing. But on the other hand, most of the people who were left in council housing could not afford to purchase (even below market value) so it undermined the social mix of council housing, leading the experts to claim that the idea of a ‘balanced community’ was a weak notion in the first place. The long-term consequence is that home ownership has become a widely accepted means to accumulate wealth and uphold civic responsibility. This was sustained during an interview with an architect and town planner who has remained anonymous: One of the best side effects of the Thatcher years was that in providing the Right-to-Buy the ‘ghettos’ of housing were broken up and the mix began. It was, of course not intentional, but the continuous cycle of state-owned property within a state-owned community, within a state-helped group of people means that people don’t take responsibility and pride as they do when they have paid 200K for their flat. So the mixed-use is actually a very important turning point in New Town housing. This popular belief is contested by academic analysis that the Right-to-Buy (generally, not specifically in New Towns) created even further class divisions or residualisation. Importantly, this class division only deepened the stigma created by 1970s political debates and sustained by experts, of New Towns being unmanageable housing estates. Stereotype 4: Working-class Labour in the Conservative belt? Tipping the electoral balance A stigmatisation of New Towns that is less often discussed is how working-class estates were created in a Conservative green belt zone, making them socio-politically unsustainable. Linked to this theme is a planning discussion of the green belt policy and how experts feel it is a smokescreen for developer-driven land-banking. On the one hand this affected self-containment and should be discussed within this context. However, after conducting expert interviews the green belt policy became even more significant and became a key component in the relationship between planning policy and English class structures. While green belt was designated around mark 1 New Towns as a way of controlling their growth and ensuring self-containment, its conceptual design was inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s original vision of an agricultural belt for the Garden City. Residents would have access to the agricultural belt for leisurely pursuits and for a farming industry that would provide for the Garden City. The green belt envisaged by Patrick Abercrombie in the Greater London Plan of 1944 was much more of a control mechanism to stop the dispersal of London’s population, not as state-owned but as state-controlled land. The green belt was introduced by the Conservative government in the mid-1950s, at exactly the same time the party was changing housing subsidies to emphasise high-rise buildings and trying to densify the inner cities to avoid the need for more New Towns. The green belt is a deeply political issue where the Conservative county lobby, which is partly agricultural and overwhelming conservative in most places - and also the people that have been able to afford the places in the small towns and villages - don’t want their areas changed and the green belt policy has helped them. On the one hand this implies that the green belt foments NIMBYism, while on the other, it is securing a Conservative voting population.

