In its 2018 Housing Green Paper, Labour proposed the introduction of new “legislation to start work on the next generation of new towns and garden cities.” Little elaboration of this idea, however, has been made since. Whilst the 2019 general election manifesto made important commitments to end homelessness, embark on a large scale council house-building programme and improve the rights of private renters, discussion of New Towns and Garden Cities was conspicuous in its absence. The designation of new New Towns would confront the party with fundamental questions about what a radically transformed, socialist society might look like in practice. Critical, self-reflexive engagement with the history of post-war New Towns has the potential to open up exciting spaces of possibility for a future housing policy. Although right-wing accounts typically construct post-war New Towns as evidence of the excesses of ‘socialism’ - a failed, statist ‘utopianism’ - Labour’s post-war New Towns were not, in fact, socialist enough. Whilst the Labour Party should vociferously defend the radical, material transformation of working-class lives brought about by its post-war predecessor, critical reflection on mid-century social democracy’s limitations has the capacity to catalyse the articulation of a truly radical policy programme.

The New Town Narrative

In 1946 the British government passed the New Towns Act.

As Lauren Pikó has argued, whilst the NHS and the welfare state have typically been granted protected status as ‘national treasures’, New Towns have been subject to unrelenting criticism as concrete monstrosities produced by a bloated, interventionist, social democratic state. Other critiques emphasise the immediately malign effects of architectural forms; New Towns failed because they were poorly conceived and executed by the aforementioned statist bureaucracy, obsessed with the virtues of modernism. Whilst there were inevitably limitations to the design and execution of New Towns (one only has to walk through Basildon town centre on a windy day to find this out), what is omitted from these narratives is the way in which New Towns have been decimated by years of neoliberalism and austerity since the late 1970s. In order to fulfil their original aim of offering better lives to their working class inhabitants, New Towns did not only need to be built, but subsequently cared for and, crucially, funded by successive governments (both Labour and Conservative). As New Towns got old, they found themselves subjected to the same neoliberal ideological and material transformations as the rest of the country.

As early as the 1950s, the Conservative government had encouraged the building of privately subsidised, owner-occupied homes for the middle-classes in New Towns.

Reliant on direct funding from the treasury into the early 1990s, and home to a higher percentage of people in social housing than the rest of the country, New Towns were particularly vulnerable to the systematic dismantling of the welfare state carried out by successive Conservative governments from the 1980s. The consequences of this were compounded by the disposal of Development Corporation assets to the highest bidder in the late 1980s and 1990s with New Towns seeing soaring levels of poverty since. A 2016 Essex Joint Strategic Needs Assessment report stated that Basildon has ‘high levels of child poverty’ and has a ‘number of deprived areas with poor health and unemployment’.

Whilst ex-New Towns like Basildon have been hit hard by decades of cuts, it was the figure of the ‘Essex Man’ - a ‘culturally barren and mildly brutish’ beneficiary of the free market - that came to dominate the cultural imaginary under Thatcherism. The ‘Basildon Man’ was a particular subset of Essex Man who, according to the Thatcherite narrative of the working-class New Town resident, had been held back by the bloated, post-war social democratic state, only to be unshackled with the advent of neoliberalism.

The limitations of post-war social democracy

The limitations of post-war New Towns are inextricable from the broader shortcomings of mid-century social democracy in Britain, concerned with ameliorating the worst excesses of the capitalist system, rather than confronting its fundamental logic. The Labour Party would encourage ‘class mixing’ in its New Towns, but offer little substantial critique of the relationship between labour and capital. In actuality, ‘social balance’ meant towns sorting themselves into more and less desirable neighbourhoods based on property ownership, and by proxy, class. The construction workers employed by Development Corporations to build New Towns were often the same working-class people the program was intended to house, a situation which could give rise to exploitative working conditions. Fred Udell, a construction worker who helped to build the first generation New Town of Stevenage, spoke of the exploitation of his colleagues by construction companies aware of employees’ desperation to secure a new home in the town. They had a shed for a canteen, no toilet facilities, and were unable to organise and challenge their poor working conditions, for fear their right to rent one of the new homes they had helped build might be taken away.

In much the same way that post-war nationalisations of industry were to be a top-down affair, working-class people had little say over the designation, design or development of the New Towns they were housed in. Development Corporations could be profoundly paternalistic and un-democratic organisations, coming into conflict with more radical existing local authorities. Basildon Development Corporation, for example, felt the wrath of left-wing Labour councillor Joe Morgan for many years. Morgan made repeated personal appeals to Harold Wilson to hand back control of Basildon to the democratically elected local council, rather from the ‘licensed gangsters’ at the Development Corporation. As historian Jon Lawrence has argued more broadly about the post-war social democratic state, the working-classes were to benefit from improved conditions, but it was the government who would dictate what form those improvements would take.

Crucially, interactions between Development Corporations and residents had a distinct class character. Development Corporation employees were almost always farmed in from outside of the area, had middle and upper class backgrounds, and often had prior careers in the military or colonial service.

In the minutes of public inquiries held by Basildon Development Corporation, residents repeatedly complained of only being consulted after decisions had been made, and the Corporation was at pains to dissuade them of their ‘misapprehensions’, or simply dismiss their objections as overly emotional (especially if you happened to be a woman). Residents were to be instilled with a sense of ‘culture’ and ‘civic pride’, but on the Corporation’s terms. In mid 1960s Basildon, the Corporation frowned upon the supposedly working-class habit of ‘passively’ watching TV, and instead encouraged the kinds of ‘active’ consumption-orientated leisure activities its middle-class inhabitants preferred, such as shopping for luxury goods, going to the theatre and eating out. Working-class residents were, it seems, expected to re-make themselves in to ‘new citizens’ in the image of middle-class planners.

