Brave New World s5

Brave new world No expense was spared when Britain began building its new towns - yet still many residents felt as if they had been sent into exile. Sixty years on, is it time to embrace Basildon, Milton Keynes and co? Jonathan Glancey visits the land of housing estates, roundabouts and concrete cows  o o o reddit this

  o Jonathan Glancey o The Guardian, Monday 6 November 2006 o Article history

Green streets... the concrete cows of Milton Keynes. Photograph: Graham Turner

"Basildon will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit." So prophesised Lewis Silkin, minister of town and country planning in Clement Attlee's postwar Labour government, at a meeting of possibly bewildered local residents convened at the old Essex town's Laindon School in September 1948.

Did they really come, those legions of camera-toting tourists, to gawp at Basildon's Festival of Britain-inspired offices-on-stilts, its artificial lakes, ambitious roundabouts, worthy public art and well-meant council estates? If they did, they are hard to spot. Tourists in Basildon, it might have saddened Silkin to know, are as rare today as snakeshead fritillaries raising their heads in Essex meadows.

Basildon was one of 11 English new towns announced 60 years ago. These were to be homes for the heroes of the second world war. The first was Stevenage, followed by Crawley, Hemel Hempstead and Harlow. Most were "overspill" towns designed as residential panaceas for the problem of what to do with blitzed, smoggy, ration-book London, yet they also included the industrial new towns of Aycliffe, Peterlee and Corby. A second wave followed in the early 60s, among them Runcorn, Telford and Washington, while the last, and most ambitious of all, Milton Keynes, was named into being in January 1967.

For Silkin and his generation of paternalistic socialists, new towns were to be places, in his words, where "all classes of community can meet freely together on equal terms and enjoy common cultural and recreational facilities". They were, in other words, postwar English society's level playing fields, ideally free of class distinction, private property, public schools and dirty drains. In a new dawning of free teeth and specs on the national health, universal education, milk at playtime, Uncle Mac on the wireless, state-run trains, local-authority buses and full employment, the new towns were seen by their advocates as ideal planning expressions of a new socialist order. They were to be architectural fanfares for the common man, woman and booming baby. And yet something has always been missing from Basildon, as from Stevenage, Crawley and even Milton Keynes. More or less successful in terms of health, education and general prosperity, each lacks the kind of emotional core or architectural heart that makes many of us think so highly of old towns and cities. When visitors approach traditional English, or European towns, signs to the historic centre, the cathedral and the grand square draw them in. Here, they may still experience densely packed worlds where commerce and culture, streets broad and narrow, buildings high and low and decked in the garb of clashing periods, rub shoulders and even coalesce. A fish market might jostle fin-by-gill next to an incense-scented medieval church, itself rooted alongside some grandiloqent art gallery jammed next to a hoary old devilled-kidney restaurant neighbouring the latest in-your-face celebrity-chef swear-o-rama. All around will be people both similar and very different to you. This tussle and jumble, these crowded urban stage sets, are what make traditional city living a perennial delight.

For those who drew up plans for the new towns, such complex and often contradictory places were thought to be the breeding ground for illness, strife between social classes, poverty and general discontent. Old cities, and especially blitzed and blighted London, were seen as dank, dirty and Dickensian. The new towns would be all about sunlight, air, green spaces and healthy children. Their plans, or layouts, would be scientifically zoned. Housing would be placed here, well away from industry sited over there. This sector would be for commerce, that for culture. Those fields over there would be for healthy recreation.

The model for these coreless new towns was the English garden cities and suburbs, dreamed up by the Esperanto-speaking Victorian idealist Ebenezer Howard at the beginning of the 20th century. His 1902 book, The Garden Cities of Tomorrow, was every bit as alluring as Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture was to be 20 years later. Letchworth Garden City, the first of its kind, was founded soon afterwards. Its blend of city and nature, its arts and crafts-style cottages, its temperance associations and free-church spirit attracted artistic young men and women sporting smocks, socialism and sandals.

Unlike Basildon, Letchworth attracted many visitors. These though did not come to admire and learn, but, by charabanc and cheap-day excursion from King's Cross, to sneer at what were widely perceived to be the eccentricities of Letchworth's first residents. A youthful John Betjeman joined in the fun with his poem, Group Life: Letchworth, in which

Sympathy is stencilling

Her decorative leatherwork,

Wilfred's learned a folk-tune for

The Morris dancers' band.

