From Talk to Town: Co Creating the Future of New Towns Through Engagement

Introduction

New Towns are equal parts architectural endeavour and social experimentation.
They need to strike the balance between meeting the housing needs of people in the places they are most in demand, and providing the social infrastructure and networks that create a sense of community and belonging in the places in which they live.

Meaningful engagement is the backbone of everything we do, putting people at the heart of the places we create. We believe people have a right to contribute to decisions that will affect them, and that stories from lived experience can dramatically enhance the form and function of the places and spaces we design.

We work with clients to help them plan for infrastructure investment over the long term, and to understand the needs of a place before undertaking feasibility studies. A collaborative approach with local communities helps to build trust, creating a sense of ownership that has the power to unite communities and deliver truly impactful projects.

Background

Estimates from the Centre for Cities put the number of homes ‘missing’ from current stock at 4.3m (1), and the consequences of this have put housing near the very top of the political agenda. The shortage of housing stock has meant that the price of the average home has risen by roughly 50% in the past decade (2).

This has been exacerbated further by economic issues, resulting in houses becoming less and less affordable for people trying to enter the housing market, while the pace of construction of new houses has been unable to satisfy the sheer scale of demand.

On winning the general election in July 2024, the Labour government proposed changes to the planning systems, set out funding commitments in the Spending Review and tasked combined authorities with developing their own strategies to fulfill the housing needs of their local constituencies. They announced that there will be new strategic planning mechanisms to allow devolved governments in England to respond to the challenges unique to their
regions.

The government also established the New Towns Taskforce, which conducted a review of all ‘New Town’ programmes since the post war period, including the first and second generations of New Towns, garden cities and eco towns.

Informed by this, the Taskforce announced a set of principles that would guide how and where the next generation of New Towns would be delivered, and the component parts that would be required in their development.

These principles include:

Even more than that, stakeholder engagement holds the key to achieving what many New Towns of the past have been missing: an authentic sense of place and culture. New Towns are equal parts architectural endeavour and social experimentation.

They need to strike the balance between meeting the housing needs of people in the places they are most in demand, and providing the social infrastructure and networks that create a sense of community and belonging in the places in which they live.

This is, of course, for the advantage of the people living in these places, but there are also more pragmatic reasons for doing so, given the relationship between demand and rising land value.

The issue here is how infrastructure can be put in place which nurtures social and cultural life to flourish, in places that have not had the same historic and social evolution from which their identity and meaning can form.

This will be critical if the next generation of New Towns is to be a success, from both a cultural and an economic perspective. After all, the issues of New Towns of old have proved expensive to rectify, and the cultural aspects of new places will serve as major incentives to attract the new residents and businesses that will make them economically viable in the future.

Consequently, it is important at this point in time to reflect on the New Towns of the past, to understand:

– How and why their successes and failures came about

– The role of engagement in defining the ‘how’

– Why embedding the people who will live in these places in the decision making process can be linked to better outcomes

The chequered past of New Towns

New Towns face a number of legacy issues. As things stand, they do not have a great reputation across the UK. The term can even be considered a pejorative in certain contexts.

Generations of New Towns have been established around the UK in waves, with very few clear success stories among them. They have been seen as characterisations of British suburban decay, of mismanagement, soullessness and persistent social challenges.

For example, a lack of infrastructure planning often led to an overdependence on personal car ownership (5). Reliance on specific industries, or even individual companies, has left whole communities at the mercy of economic shocks (6).

There have been some major cultural accomplishments to come out of New Towns, but they all too often emerge from them despite the cultural infrastructure in place, not because of it.

Housing quality has become a major issue, as local authorities have often found maintenance to be increasingly uneconomical. As a result, housing estates within New Towns have been demolished across the country, despite being built less than a generation ago.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many local authorities have gone back to the drawing board and undertaken new masterplanning exercises to align New Towns with the needs of the 21st century, which is often an extremely expensive exercise.

There is a collective need to get this exercise right first time and, looking back to the principles outlined by the government in February 2025, there is a clear need for engagement to sit at the centre of the next generation of New Towns.

However, as he departed the train in Stevenage, Silkin was met by an angry crowd, holding signs and demanding explanations over planning decisions regarding the future of Stevenage.