115

New Town Utopia A few specialists suggest that the aversion to the New Town style came more out of a feeling of NIMBYism by the surrounding villages, than from the New Towners themselves. It is important to remember that mark 1 New Towns were built in Conservative county constituencies that did not want either a Labour-voting population in their countryside or an ‘eyesore’ to their quaint village lifestyle. New Towns were dramatically built in rural areas that were mainly Conservative. However, their architectural manifestations had inner city qualities that led to local resentment from the outset. This also led to an important revelation that the architectural legacy of New Towns generated a much wider problem than its misrepresentation as suburbia. The New Towns embodied a certain aesthetic that challenged English class values: the countryside was supposed to be a place of quaint cottages supported by a Conservative-voting population, while state-sponsored housing schemes belonged in the city, together with its Labour-voting population. This was a critical disclosure that was difficult to assess because interviewees never stated it directly. The late planning historian Sir Peter Hall had highlighted this in 2002 as a fear of the ‘democratisation of the countryside’ as “the lower middle-class and working-class invasion of an area that had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic and upper-middle class elite.” (King, cited in Hall, 2002: 84.)i An analysis firstly initiated by the CABE representative, but subsequently reoccurring throughout most interviews, was the long-term effect of building an entire settlement from ‘scratch’. For the residents it was a difficult way to create strong community links because there was little shared history. In terms of the architecture and design, the ‘new place’ weathered simultaneously leaving little opportunity for historical variation and making the majority of the town appear to be one and the same. This is most un-British and makes it a significant problem: aesthetically, New Towns were a strong departure from Howard’s British cottage in the Garden City. The CABE representative expresses this concern below as an “all built at one time syndrome that is so not English picturesque...we are in a country where there is a huge love for little villages growing incrementally, market towns that have developed slowly over centuries. And this is very foreign to us all. To have suddenly, all in one era, a town built at once is very un-English.” This ‘love for little villages’ is important. New Towns were neither quaint nor modest, and they would not attract a Conservative-voting middle-class population. The policy objective of reviving inner cities in the early 1980s furthered the expert assessment that New Towns had actually not benefitted the large cities enough to justify their vast expense and administrative framework. Decentralisation into New Towns did not benefit inner city areas of housing stress despite evidence that city residents were willing to move out. Instead, decentralisation benefitted suburban local authorities that were already close to the New Towns. It also attracted the workers of expansive, capital-intensive employment found in suburban locations rather than the inner city. In fact, New Towns could have made a larger contribution to aid the economically deprived inner cities if the London local authorities had not been so reluctant to promote the scheme. Even though New Towns did not contribute as much as they could have to inner city areas of stress, its policy of decentralisation has in due time contributed to the dispersal of the urban disadvantaged. This fourth stereotype reveals an untold account of the New Town narrative that suggest a Labour-voting working-class presence on the outer edge of London’s green belt was too uncomfortable for the Conservative belt, encouraging both NIMBYism and disdain for the policy. Stereotype 5: Land-banking over Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) Although the research in this chapter has been specifically unpacking the discourse around mark 1 New Towns, with focus on London’s outer ring, there is an important stereotype created around Milton Keynes that has affected the wider New Towns narrative. Despite Milton Keynes being the only mark 3 New Town (designated in 1967), it has dominated New Towns theory. Until the 1970s, the main role of house builders was destined to be that of contractors; but after the 1970s, volume house builders took a lead role in both housing provision and land speculation. As a consequence, experts tend to see New Towns as something that merely aided and abetted house builders. This stereotype is difficult to contest, because the deregulation of planning controls witnessed in the 1980s coupled with a buoyant new market of home owning citizens that were previously the affluent working-class rental market resulted in a strengthened market for volume house

116

Utopian Realities builders. The most evident impact is that volume house builders are now the main suppliers of new housing3. This has resulted in the Southeast being subject to serial land-banking. Lord Richard Rogers conceded that in England issues around housing and land were inseparable and that it caused significant problems when the Urban Task Force was preparing ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’: Housing is the most difficult type of building in Britain. That’s because it’s in the hands of volume builders which are property developers… they are the biggest firms in Britain and build millions of houses. But they really have very little interest in the housing- it is only a short term interest. They buy pieces of land. They wait for planning permission. They bank land and at certain points they dribble it out! They dribble it out because they want to push their prices up. And then they have to move real quickly: there is such a demand you can sell anything, and then they sell quickly and they have no interests in follow-ups. (Interview with Lord Richard Rogers) The experts interviewed consistently identified land-banking as the primary reason for the overwhelmingly undersupply of housing since the 1980s, and why supply has been notoriously difficult to kick-start. However, the way in which Milton Keynes was procured was significantly different from the pre-1980s system of mark 1 New Towns.4 Given the demand for housing, a particular type of development model was adopted where the Development Corporation acted as a primary agent but projects were delivered through publicprivate partnerships. Although there are certain stereotypes around mark 1 New Towns being state-led projects as suggested earlier, there was substantial involvement and partnering with private developers. However, the Development Corporation was responsible for the master-plan, acting as the lead client in the procurement process while house builders were mainly contractors. This differs from the Milton Keynes model in which the Development Corporation dissolved its powers and private developers undertook a lead role. This minor difference has a major impact on how land is acquired (and by whom). The mark 1 New Towns were acquired using the 1947 system of land acquisition where the state is conferred development rights through compulsory purchase in the name of positive planning. This is because Development Corporations had the power to purchase land through a simplified form of CPO that was crucial to enable the delivery of New Towns (Aldridge, 1979)ii. Land nationalisation is the last remaining strategy that has been created around New Towns because it represents a planning system of radical origins. The term ‘radical’ is repeatedly used in New Towns literature as shorthand for the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. While it is portrayed as positive planning because it clearly had the capacity to modify the national settlement pattern, its implications were too ‘radical’ because it effectively destroyed the land market and made the state its sole trader (Reade, 1987)iii. Thus, in relation to New Towns, CPO as a planning choice has been portrayed as undesirable and socially unsustainable because of the ambiguity in compensation rates and betterment value of the land purchase. However, the experts interviewed contested this perception because it was used to facilitate municipal landbanking, on which development through public-private partnerships could occur, whereas after the Milton Keynes model of land acquisition, land-banking has been overtaken by large private house-builders. CPO was not straightforward because ascertaining the developmental value at which the land should be bought was complex and fraught with changes. This was also a very difficult experience for the people whose land was lost. A retired architect told the story of his grandfather’s parcel of land that was bought from him by force, in order to build Crawley New Town. Despite enduring a legal battle, the land was lost and his family believes the process led to his grandfather’s downfall and eventual death in the mid-1960s. The stereotype created around CPO is closely related to the belief that New Towns are part of an unreasonable public programme borne out of a statist ideology. Despite experts claiming during the formal one-to-one interviews that there are benefits to nationalised development rights and in using CPO (to a controlled extent) as part of a ‘positive planning’ system, this view is not reflected publicly. It is as if CPO has not only become typified as the villainous evil twin to the welfare state, but it is portrayed, with a peculiarly English dimension, as a socially unsustainable planning choice to be avoided at all costs in planning new communities.

