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Post-election promises for new towns and garden cities
Garden cities and new towns made a major contribution to housing supply in the last century, but their place in the election manifestos for 2024 cannot be guaranteed.
Amid the turbulence and uncertainty that accompanies a general election year, one thing we can be sure of is that how and where to house the nation will continue to be high on the political agenda. The need to provide genuinely affordable homes in thriving places, which enable healthy and sustainable lifestyles, is more acute than ever.
Dealing with our housing crisis will require a portfolio of solutions. Alongside the renewal of our towns and cities this includes building holistically planned new communities, in sustainable locations, based on modern Garden City Principles. Over the past few years, the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) has been exploring the lessons from the Garden Cities, post-war New Towns, and beyond, to help inform the delivery of a new generation of communities.
In this time there has been a renewed political interest in the Garden City and New Towns legacy. Most recently, this has included postelection commitments from the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party on the delivery of ‘ten Garden Cities’ and ‘a new generation of New Towns’. This provides an opportunity to transform how housing is delivered, but this will only be achieved if we learn lessons from the past. The lessons are numerous and span a wide range of issues, but core to this is a landscape-led approach to design and a focus on how we manage green infrastructure and other assets to help sustain places in the long term and improve health and wellbeing.
This proposition was core to the original Garden Cities as part of a cooperative approach to thinking about how we might live. While for many people the term ‘Garden City’ has become synonymous with tree-lined streets and suburbia, it is in fact a radical but practical approach to creating and renewing places which enable people and the natural environment to thrive.
While for many people the term ‘Garden City’ has become synonymous with tree-lined streets and suburbia, it is in fact a radical but practical approach to creating and renewing places which enable people and the natural environment to thrive
As many as 125 years before ’20-minute neighbourhoods’ were fashionable, the Garden City pioneers proposed walkable neighbourhoods and access to nature, and they understood the wider determinants of health and wellbeing. They had a deep-rooted understanding of the power of art and nature to improve people’s lives and of the indivisible connection between them. Garden City pioneer Ebenezer Howard suggested that this was via a ‘joyous union’ of town and country – the best of both worlds. The practical idealists of the movement set out in detail how a charitable trust working on behalf of the community would recycle development value uplift to pay for the project and support a range of social and cultural activities and long-term stewardship. The two experiments in applying these ideas, at Letchworth and Welwyn, demonstrated what these ideas might look like in practice but experienced their own challenges in finance and delivery, from which there is much to learn.
These ideals would inform the post-war New Towns programme, which sought to provide healthy, balanced communities and no less than a ‘new kind of citizen…’. The New Towns were upscaled in size from the Garden Cities and with an entirely different means of delivery. Powerful new Development Corporations had the autonomy and long-term resources to deliver ambitious projects, at speed. The principle of health and wellbeing informed the New Towns’ design and delivery. The emphasis on landscape and green infrastructure endured and the landscape character of the New Towns is one of their core design characteristics. From Brenda Colvin to Sir Frederick Gibberd, the landscape architects of the New Towns worked with the landscape and sought to provide access to nature for residents.
Thirty-two New Towns were delivered through the programme, providing homes to over 2.8 million people today. They contain some of the fastest growing, but also some of the most deprived, communities in the UK. While there are wider socioeconomic policy influences on this deprivation, there are also some elements of the New Town design which are contrary to healthy and sustainable lifestyles. This includes the convenience of access by car and the use of cheap building materials in the early New Towns. These are all ageing at once, and some aspects of experimental design which looked wonderful in the architectural magazines have in practice provided damp and cold living conditions. Aside from delivery approaches, one of the key lessons of the New Towns is around long-term stewardship. When the corporations were prematurely wound up in the 1980s and their land and assets sold to the private sector or given to local authorities, their economies became like normal towns and local authorities were left with fantastic public realm and green infrastructure assets, but without the resources to maintain them. Milton Keynes Parks Trust and the Nene Valley Trust in Peterborough were the two exceptions and demonstrate what might have been possible if stewardship had been a requirement from the outset. Today the landscape and green infrastructure of the New Towns also provides a potential catalyst for renewal – from the repurposing of municipal grassland for food and biodiversity, to being active travel exemplars.
The next holistic consideration of the concept of a planned new community enabled by government was the 2007 Eco Towns programme. This sought to combine housing delivery ambitions with commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 80% below 1990 levels, by 2050. The government invited bids for ten new settlements of around 5,000 homes each. The programme was accompanied by a Planning Policy Statement which set out the high objectives to be met by the exemplars of sustainable placemaking. Four Eco Towns received support, three of which (Whitehill & Bordon, Eco Bicester and China Clay Communities in Cornwall) are still delivering. What was a commendable concept was undermined by an undemocratic process of consent. Such was the public opposition to projects, which appeared in newspapers before the public had been made aware of them, that a change of government in 2011 saw immediate abandonment of the programme.
It is now 12 years since the English National Planning Policy Framework was published in 2012, with reference to the Garden City Principles. While successive governments have so far avoided implementing a comprehensive programme of new Garden Cities, there has been significant interest in the role of the Principles and Garden City ‘inspired’ developments, including through government’s ‘Garden Communities’ programme, itself supporting 49 developments. Initiatives such as the NHS Healthy New Towns programme have demonstrated the power of uniting health and planning in new communities. Several local authorities have referenced the Garden City Principles in their adopted Local Plans. This is a positive step for ambitious councils and developers and is already leading to some improvements in the way some places are designed and delivered, particularly in relation to long-term stewardship and zero-carbon ambitions. However, this decade of interest has so far failed to result in a holistic realisation of the Garden City idea. Many local authorities such as the members of the TCPA New Communities Group, are delivering ambitious places despite a confused policy environment. But they are held back by challenges with capacity, disjointed infrastructure investment and inconsistent support from central government. In short, our planning system and delivery model are not set up to efficiently enable the long-term and complex project of delivering a whole new place to high standards, with the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act providing further constraints on strategic planning and delivery. The Planning Inspectorate’s decision to remove critical climate targets from the proposed Salt Cross Area Action Plan for a new garden village in West Oxfordshire illustrates how sustainability standards are being affected.
These lessons each demonstrate the need for government to implement a range of practical solutions to delivery. It means committing to a transparent strategic approach to identifying sustainable locations and public consent as part of a national spatial plan; it means securing in policy and legislation the standards and commitments for design and delivery; including long-term stewardship.
It also means resourcing up-front infrastructure and investing in skills and capacity. The design principles and technical solutions to achieving a vision of healthy, net zero and biodiversity-rich new communities already exist. The challenge is whether we have the political will to implement them.
Katy Lock MRTPI is Director (Communities – FJ Osborn Fellow), Town & Country Planning Association. Katy leads on the TCPA’s campaigns on new and renewed communities and Garden City Principles and is co-author of New Towns – Rise, Fall, Rebirth (RIBA Publishing, 2020).
