Lessons from the new towns

New Ash Green

New Ash Green is a village built from scratch in the Kent countryside. Stylish ‘modern’ architecture, harmonious landscaping and residence societies – not to mention its village scale – set it apart from the New Town developments that typify Britain’s post-war building programme.

But the main difference between New Ash Green and its bigger cousins (it was only ever intended to provide homes for around 6,000) is the fact that it was conceived and built by a private firm, Span Developments, and its consultant architect, Eric Lyons & Partners.

It was an ambitious idea. Span’s 1967 publicity brochure declared ‘this village is planned as a “whole” place created for Twentieth Century living and providing for Twentieth Century people’s needs’, and it appealed in the first instance to the baby boomer generation. ‘It was the 1960s,’ says Patrick Ellard, a long-term resident and Span aficionado. ‘People were a little bit more open-minded and adventurous, especially where modern architecture was concerned.’

For the time, the architecture was strikingly modern and indeed it still is. Learning from smaller schemes he had designed for Span, Lyons developed new methods of construction that would allow for the provision of a number of house types for a variety of users – from young couples to large families. The planning was innovative too: footpaths and roads are removed from each other and pedestrian routes arranged to encourage villagers to interact.

Walk along the paths of brushed aggregate in New Ash Green and you’ll find neat, modest homes characterised by big windows, warm brick courses and timber cladding. Arranged in clusters, they nestle comfortably in a landscape of lush green grass, mature trees and colourful shrubbery. The paths wind in and out, up and down, linking the homes to communal spaces: greens, the local school, the shopping area, a community hall.

Remarkably, despite a footprint of 429 acres, Span only ever intended to build on 190 acres. Space – communal and private – was considered vital to New Ash Green’s success.

A number of financial and political factors, however, conspired to stifle the vision and Span withdrew from the project. In 1971 Bovis stepped in and continued to develop the village, albeit along more commercial lines: space standards, material specifications and landscaping were all cut back.

Ellard says that despite the change in focus, resident societies were able to enforce standards regarding the character of the development (particularly in the use of materials and the clustering of house types) so the early Bovis sections of New Ash Green respect the original vision in essence. Later developments however, which continued until the nineties, were less respectful.

Furthermore, the shopping and community zones were never fully realised and over time they have deteriorated and the shopping zone is in particular need of attention. Nearby Bluewater has been blamed for its demise.

Nevertheless, new thinking on sustainable communities could yet signal a revival of New Ash Green, which today is more of a dormitory rather than a working village. Denis Minns, a young surveyor with Bovis at the time of New Ash Green’s second phase of construction, says: ‘New Ash Green looked forward to ways in which design and construction can serve community. Perhaps it is time to look again at the new village in the countryside concept’.

P Read Denis Minns’ essay on New Ash Green at www.construction-manager.co.uk

Milton Keynes

While most towns and cities are developing their brownfields, creating loft-style apartments in the process, few are able to find room for more spacious housing types – those aimed at young families for example, where a house, not a flat, with some garden space is the ideal. In Milton Keynes, the UK’s most successful New Town, the problem is reversed: there’s plenty of land, but a city centre is lacking. As the head of the council’s planning and transport, David Hackforth, puts it: ‘Milton Keynes is unlike any other city in the UK.’

Forty years old this year, ‘Keynes’, as it’s known locally, was an expanse of land stretching between Bletchly in the south and Wolverton in the north in 1967. Its population was 60,000. Today it is home to more than 220,000 and is still growing.

Construction of Milton Keynes began in 1970, the first three years being largely consigned to planning, within zones designated as residential and industrial that formed a patchwork of squares that over the following decades have been ‘filled in’. A grid pattern of roads was established and linear parks following existing river valleys were created. And thousands of trees were planted.

Hackforth explains why the city centre was neglected: ‘The centre of the town was not developed at the start because there were existing centres in both Bletchley and Wolverton.’

The new town centre only became recognisable as a usable place in the late 1970s when its shopping centre opened in 1979, at the time the largest covered centre in Europe at 1m sq ft. As the city centre emerged over the years, it also became an attractive proposition for workers, especially those commuting to the city. So now, despite the wide open spaces still available within the city boundaries the council has turned it attention to brownfield development.