The use of compulsory purchase orders had displaced people from their homes, with many to be rehoused in tower blocks. The decisions had been dictated from above, and the combination of the new architecture and ‘totalitarian’ mode of planning had led some local residents to cover a sign at the town’s train station with the name ‘Silkingrad’.

His response to the crowd was characteristic of the mechanisms of town planning in the post war years, responding to the admonition with: “It’s no good you jeering. It’s going to be done” (8). That did not prevent legal challenges from residents and farmers, however – the ultimate completion of phased development in Stevenage delayed substantially through long and expensive court battles between the government and local organisations. Despite the unpopularity of the whole enterprise, it ploughed on regardless.

Controversy in the first years of New Towns was not confined to Stevenage. In Crawley, compulsory purchase orders were used by the development corporation for shops that would form the new high street – then to be leased back to existing owners or demolished with a poorly defined compensation policy.

This provoked impassioned responses from locals, complicating further development already hindered by labour and materials shortages and arguments over design.

There were, of course, some successes in the early years of New Towns. But by the first decades of the 20th century, each of the New Towns had applied to central government for regeneration funding, the overall design and quality of build presenting issues that required immediate and often costly remediation. Some New Towns had made such applications just 20 years into their existence.

Would engagement have helped in this situation?

It undoubtedly would have, not just in terms of the composition of the towns themselves, but also in terms of the time and cost repercussions of locals taking various bodies involved with the project to court. It could well have helped to secure longevity in the towns, most of which are now in dire need of a refresh. So, why didn’t they?

The primary reason lies with the government of the day and the development corporations responsible for the New Towns – the powerhouses behind the first generation of New Towns.

There were certainly motivations in holding all decision making powers around New Towns centrally at this point in time, given the scale of the ambitions associated with the enterprise and the speed required of it. But engagement with the local population was regarded as a courtesy, and the corporations were under no obligation to consult the local population at any point in town planning. They were answerable to parliament, and parliament alone. But this meant that the people living in or moving to the town did not have the opportunity to shape the places in which they would live and work.

Cultural cohesion could well have secured the longevity absent from this first generation of New Towns, but the opportunity was missed in defining the life that would exist between the houses and promenades of the masterplan.

Redditch and Dawley New Town, later renamed Telford, was designated to manage overspill from Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Washington in Tyne and Wear was intended to simultaneously provide new housing for the nearby coal mining industry, and to attract young families working in Newcastle and Sunderland. Runcorn and Skelmersdale were designed to manage overspill from Liverpool.

It was a time of lofty ambition and one in which the functional needs of residents of all stripes could be balanced with the aesthetic and conceptual.

The 1960s was a time in which architects were keen to embrace the lessons of the modernist school, break away from the image of the New Towns of the 1940s and 1950s, and create something laudable in the architectural world.

In the words of the architectural planner from Runcorn Development Corporation, Arthur Ling, on his initial notions for how New Towns should be shaped: “The starting point for any new town project must be human needs and the aim must be to foster the establishment of an integrated community in which all sections of society are anxious to play their part.”

There would be a delicate balance between “urbanity and landscape, between public and private transport and between utility and amenity.” (9) Both Runcorn and Skelmersdale were envisioned along similar principles. Urban traffic would be eradicated using perimeter ring roads, with public transportation and pedestrian walkways linking peripheral housing estates with each town’s commercial core.

The high rise tower blocks that often personified the last generation of New Towns would be ditched, in favour of modern, aesthetically pleasing estates in which all residents would have immediate access to outside space. Convenience and entertainment would be the focal points of the towns, with shopping centres and promenades featuring as the beating heart of these new communities.

While decisions around planning had been, to an extent, democratised, with local authorities having a much stronger say in eventual planning decisions, engagement remained at the behest of individual development corporations. The engagement undertaken had little impact on how the towns were formed.

In Runcorn, only the people who had applied for a house through the development corporation were consulted about their hopes and expectations for the town. This mainly concerned what distinctions and similarities they might expect when moving to a smaller, newer town when compared to their experiences of urban life in Liverpool.