And yet the offspring of those who went to snigger at life in Letchworth would, half a century on, be living and working in Basildon, Crawley and Stevenage, the state-planned scions of Howard's garden cities. Before Margaret Thatcher's government put an end to the official and publicly funded development of the new towns, these had spread from London's green belt to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Although Howard had been an essential ingredient of new-town thinking, these were also very much the result of a brains trust of government commissions inquiring into the future of British towns from 1940, when Goering's Heinkels and Dorniers first unleashed their deadly cargoes on London and other soft urban targets. There was the Barlow commission of 1940 reporting on the distribution of the nation's industrial population, the Scott committee of the following year tackling the issue of rural land use, and the Abercrombie plan for London of 1944. This recommended that no fewer than 1.5 million Londoners should be transported to well-planned new towns. Finally, at the end of the war, came the mighty Reith report, chaired by Lord Reith of BBC fame, paving the way for the new Jerusalems of Hertfordshire, Essex and Surrey. Several generations old today, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow and Crawley have their champions, and their own histories, and yet, despite their offer of low-rent new council homes with indoor bathrooms and hot running water, many Londoners in the late 40s and early 50s felt they were being deported to cockney Siberias. More than a few succumbed to what the press dubbed "new-town blues". What must it have been like for a housewife stuck in a small house, with an apron of garden, at the end of an all but lifeless cul-de-sac on the fringe of a new town, when what she had known before was the clattering street life of Whitechapel, Bethnal Green or Dalston? Where was the raucous cheer, the colours and bright lamps of Ridley Road market? Where were the shopping-laden trams swaying along Mare Street? What had happened to the coalman, knife-grinder, French-onion seller and rag-and-bone man? Could a prim, and probably teetotal, new town architect design a decent London-style boozer? With homes set a long way from anything like a proper town centre, no wonder many first-generation new towners were confused.

Perhaps this is why a galaxy of big telly and screen stars were roped in to bring a little glamour to life in these frontier towns. Benny Hill, Frankie Vaughan, and, I say, Terry-Thomas, opened new shops in Hemel Hempstead, while its new cinema's first night was graced with the smouldering presence of none less than Lauren Bacall.

Culture was enlisted to bring cheer into the new towns, too, although no amount of wholesome modern art could ever compensate for a lack of traditional city life. Harlow went so far as to set up an arts trust championed by the new town's architect, Frederick Gibberd, better known, perhaps, for the designs of Didcot power station and "Paddy's wigwam", the Gemini space- capsule-style Metropolitan cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, and by the landscape designer Sylvia Crowe. Today, Harlow is, on one level, a remarkable open-air gallery of 50s sculpture: Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Lynn Chadwick.

Sir Kenneth Clark, the patrician arts grandee, made his way here in May 1956 to unveil Henry Moore's sculpture, Family Group. Imagining himself, perhaps, to be in somewhere altogether more agreeable, such as Italy, Clark congratulated the plucky townsfolk "on behalf of all those who believed in civilisation for maintaining the great tradition of urban civilisation in making a work of art a focal centre of a new town." The Times correspondent, up from the Smoke for the day, noted that "within an hour of its unveiling, the Family had already entered into the life of Harlow. Small boys were getting up on the pedestal, clambering over the woman and taking occupation of the empty place in the man's lap. At one moment, indeed, the family of three had expanded to one of seven." The sculpture was later moved inside the civic centre.

In an altogether more populist, and Pop, cultural gesture, the last and by far the biggest of the new towns, Milton Keynes, opted for a field of artist-designed concrete cows instead of a hefty few tonnes of Henry Moore. The cows won the new town national attention, as did its often deliberately funny and highly effective advertising campaigns dpesigned to lure a quarter of a million people to its determinedly green streets. Designed, developed and promoted by a younger and less tweedy generation of civil servants, architects and planners, Milton Keynes is perhaps the most successful of the new towns.

Laid out on a generous scale, it is a kind of giant park. In fact, 20% of the town is parkland, and there are said to be 20m trees there. Ospreys have been seen swooping over the town's North Willen lake. Seventeen of its ponds offer sanctuary to the endangered great crested newt. Someone has noted 800 species of moth within the town's boundary.

Although increasingly invaded by kitsch new developers' homes, Milton Keynes boasts many intriguing architect-designed houses of the 70s. It even has a proper centre, of sorts, clustered in a curiously, low-lying US fashion around a sleek and ambitious shopping mall opened by Thatcher in 1979. There is a well-connected civic art gallery and theatre close by and even what looks like a cathedral, although this curiously kitsch church proves to be a centre for ecumenical matters rather than any one particular strand of Christianity. Prince Charles unveiled the nearby shopping-mall style railway station in 1982. Although many people commute from here to London by fast electric to Euston, Milton Keynes provides many of its own jobs, its home commuters gliding around the town's extensive and free-flowing road network. Traffic jams are rarer than great crested newts. It takes about 15 minutes, by car, to cross from one side of the city to another.

Cars, though, are the fundamental problem with Milton Keynes. For all its greenery, cycle tracks, pedestrian paths, bridleways, ospreys, millions of trees and 800 species of moth, the car here is king, queen and all princes. Early plans for a futuristic monorail came to nothing. Trams, though, would be natural for such broad avenues, gridded street plans and widely-spread housing estates. They might not, however, take kindly to the town's infamous roundabouts. There are enough of these to make visitors giddy, and confused. Just where is that town centre?

This remains the question for all Britain's new towns still finding their foundations 60 years on. Where are their centres? For those who truly care for new towns, their lack of traditional centres, spatial hierarchies and history makes them a model for an increasingly globalised and less sharply defined Britain. For others, they are an acquired taste. They still feel like social and architectural experiments. It would be interesting to discover, though, all those years since Silkin addressed the people of Basildon, just how many of the sort of tourists who make a beeline for Barcelona, flock to Florence or fall for London, head for Hemel Hempstead, brave Basildon or are truly mad about Milton Keynes.