117

New Town Utopia

Conclusion This paper uses a selection of key experts and helicopter specialists who were instrumental in writing and disseminating a specific understanding of the New Towns programme to unpack the stereotypes that were constructed around New Towns which have (as a result) contributed to their so called decline. This Chapter also questions whether certain issues are due to a biased misrepresentation of the New Towns narrative, and if an alternative perspective is available. While this paper exposes the official view, and seems to portray New Towns as unbalanced communities built on the premise of a failed statist policy, it does not accept these views as fact. On the contrary, the issues revealed in the material raise a series of questions that can only be answered by the pioneers of the mark 1 New Towns. This is why obtaining a localised, bottom-up perspective is so important and can contribute an alternative narrative in the understanding of New Towns. Originally published in Political Ideology and Housing Supply: Rethinking New Towns and the Building of New Communities in England. Helena Rivera is a chartered architect and the founder of A Small Studio, an architecture practice based in London. She specialised in the British planning system and has a Doctorate (PhD) in Regional Planning from the Bartlett School of Planning (UCL). -

1. Both Frederick Gibberd (Harlow master-plan) and Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (Hemel Hempstead master-plan) taught at the Architectural Association (AA), and Jellicoe was principal of the school. 2. CABE merged with the Design Council in 2011. 3. These are sometimes acting as Housing Associations and at other times as developers for the private market, but usually providing for both simultaneously. 4. Again, this points to the difficulties in all New Towns being labelled as one and the same. Just in terms of procurement, Mark 1 and Mark 3 new Towns differ significantly. i) Hall, P. G. (2002). Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the 20th Century. ii) Aldridge, M. (1979). The British New Towns. London: Routledge. iii) Reade, E. (1987). British Town and Country Planning. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