Their new homes were described to them, as well as how the transportation networks and state of the art shopping facilities would provide convenience and entertainment, and how local industry was there to provide the livelihood on which their family could depend – only a stone’s throw from their new house.

However, there was very little room for manoeuvre. Rather, it was an opportunity for prospective residents to listen to the benefits that Runcorn had to offer them, according to the development corporation. Moreover, there was a risk that asking too many questions might get in the way of their new housing prospects.

What lessons can be taken from engagement in the second wave of New Towns?

The examples of Runcorn and Skelmersdale hold valuable insights into how engagement can be leveraged to give places longevity.

While it is very unlikely to have done anything to stem the tide against the economic issues that ravaged the country in the late part of the 1970s, it could have played a role in developing the infrastructure and sense of community that could have provided a useful safety net, to provide the formula that would allow a community to withstand the social atrophy that occurred when jobs were lost in towns with no tangible sense of self.

New Towns provide incredibly interesting experiments in how consent can be reached in spaces where the new mixes with the old, but where the time is not available to allow the organic emergence of culture. Real and meaningful social infrastructure would have been key in these communities, where the signs of a lack of cohesion were glaringly evident even before industrial decline to give people the facilities and forums to develop a collective sense of self, of belonging and direction.

That was a lost opportunity in the second generation of New Towns, where engagement was simply used as a marketing tool for the places architects had in mind.

It also begs the question of who New Towns are for, and to understand engagement as a tool that can be leveraged to find a balance between housing, the needs of incoming residents and the preservation of a unique and local culture.

Finding a balance between these elements is key in developing the sense of stewardship – to give residents the ability to shape the development of, and look after, the places in which they live and work.

What distinguishes Milton Keynes from previous New Towns is decision making processes behind these expansions. It would no longer be the development corporation alone dictating the terms of what the town would be. Now the people living there would have a direct and tangible voice in the evolution of their town.

The profile of the main designer behind the town, Baron Richard Llewelyn-Davies, offers some insight into Milton Keynes and how it developed. He was professor of architecture at Bartlett School of Architecture, part of University College London (UCL), and was part of a growing body of academics that advocated for an inseparable relationship between architectural design and the social sciences.

This approach was adopted by the first chairman of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, Jock Campbell, Lord Campbell of Eskan. Planning was to be informed at every stage by consultation, with the desire that “we must build a city for the people, with people” involving, “where fruitful,” social scientists. Campbell’s vision for Milton Keynes became: “The intention was not to prescribe a way of life, but offer opportunities for residents to choose and build a life for themselves.” (12)

Milton Keynes was designed to couple the need for housing with personal liberty and social development. Social infrastructure would sit at the heart of the masterplan, as would aspects of choice, from leisure to entertainment and employment.

The city would mirror the advantages of rural towns, planting hundreds of thousands of trees to provide green spaces for the city’s inhabitants. All of this would be underpinned by the building of a ‘community’ , providing the social fabric that would direct the future of the city.

A number of projects which occurred after the initial development of Milton Keynes encapsulate this approach well. For example, initiatives to improve access to outside spaces in the town as it grew built on the initial masterplan concepts of the recreational landscape, linear parks, and open spaces. The amalgamation of villages onto the periphery of the town was met with questions about how the town could be built in a way which adhered to the town’s founding principles, resulting in a system of ‘strings, beads and settings’ which would provide continuity of greenery throughout the town’s grid system to extensions of its boundary.

Social collectives and environmental groups were sought for this development to ensure that the vision matched the experiences and expectations of residents. Out of this grew the Greentown Group, which would spearhead the development of a new eco neighbourhood in Milton Keynes in the 1980s.

This highlights something different but equally important in the Milton Keynes model of development: that engagement could be a tool not just to test the water of local public opinion, but also to act as a platform from which special interest and community groups could become independent, self sustaining forces for the development of a town, based on the views and interests of the people living and working there. It is this sense of place stewardship that was largely absent from other New Towns, but which reflects a key reason that Milton Keynes continues to be regarded as one of the few real success stories in the history of New Towns.

This is not to say that Milton Keynes has been an unbridled success story. The initial plans for the town placed the focus of social interaction on individual neighbourhoods, creating a feeling of isolation from other residents in the town. But it is through adaptation, consultation, and iterative change that the town has struck the right balance between flexibility and longevity.

