New Towns, Our Town

Twenty years before being designated as one of the UK’s first New Towns, amateur film-makers capture community-centred events in 1920s Crawley, including the Crawley Fair and the Church Parade. Later footage from 1937 shows the town’s jubilant celebrations for King George VI’s coronation.

Ebenezer Howard’s book ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ offered a vision of people enjoying the opportunities of the city along with the beauty and fresh air of the countryside. The book gave rise to the Garden City movement which preceded the first New Towns Act in 1946. Welwyn Garden City was the second of these Garden Cities, before itself being designated a New Town in 1948.

Drawing comparisons with the transformation of the rural landscape by the industrial revolution, this film charts the history of the New Towns as a solution to the dual problems of relieving urban congestion and providing homes for those who lost theirs in the Blitz.

The rapid development of these new social utopias to solve the post-war housing crisis is called into question by existing residents. The reaction of this farming family outside Stevenage reflects similar complaints and objections from the old neighbours of other New Towns.

Two years after the first newcomers arrived, Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation commissioned this short fictional film to promote the town to people looking to move out of London and start a whole new life. Famous character actor Harry Lock stars as a bricklayer who passes through Hemel Hempstead by chance and is taken with the whole idea. He returns home to persuade his wife…

The ambition of the New Towns project attracted international attention, demonstrated by this insider’s guide to 1950s Harlow made for US audiences.

Moving home is never easy, but relocating a whole company and its employees from post-war London to the state-backed ‘New Town’ redevelopment of Hemel Hempstead is daunting for all involved. This film, produced by the industrial shelving company Dexion, seeks to assure its staff that a new life for their families outside London is a step into a modern age.

Shot over the second half of 1952, this film provides a visual record of life in the Hertfordshire town of Hatfield in the early 1950s including the heaving swimming pool and the delivery and assembly of pre-fabricated housing.

This film, commissioned by the Stevenage Development Corporation, takes an optimistic look at life in the original new town as citizens extol the town’s virtues as a great place to raise children and care for the elderly.

Made by local residents themselves, this film reflects on the modern success story of Basildon New Town, featuring amenities that would rival those left behind in London while benefiting from all this country-style living has to offer.

The third and last wave of new towns allowed for additional growth. In 1967 Peterborough Development Corporation was formed in partnership with the city and county councils to house London’s overspill population in new townships sited around the existing urban area. But will it make Peterborough a ‘better place’?

“The most exciting thing going on in Europe, if not the world”: welcome to Milton Keynes circa 1973 as town planners earnestly trumpet the logic and ambition behind the largest, and arguably the most famous, of the New Towns.

Thirty-five years after its designation as a New Town, Harlow’s residents reflect on its success as a ‘town of the future’ while architect-planner Frederick Gibberd laments the complications and barriers that prevented him from fully-realising his vision.