118

Utopian Realities

New Towns: Lessons for Tomorrow

Katy Lock

What typically comes to mind on hearing the words ‘New Town’? Modernist housing estates? Concrete? Roundabouts? The New Towns are often the butt of jokes about the failures of modern urbanism (often made by people who have never visited a New Town, let alone lived or worked in one), but as New Town Utopia illustrates, their story is an intriguing one: of anarchists, artists and visionaries; and the promise of a new beginning for millions of people. As Basildon New Town (designated 4th January 1949) approaches its 70th birthday the idea of building a new generation of New Towns to help solve the housing crisis is high on the political agenda. With this in mind, its important to learn the lessons – good and bad – about what has been done before. What can we learn from the first generation of New Towns? What is their situation now, and what need to be done to ensure they flourish and continue to provide good places to live? And how can we make sure the next generation of New Towns create successful C21st communities? The post-war New Towns programme was the most ambitious large-scale town-building programme ever undertaken in the United Kingdom, and was described by the late Sir Peter Hall as ‘perhaps the greatest single creation of planned urbanism ever undertaken anywhere’. The New Towns were direct descendants of the Garden City movement, upscaled in size of population and strategic economic purpose, and with very different methods of delivery, but with many shared objectives. Between 1946 and 1970, the New Towns Act, and subsequent legislation in Scotland and Northern Ireland, led to the delivery 32 New Towns across the UK. The legislation set out how they would be delivered by powerful, long-life, dedicated organisations called Development Corporations. The Corporations had a range of borrowing, planning and masterplanning powers and the ability to acquire land by compulsory purchase and proactively manage the values created as the towns developed. The New Towns programme was ambitious not only in its scale and means of delivery, but also in its objectives to create ‘balanced communities’. Reflecting the spirit of the Garden City movement, the purpose of the New Towns was not simply to provide homes and jobs, but to create socially balanced communities that integrated employment, homes and social life to provide opportunities for all. Lewis Silkin famously argued that: ‘our aim must be to combine in the new town the friendly spirit of the former slum with the vastly improved health conditions of the new estate, but it must be a broadened spirit, embracing all classes of society… 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.’ To this end the Development Corporations invested huge amounts of time and money in innovative design and masterplanning, in civic art and in community development of all kinds for both new and existing residents. Designations under the New Towns Act came to an end in the late 1960s, as the programme lost political favour. The New Towns were blamed for draining the inner cities of their most vigorous young people (in fact, only some 17% of those leaving London had actually gone to the New Towns) and for drawing off money that should be spent on regeneration (in fact, money directed to the New Towns was on loan, repayable with

119

New Town Utopia

interest); and central government turned its attention to the problems of the inner cities, disregarding any part that might have been played by further New Towns and the continuing development of those already designated. The New Town Development Corporations had acquired, and created, valuable assets in the form of land and property. Although it was originally planned to transfer the assets of mature New Towns to the relevant local authorities once the Development Corporations’ work was complete, the New Towns Act 1959 established a national agency, the Commission for the New Towns, to manage residual assets after the dissolution of each Development Corporation. A first tranche of Development Corporations was wound up in the 1960s. Some of the assets were transferred to local authorities and the Commission for the New Towns became landlord for the rest, with rent receipts going back to HM Treasury. The story began to change in the 1980s, following the election of the first Thatcher Government, which wanted all the New Town Development Corporations to be wound up as soon as possible. The Commission for the New Towns was instructed to sell its existing portfolio of land and property and any further land or property it received from the remaining Development Corporations as they were wound up. It was here that the New Towns programme failed to act on one of the most important lessons from the Garden City movement – that of long-term stewardship. The failure to transfer assets to local authorities or community-led organisations, combined with a fire-sale of assets that had not reached maturity, proved to be a chronic shortcoming of the New Towns programme – preventing the towns from retaining the means to look after the high-quality community facilities and assets that the Development Corporations had provided. Today the New Towns provide homes for over 2.8 million people, and as a set of places, exhibit a range of successes and failures – including, as they do, both the fastest and growing and most successful yet also some of the most deprived communities in the UK. The Development Corporations left outstanding legacies in the New Towns, including comprehensive green space networks and landscape design, good-quality social housing, and an emphasis on community development. The New Towns’ physical design and architecture, including civic art, are only just being recognised as important modern heritage assets which not only require protection but could also prove to be catalysts in their renewal. But as a result of building at speed – and, often under the constraints of the day, using cheap materials – whole estates are now in need of renewal, putting a significant burden on local authorities, while tired-looking buildings affect contemporary perceptions of what were once ambitious schemes. The central government dictated fire-sale of assets has left – with the exception of The Parks Trust and Milton Keynes Community Foundation in Milton Keynes and Nene Park Trust in Peterborough – no means to look after the facilities provided by the Development Corporations. The post-war new towns suffered a great injustice but are also places with huge opportunities for growth and renewal. They are, in short, unfinished business. And what does this mean for a new generation of new communities? Today, the New Towns Act is still on the statute books and remains an important tool for tackling the nation’s housing crisis. The Act enabled the fast and efficient delivery of new communities, at a time of austerity, using a financial model that paid for itself (the first generation of New Towns were so economically successful that they became net lenders to other public