New Towns were originally designed for the white nuclear family unit, with a breadwinning husband and a stay at home Mum.

Imagining new New Towns

What follows is not a detailed prescription of what new New Towns should look like, or straight-forward solutions to the problems identified above, but instead a tentative attempt to imagine new possibilities. Despite the limitations of post-war New Towns and the social democratic state that produced them, their strength lied in their capacity to imagine a new future for the British working-class. The strength of the British Left over the past few years has manifested in this very same capacity, evidenced by the wealth of new think-tanks that have sprung up around Corbynism, and the passing of a series of radical motions at the 2019 Labour conference. New New Towns, I argue, would offer fertile ground for the flourishing of these exciting, imagined new futures under a future Labour government.

New New Towns would have to form just one aspect of Labour’s broader commitment to rehabilitate social housing as a mass tenure, and re-ignite council house building in this country. Post-war New Towns amounted to only 7.5% of all houses built in Britain since 1951. New Towns would not be enough on their own to tackle the country’s housing crisis, and would have to be combined with measures akin to those put forward by Owen Hatherley in his suggestions for a 21st Century socialist housing policy. The idea of creating ‘balanced’ communities of different classes in post-war New Towns could not work when Development Corporations made progressively more housing available for owner-occupation as the twentieth century wore on, the pace of which was accelerated further after the introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’ at a national level. In its 2018 housing Green Paper, the Labour Party argued that New Towns needed to be celebrated because they ‘helped people into home ownership’, a selective interpretation of their legacy that suggests the party remains ideologically welded to the fetishization of owner-occupation. Section 106 has repeatedly proven itself to be an inadequate mechanism in ensuring ‘affordable’ housing is built by private developers; the building of whole New Towns filled with publicly-funded, built and rented housing would send a clear message to private developers, who for too long have been allowed to view housing as a source of profit, rather than a public good.

New New Towns would also provide the opportunity to enact emerging ideas around community wealth building. What better way to develop strong anchor institutions and create a locally rooted economy, based on new forms of worker ownership, than to design a New Town on these principles from the ground-up? Rather than exploiting the workers that build New Towns, they could instead belong to unionised, local co-operative construction companies. Original New Towns were themselves committed to a kind of proto-community wealth building policy of ‘self-containment’, which encouraged residents to work, rest and play within the boundary of the town. This policy was undermined by the concentration of wealth in London, withdrawal of state investment in New Towns and the de-industrialisation and financialisation of the economy. In existing New Towns like Basildon and Harlow, community-wealth building could be used to help re-build local economies that have been gutted by years of cuts, and start to reverse the impact of these interrelated socio-economic processes. Current ‘regeneration’ plans in Basildon centre around the building of an Empire Cinema and the courting of multi-national corporations that might attract visitors from outside the borough, a depressingly un-inspired vision of the Town’s ‘future’ for residents who have endured years of brutal austerity.

Crucially, working-class people would need to be placed at the centre of any New Town project. Decisions about the designation, design and development of New Towns, rather than being made unilaterally by unelected Development Corporations, should be made by and in the interests of the working-class. Just as criticisms of the top-down nature of post-war nationalisations have engendered discussions about ‘economic democracy’ in the Labour party, the means through which working-class people would shape the creation of New New Towns needs proper consideration. These questions – about ‘democracy’ and the current limits of its representative, liberal bourgeois manifestation – are of vital importance to the Labour Party’s future policy programme more widely.

New New Towns would also create the space for the country’s public transport network to be re-imagined. First generation New Towns like Basildon were often designed with a limited public transport network, and failed to anticipate the ‘boom’ of the personal automobile in the 1960s. When the number of cars on the roads grew, Basildon simply retro-fitted more roundabouts, carparks and driveways, embracing this privatised mode of travel as the new reality. In the 1960s New Town of Skelmersdale, public transport links with near-by Liverpool are so abysmal that taxis are often the preferred mode of transport. Designing a town from scratch using public funding would allow for the creation of a free at the point of use, green, well connected public transport network. Pre-Milton Keynes plans for a monorail city that would connect residents via a free at the point of use monorail system – despite never materialising – demonstrate the capacity for the design of New Towns to generate radical re-imaginings of urban transport and mobility.

New New Towns could also herald the return of genuinely public space. Compulsory purchase orders, whilst historically used controversially by Development Corporations set on uprooting existing residents, could ensure that land in the centre of towns was not privatised, but remained a public good. Rather than town centres being littered with chain coffee shops and restaurants, community halls and spaces could flourish. One piece of writing I can’t help but keep returning to is this vision of what a public canteen might look like. It’s these kinds of imagined futures – where one doesn’t have to partake in repeated acts of consumption to justify one’s presence – that new New Towns might create the space to enact.

It is by no means certain that new New Towns will ever be built, and with the recent general election result, the possibility of a Labour government in the immediate future has vanished. But to entertain the idea of new New Towns opens up imaginative space; space for the articulation of ideas about how society and the economy can be transformed, whilst engaging in critical dialogue with the flawed history of post-war social democracy.

We will be continuing our Beyond the Manfiesto series, now aiming to develop ideas and policies that could be part of a socialist programme beyond both 2017 and 2019. If you’re interested in pitching, the guidelines are available here.