The urban new town
More than half of new homes in Britain are currently built on previously developed land, with the result that the skills of architects and planners are relatively well honed to deliver a city-based new town.
One built example of a settlement approximating a new town is the Greenwich Millennium Village in east London. Built on the Greenwich peninsula, it was part of New Labour’s regeneration programme that also included the Millennium Dome.
It has been built over the last 25 years on 120 hectares (300 acres) of contaminated land that was formerly a gasworks and was bought by the then government’s development agency English Partnerships. A competition saw the architect Ralph Erskine, who had worked on Welwyn Garden City and designed the 1970s Byker Wall estate in Newcastle, draw up a masterplan for two private developers, Countryside Properties and Taylor Wimpey.
Eventually there were to be about 3,000 homes. Some of the apartment buildings were 12 storeys high, designed in part to block the winds coming across the Thames from the east. There have been problems. After the Grenfell Tower fire, leaseholders discovered that cladding panels needed to be removed to make their homes safe. But a recently built design district was applauded for “wit and spirit and intelligence”.
Milton Keynes #2
Arguably the most successful of the UK’s 20th-century new towns, Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire is now home to well over quarter of a million people and is bigger than Brighton or Newcastle upon Tyne. It has grown to support a theatre, art gallery, concert hall, football stadium and a small university campus.
From the start of the project in 1967 it was built on mostly open farmland and around historic villages, and the government set up a powerful development corporation to oversee planning. The planners embraced modernist architecture on a grid of roads and it was designated as a city in 2022.
Repeating this feat would require a government willing to look decades ahead, suffer the short-term political pain of zoning large amounts of open fields as a site, and invest – most probably through loans – billions into the infrastructure required to sustain itself. And that is before grappling with the thorny question of where it would go.
The super extension
A planning team led by David Rudlin, the director of urban design at the architectural firm BDP,worked out it would be possible to double the size of a city the size of York by building three “super-extensions” of about 20,000 homes each. He called it Uxcester.
These circular satellites would be separated from the existing town or city by fields or woodlands, but they “should have good links to town or district centres with a range of facilities and should be serviced by public transport”.
Designing in country parks as buffers between the new and existing settlements could help satisfy current residents that the homes are not “in their back yard” but are “over there”, thereby reducing local opposition.
They do not need to be as large as 20,000 homes, but should have at least 3,000 – sufficient to support a secondary school, Rudlin says. Shops could be provided at affordable rents as part of the development finance strategy to guarantee each satellite would have a lively centre. They would be designed to be compact, with more dense housing at the centre, and could be traversed on foot in 15 to 20 minutes.
The traditional town
When he was Prince of Wales, King Charles built Poundbury, a 4,100-resident extension of Dorchester. It was designed using the principles of new urbanism that emerged in the US in the 1980s. The movement urged the creation of walkable communities built around public spaces and community institutions using architectural styles that reflect local history.
At Poundbury, Charles chose Georgian architecture and critics decried it as a chocolate box pastiche. But some urbanists and developers believe using patterns of streets and architectural design from earlier eras could unlock public approval for new settlements. Given the public antipathy towards the municipal housing architecture of the 1950s and 1960s and the volume housebuilding that has dominated since the 1980s, a return to earlier patterns of housing – updated for the 21st century, perhaps – may appeal.
The duchy of Cornwall, controlled by the Prince of Wales, has built a significant town extension at Newquay in Cornwall and one is planned for Faversham in Kent. But what chance the current Prince of Wales would allow some of more of the duchy’s 52,000 hectares to become a larger new town?