A man with a plan

When I read about Ed Balls’ plan, if Labour are elected, to build a 'wave' of new towns, I wondered whether the current nostalgia for all things 1963 had gone to his head. Or perhaps this was an extreme example of the two Eds’ intention to eradicate every trace of New Labour, and to unlearn the lessons of the wilderness years of the Eighties and early Nineties. Surely new towns were a feature of the unpopular Old Labourism that voters decisively rejected at the end of the Seventies, along with tower blocks, nationalisation and the closed shop?

In case you’re wondering whether I know whereof I speak, I should mention that my first full-time job was in Basildon, another was in Berinsfield (a planned ‘new village’ in the Oxfordshire countryside), I now live a few minutes from Stevenage, and for the past two decades I’ve worked in Milton Keynes, arguably the only new town that (sort of) works. All of these, except perhaps the last, are characterised by bleak and soulless centres, brutalist architecture, and large and isolating housing estates. What they lack are many of the things residents of ‘old’ towns take for granted: the informal bustle of street life, an attractive diversity of architecture in which the ancient jostles with the modern, buildings and spaces hallowed by tradition and collective memory, and the capacity for organic and spontaneous social, economic and cultural initiative. A recent story in our local paper reported that Stevenage is the ‘unhappiest’ town in Hertfordshire. To be sure, many of its social ills (a high unemployment rate, widespread drug and alcohol problems) are shared by a number of ‘old’ towns and cities, but surely they must be exacerbated by the depressing built environment and the legacy of soulless, centralised planning? Perhaps the most telling sentence in the report is the last: 'Being a new town, Stevenage might not have the established community networks to make people feel they belong, leading to alienation.' (This is despite the 'new' town having been there since 1946).

Another thing new towns tend to lack, though it’s difficult to talk about, particularly on the Left, is class diversity. The new towns of the Sixties were, by and large, one-class towns – working-class towns, in fact – unsurprisingly, since they were mostly intended as a means of clearing the decaying slum areas of London and other big cities, and offering their residents a better life in the country air. By contrast, ‘traditional’ towns tend to be marked by a vibrant social mix, from which everyone gains. Like it or not, in most communities it's those with economic, educational or cultural capital - the  middle classes, in other words - who keep the schools going, organise cultural events, attract higher-end shops and restaurants, and campaign to preserve the local environment. It’s probably the social diversity of Milton Keynes which accounts for it being one of the more attractive and popular of the new towns - which isn’t to overlook its negative aspects, such as the lack of streets you can actually walk along, its disadvantaged outlying estates, and the dire transport connections for anyone without a car.

The deliberately proletarian character of the Sixties new towns always had vaguely Soviet overtones, as did the council-run cultural centres and centrally-planned landscapes and public art works. Balls & co. might object that their new generation of new towns will learn from these past mistakes, and will go out of their way to attract a social mix, employ decent architects, and ensure good transport facilities. But that doesn’t get away from the basic problem with new towns, whether we’re talking about the windswept decay of Basildon or the consumer paradise of Milton Keynes: and that is that they are planned. Surely the main lesson from the new towns of the Sixties is that you can’t plan community, that it has to grown organically over time, and given the choice, most people would prefer to live in an unplanned traditional town, with its mixture of old and new, than in a centrally-planned new town where the government and local authority have preordained where and how you shall live, shop, and enjoy yourself.

When I posted about this story on Facebook and Twitter earlier today, a few commenters suggested that garden cities such as Welwyn and Letchworth provided examples of 'good' new towns and might offer a better model. However (and again, writing as someone who lives within a few minutes of both of the aforementioned places), I have to agree with Jane Jacobs, who was as hostile to the fantasies of Ebenezer Howard as she was to those of Robert Moses. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs described Howard's aim as 'the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge'.  I'm biased, of course, but I much prefer Hitchin, the old, diverse, attractive and constantly surprising town where I'm privileged to live, to either of its rationally-planned near-neighbours, whether the brutalist squares of Stevenage or the orderly avenues of Letchworth.

Prince of the New Age

Your thought for the day:

Nature, I would argue, reveals the universal essence of creation. Our present preoccupation with the individual ego, and desire to be distinctive, rather than “original” in its truest sense, are only the more visible signs of our rejection of Nature. In addition, there is our addiction to mechanical rather than joined-up, integrative thinking, and our instrumental relationship with the natural world. In the world as it is now, there seems to be an awful lot more arrogance than reverence; a great deal more of the ego than humility; and a surfeit of abstracted ideology over the practical realities linked to people’s lives and the grain of their culture and identity.

Who do you think said that? Some New Age guru, perhaps, addressing a gathering of the gullible? No, it's our future head of state (God help us), speaking to a meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects earlier this week. In his speech, Prince Charles argued for what he called 'organic' architecture and against the 'mechanical' fashions of modernity. His overall message seemed to be: modern world and cities bad, 'Nature' and rural life good.

It's all profoundly, and dangerously, conservative, valuing reverence for ''culture' and 'tradition' over original thinking, and the mystical collective over the free-thinking individual. What really sticks in the gullet (and explains how he gets away with it) is the Prince's cunning linkage of this woolly 'holism' to a phoney populism, in which he portrays himself (the hereditary wealthy landowner) as speaking up for 'communities' against professionals in thrall to new-fangled ideologies. 

Charles' revulsion from some of the worst of Modernist architectural experimentation - soulless Sixties housing estates for example - is widely shared. But the answer doesn't have to be a complete rejection of modernity, individuality and innovation in favour of some imaginary harmonious past. 

The Prince once expressed a desire, as monarch, to be a defender of all faiths, rather than just the Defender of Anglican Christianity. His speech this week, in which he espoused a vague traditionalism that seemed to be a boiled-down gloop mixing together elements from many different religions, gave us a glimpse of what this might mean. The thought of having to endure endless New Age sermons from King Charles III makes Rowan Williams' wishy-washy Anglicanism seem not half so bad after all...

Light versus dark blue

Coincidentally we found ourselves in Oxford last weekend and Cambridge the weekend before. Both cities have strong personal associations: I was a student at Cambridge in the mid-70s and worked in community education on the outskirts of Oxford in the mid-80s.

We were in Cambridge to see Peter Gill's production of The Importance of Being Earnest (which transfers to London in January), starring Penelope Keith as Lady Bracknell, and with a supporting cast that included Rebecca Night who recently achieved fame as the star of the BBC's Fanny Hill. It was an enjoyable production, though you could almost hear the disappointment in the audience at Penelope Keith's low key interpretation of the famous 'handbag' speech. Our reason for visiting Oxford was more mundane: to do a spot of early Christmas shopping.

The two visits, so close together, revived our old debate about which city we like best. I used to prefer Cambridge's small-town, semi-rural feel, by comparison with the more urban, semi-industrial atmosphere of Oxford. And I've always liked the way you can walk freely through the colleges in Cambridge, whereas Oxford's tend to be hidden away behind high walls and 'keep out' signs. But this longstanding preference was challenged when we lived and worked in Oxford in the '80s. We grew attached to the city and its surroundings: there's a certain magic when you drive through the 'canyon' on the M40 from London and see Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds spread out before you, a first glimpse of the West Country.

In fact, the two cities now feel remarkably similar, with their identical Borders bookstores and anonymous new shopping centres. Interestingly, on both visits we found ourselves eating in restaurants located in converted public institutions. In Cambridge we had lunch at Browns, in the old Addenbrookes Hospital building, and in Oxford we ate in Carluccios, one of a number of new eateries situated in the old prison: the Malmaison hotel, in the same complex, has even retained the bars on the windows.