120

Utopian Realities

bodies). Meeting the nation’s housing needs involves more than just delivering housing units – we need to create beautiful places which offer a wide range of employment opportunities and genuinely affordable homes, while enabling more sustainable lifestyles. Learning from the past this means a new generation of Garden Cities – new communities which combine the high ideals and place-making standards of the Garden City movement with the effective delivery mechanisms of the New Towns programme, building on the lessons from past experience. A few amendments to the New Towns Act are required to make it fit for purpose today – for example, new Development Corporations must be required to commit to high standards of sustainability and meaningful participation, and, crucially, the legislation should set out provisions for the long-term stewardship of valuable community assets. Government understands there is a role for new communities in dealing with the nation’s housing needs. It has supported places who want to develop new communities as ‘Garden Villages Towns and Cities’; but does not require a commitment to the Garden City principles, leaving it up to local authorities to ensure high standards. For even the most ambitious councils, this is a challenge in the face of the viability test. Government has even proposed some changes to the New Towns Act (including – we await the results of the consultation – on long-term stewardship). These are an important start but ignore many crucial lessons we have learnt from the post war new towns programme and beyond. Recognition of the role of a new generation of Garden Cities, alongside renewal of existing places, in tackling the housing crisis is a huge opportunity. But the legislative amendments and supporting policy are far from those needed to ensure high quality design, inclusive delivery, affordability and climate resilience. But there is an opportunity for that to change. At the 2017 budget the chancellor announced that government would ‘use New Town Development Corporations to kick-start 5 new locally agreed Garden Towns’1. As plans for the identification and delivery of these schemes are in development, government faces an opportunity to recapture the ambition of the New Town pioneers. But new Garden Cities will not be conjured out of the air by wishful thinking. Above all, they require the government to set out plainly how these new places will fit in Britain’s wider economic, social and environmental development. This requires unprecedented crossdepartmental coordination in everything from social housing investment to energy deployment. Only with this kind of forethought and enabling will new garden cities truly be able to deliver their outstanding benefits for future generations.

Katy Lock is Garden Cities & New Towns Projects and Policy Manager at the Town and Country Planning Association (www.tcpa.org.uk) and joint author of The Art of Building a Garden City: Designing New Communities for the 21st Century (RIBA Publishing, 2017). For more on the TCPA’s New Towns Research visit: https://www.tcpa.org.uk/research-gcnt 1. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/autumn-budget-2017-25-things-you-need-to-know

121

New Town Utopia

Acknowledgements

This publication wouldn’t exist without the support, contributions and influence of everyone involved in making the documentary film New Town Utopia. The film was only completed due to the generous financial support of hundreds of people though the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. To bring this book to life, my key partner in crime has been Mark Beechill, who looked after the design and printing. His article about New Town Utopia in Foxhole Magazine inspired this anthology. The cover is the fantastic work of Guy Hulse and Chloe Smith at DN&Co. I’d like to thank all the contributors, who have bestowed their time, minds and energy. I am also very grateful to Five Leaves Bookshop for their support in tracking down a digital copy of Arcadia For All. No-one has been more important to bringing this entire project to life than my family - especially my partner Cassie and daughter Etta, who bring fun and perspective when its most needed.

122

This is a companion publication to the feature documentary film New Town Utopia - an anthology of ideas and thought inspired by Basildon, Essex. It brings together poetry, photography, theory and analysis to explore the legacy of the British new towns and features contributions from Gillian Darley, John Grindrod, Owen Hatherley, Jonathan Meades, Ken Worpole and more.

Reviews of the documentary film New Town Utopia: A A A A ‘Consistently fascinating, unfolds like a warning from history. Powerful material’ The Times A A A A ‘Unapologetically upbeat film in which utopianism is taken unexpectedly seriously. Absorbing and heartening’ The Guardian A A A A ‘Endlessly poignant. An ode to the unique moment when post-war Britain allowed itself to dream’ Financial Times ‘Intelligent, poignant and delicately ambiguous portrait. Leaves a rich impression’ The Big Issue

www.newtownutopia.com Cover design: DN&Co