‘It’s only in the past 10 years that we’ve started to have a city centre where people might want to live,’ says Hackforth. ‘But it’s still a small proportion of our housebuilding output and we’re not talking about very high-density developments.’

Milton Keynes’ masterplan has allowed for this flexibility. It has not been difficult to re-plan areas, despite the original vision being for car-dependent families living in individual dwellings. This flexible approach extends to land use as well. Hackforth says: ‘Today, the city centre is double the size of the original masterplan. And we can change the land uses according to circumstances. For example, some of the areas that were originally expected to be for employment ended up being housing.’

He adds that much of the city’s success is down to lessons learned from the first wave of post-war New Towns such as Stevenage and Harlow. ‘We have a mixed economy and we don’t rely on London for any kind of service provision. Harlow, for example, suffered when the cold war ended as much of its industry was aerospace related.’

Milton Keynes is now taking a lead in eco-policy too. Its building standards are set higher than the those of the Code for Sustainable Homes. But there is one thorn in this New Town’s side – public transport. ‘It’s not good,’ admits Hackforth. ‘Milton Keynes was designed with the concept of unrestricted car use and as a consequence it is quite difficult to operate buses on a commercial basis.’ Despite the transport challenge, Hackforth is more than upbeat about his city. ‘It’s probably the most successful example of planned development anywhere in the world,’ he says.

Cumbernauld

For those of a certain generation, Gregory’s Girl – a teen romance movie from the late 1970s – captures the happy innocence of adolescent life in the suburbs of Cumbernauld and certainly the film’s young stars exude a lightness that suggests that where they live is a fun place to be.

Strange then, that today’s Cumbernauld residents should vote for its demolition in the Channel 4 TV show of the same name. Actually, residents are happy with their homes, it’s just the town centre that rankles. It’s a battered and graffiti-covered concrete megastructure accessed by ramps and dank stairwells. It’s daunting in scale, alien in form and, well, it looks pretty ugly. And to think that back in the day it was hailed as the future – so much so that it garnered several international awards, most notably from the American Institute of Architects, which in 1967 described it as, ‘the most significant contribution to the art and science of urban design in the western world’. So where did it all go wrong?

Cumbernauld was conceived as a truly experimental project. Making use of the location, a hill east of Glasgow, it was decided to build the modern equivalent of a medieval hillside town with rigidly segregated traffic and pedestrian routes and footpaths leading directly to the centre. Unlike the other new towns though, Cumbernauld was conceived as a high-density town achieved, initially, by a tighter clustering of the housing zone, and by cramming together the different activities of the town centre in a single, so-called ‘megastructure’ block designed by project architect Geoffrey Copcutt.

Hugh Wilson, the town’s chief architect and planning officer, commenting in the 1970s after the town had been conceived, said: ‘Cumbernauld’s planning concept was not just the most advanced and daring piece of post-war architecture in Scotland, but also made a decisive contribution to international debates, by showing that there could be greater mixture and liveliness of activities without giving up the ideal of building community.

So the town, as built, became a magnet for overseas visitors.’

Within a few years, however, the vision had soured, the megastructure was left unfinished and planned functions in the centre were cut. Hilltop locations in rainy, windy Scotland soon revealed their drawbacks too. Retailers were turned off by the rapidly decaying megastructure and gradually, residents too turned their back on the town.

Changes to local authority boundaries have also hampered Cumbernauld’s fortunes, as has a planning department wary of taking steps to revive the town’s fortunes. Instead, it has opted for a the low-cost shed approach and has overseen the erection of a new shopping mall next to the city centre which, while as bland as bland can be, meets the town’s retail needs.

Gordon Murray, of GM+AD architects, is a passionate supporter of the original vision and believes the town’s centre has been harshly judged: ‘The Cumbernauld megastructure was never allowed to develop a rationale of continual change. The clarity of the original idea has been lost in a series of corrosive interventions which enveloped it with layer after layer of meaningless retail concepts. Understanding it now is an archaeological exercise.’

Even by the late 1970s, when Gregory’s Girl was being filmed, the town centre was a mess. No surprises then, that the megastructure, unlike the well-conceived housing, didn’t make it to the silver screen.