![]() This concrete ghost estate was begun the 1960s as a modernist catastrophe. Osborne’s glamorous border-hopping Anglo-Parisian elite never quite took to Ebbsfleet.Īs for Thamesmead, it remains the new town that dares not breathe its name. His Ebbsfleet staggers on along the Kent estuary, though at least poor Eurostar is no longer forced to stop there. George Osborne went potty for garden cities. The TCPA persuaded Tony Blair to back new towns, followed by Gordon Brown and David Cameron. In every London borough there is a Milton Keynes lurking unused. The key to low-carbon living is adapting back-lots and bringing upper and empty floors into use. Cities are where journeys are shortest and not by car, while infrastructure is in place and can be more efficiently enhanced and shared. To urbanists such as Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, the “greenest” places in which to live are the biggest cities, such as Manhattan and central London. It is hard to believe that would pass muster today.Įvery doctrine of modern planning screams no. The most successful, Milton Keynes, was ideally located in the home counties and designed around a grid of roads, Los Angeles-style. Some, such as the brutalist Cumbernauld and Thamesmead, were often disliked and have had to be extensively demolished. The towns were artificial settlements planned by architects, not grown organically from existing communities. The two-dozen postwar new towns were rarely successes, except where they filled with home counties commuters. Spacious estates would cover the landscape and traffic would move freely through them. Champions of new towns since the 19th century, their founder, Ebenezer Howard, dreamed of new garden cities that would one day entirely replace filthy old slums. The reference to new towns came, we are told, from a meeting with the veteran Town and Country Planning Association. Housing policy was to be conducted from Westminster. He later regurgitated what seemed the result of a good lunch with the construction lobby: five Milton Keynes sprawling across the south-east and an end to local democracy in planning. In his speech Starmer dismissed levelling up with a jeer. It discusses the curse of Britain’s geographical inequality, and the significance of Boris Johnson’s “defining mission”, levelling up. ![]() Reeves should turn to page 231 and share it with Starmer. The best bit of gossip out of Liverpool was that the bedside reading of the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is Paul Johnson’s excellent bestseller, Follow the Money. It sounded ominously like the HS2 of housing. There would be “Labour new towns”, whatever they are, referred to in later briefing as in the south, on the “M1 corridor”, brooking no local opposition and “the equivalent of five Milton Keynes.” Land for them would be purchased compulsorily at a knock-down price. Then came two words that fell flat: new towns. It was that of an expectant prime minister, of sonorous phrases and few promises. Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference was good.
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