There was, of course, a commercial imperative to this, based on a unique funding model developed by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation and tied to land value. The corporation, in effect, bought land from the government at low prices, previously being designated as agricultural land. The increase in land value that came through developing an attractive housing option where residents could have a direct say in the development of their own community allowed the corporation to repay the government for the acquisition loans, but also to fund further expansion.

Not all New Towns in the third wave were successful to the same extent as Milton Keynes, despite the fact that according to the Centre for Cities, four of the five largest developments from this iteration were still the fastest growing in the UK, with both Peterborough and Milton Keynes growing by 15% or more from 2012 to 2022 (13). However, there is a distinction to be made here between towns expanded to manage overspill from larger cities, as Telford, Peterborough and Warrington are, and Milton Keynes – planned to be not just a new town, but a new city.

There was a central masterplan and vision around which future developments in Milton Keynes would be made, and which consistently draw back to the initial principles and vision for the town. This gives Milton Keynes something other towns of its generation do not have – a way to expand and grow that is planned, managed, and puts the building of self serving and self sufficient communities at its core.

It is not just an expansion to increase population, but serves as a blueprint model for how engagement and consultation can be used to foster a sense of community, to increase flexibility and offer the longevity that allows for further expansion in the future.

By 2020, there were to be ten of these new ‘eco towns’ – carbon neutral communities built on government owned land, capable of generating their own electricity, growing their own food and serving as the model for self sufficient housing developments that would create housing bandwidth in the greenest way possible.

By late 2008 that dream was all but over. The financial crash had put the brakes on investment, creating an atmosphere where critical levels of risk aversion chipped away at capital investment.

The bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble hit the revenues of construction companies, coupled with new financial obligations that scared off all but those with the very deepest pockets from the mortgage market.

On top of that, the government’s decision making process on where these towns would be located created nothing short of a backlash in neighbouring communities. The fact that it was government owned land meant the government could sidestep its own regional planning regulations in the selection of locations for these towns.

It would give the green light to local development authorities to press ahead with developing these new communities, and incentivise developers to invest in the energy and transport infrastructure to bring them to fruition. The lack of public consultation in this process caused fury in many of the neighbouring towns and villages.

Of the 15 locations put forward for these new eco towns, nine had received petitions in protest, based on their proposed locations. Without major transport investment, the people living in them would continue to rely on private transport on a day to day basis, undermining the overall goal of becoming carbon neutral.

By 2009, all but four of the original 15 proposed sites for these new eco towns had been withdrawn. By the time of writing, only one – North West Bicester – has been built in line with the original planning procedure and vision outlined under Gordon Brown. The need for housing beyond the primarily private type offered by these towns pushed Eco Towns (and New Towns in general) down the pecking order as a solution to best tackle the issue, particularly as the government was confronted by a need for much higher levels of social and mixed tenure properties.

In the prime austerity years immediately following the 2008 financial crisis, the magnitude of large scale residential and placemaking projects was also considered too expensive a solution to meet this need for housing when compared to alternatives.

However, in this time, there was a much greater emphasis placed on engaging with stakeholders. Central government funding was regularly tied to strict requirements for engagement with tenants – both current and prospective – landlords, and those representing the demographic groups linked to new areas of residential development. The reasons, by this point, had become abundantly clear. There was mounting evidence showing the link between thorough, early engagement with relevant stakeholders and project outcomes, risk reduction, and time and cost savings, not to mention the social value gained and the advantages of co creation.

One of the large scale housing developments that was commissioned in this time was Northstowe. Nestled between two existing towns on the outskirts of Cambridge, Northstowe was developed on a range of ambitious principles, reflecting the shifts in thinking around what New Towns should become and the role they would serve – not just as a housing solution, but as an exercise in community building.

The principles emphasised the need for community self sufficiency, with healthcare, sport, retail and leisure all no further than 600m from any newly constructed household. The town would also serve as an exemplar of new environmentally conscious town planning, promoting local food production, energy efficiency and reduced reliance on cars through the development of a guided busway, linking the town with Huntingdon to the northwest and Cambridge to the south.