Few would call it fashionable but Milton Keynes is one of Britain’s biggest urban success stories. Some British cities have well-heeled residents, others affordable homes. The Buckinghamshire new town is almost unique in offering both, and one of the busiest retail centres in the region to boot.
To celebrate the Queen’s platinum jubilee in 2022, the town — created in 1967 from the merger of three smaller towns and more than a dozen villages — was awarded official city status. Given that it now contains more than a quarter of a million people, more than Norwich or Aberdeen, almost nobody laughed.
Now, the party overwhelmingly likely to provide the next British government wants to repeat the trick: Labour’s manifesto, published on June 13, promises “a new generation of new towns, inspired by the proud legacy of the 1945 Labour government”. The purpose of these new new towns would be much the same as the originals: to provide homes in a country that obviously doesn’t have enough. But it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the reasoning that led the Labour party to this particular solution is quite different.
In 1946, after all, when the sleepy Hertfordshire village of Stevenage was designated the first new town, the point of the exercise was to get people out of cities too polluted, too overcrowded or too recently bombed into cleaner, greener spaces. In 2024, though, exorbitant house prices tell us that cities are precisely where people want to live. Why, then, would a new government make new towns a cornerstone of its housing policy? At least partly, surely, because it concentrates the potential electoral pain. Over the past few decades, Britain has created a planning system in which it feels easier to create a settlement from scratch than to allow existing cities to grow.
For most of human history, cities have grown organically — gently at first, rather faster following the inventions of trams, trains and the internal combustion engine. In the interwar years, new suburbs spread across the green fields of England, and the county of Middlesex disappeared completely beneath a sea of brick.
Since the second world war, though, official policy in Britain has been to use a network of greenbelts to keep many within the footprint they already occupied, preventing towns from merging and encouraging the reuse of derelict brownfield land. The law creating the Metropolitan Green Belt that constrained the growth of London was introduced in 1938; the Town & Country Planning Act of 1947 enabled other settlements to follow suit, whether they were big (Birmingham, Manchester) or small (Lancaster, Burton-on-Trent).
By ensuring many cities remain in essence the same physical size they happened to be at around the time of the Korean war, this policy has contributed to housing shortages and pushed up prices. (In the late 1950s, the cost of land contributed about 25 per cent to the cost of new housing; by the mid-2010s, it was closer to 70 per cent.) It has also hit the economy by making it harder for people to move to where the jobs are.
Labour’s manifesto also talks of releasing “grey belt” land, a nifty bit of rebranding for poor-quality or brownfield land that has, mystifyingly, been protected from development. But few politicians from anywhere on the political spectrum have seriously talked about removing green belts altogether: anyone who did would surely lose.
In some ways, though, this is odd because there are plenty of other ways of preventing endless sprawl that don’t make it quite so hard to meet housing needs. Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London plan proposed using parkland as “a natural cut-off between [each district] and its neighbours”; green space would be accessible to everyone, rather than being relegated to the city’s fringes. The plan was never implemented.
Four years later, though, as Britain was passing the Town & Country Planning Act, Copenhagen was establishing its “Five Finger Plan”. The city would no longer be allowed to grow unplanned and indefinitely: its need for housing and commercial space would instead be met by five urban corridors stretching away from the urban core (the “palm”). Between would lie green “wedges”, ensuring land for agriculture and open space for recreation within easy reach of the new suburbs.
The rather pleasing symbolism of Copenhagen’s “hand” has in recent years been undermined by the introduction of a sixth finger, stretching across the island of Amager and across the Øresund Strait towards Malmö — but, nonetheless, it shows how a thoughtful planning system can balance the need for green space with the need to provide places to live.
3.7%Proportion of London’s greenbelt that would be lost under an Adam Smith Institute plan to build 1mn homes within walking distance of a train station
Such a plan, alas, seems unlikely to win converts in an electorate used to green belts. The closest the UK has come was the “Thames Gateway”, a Blair-era attempt to prioritise the industrial Thames Estuary for regeneration and development. That foundered for several reasons, not least the fact that, being low-lying land on the wrong side of the Thames Barrier, it’s at growing risk of flooding.
A more politically palatable idea may be found in “transit-oriented development”. A key element of the Copenhagen plan was that each “finger” followed an S-train commuter rail line to the central business district; while cities from San Diego to Hong Kong have introduced policies to ensure the densest provision of housing and other amenities is in areas around stations. Such policies don’t just maximise the vibrancy and walkability of the resulting communities: they minimise the need for cars.
This is something that surely could be usefully imported to the UK: a 2015 report from the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-tank, estimated that 1mn new homes could be built within walking distance of a railway station — a form of British transit-oriented development that would take up just 3.7 per cent of London’s greenbelt, leaving 96.3 per cent of it, an area many times the size of the city itself, untouched.
In some ways, it’s absurd Britain hasn’t already done this. The ASI report mainly concerned mainline stations but the expansion of London’s Tube in the early 20th century was in effect a real estate play, the new lines created as much to sell new homes as to transport passengers. Today, though, outer stretches of the Tube, on the extremities of the Metropolitan or Central lines, still run through agricultural land, while the British government recently spent £19bn on providing semi-rural stations in Berkshire and Essex with frequent trains to central London via the Elizabeth Line, without at any point pressing councils to use this space for housing. Whether Tube or rail, building besides existing commuter lines while protecting actual countryside is surely a no-brainer.
Another option for expanding built-up land within cities may, I fear, prove less popular with the readers of this newspaper: that is, to reconsider quite how much land Britain gives over to a little-played sport involving hitting balls with metal sticks. “The Golf Belt”, a 2021 report from architect Russell Curtis, found that the 94 golf courses in London between them occupied more space than the outer London borough of Brent, home to more than 330,000 people (fewer than 7,000 people can play on the courses at any one time). Given that golf courses are bad for biodiversity and walkers alike, this feels like a curious choice at a time of housing crisis. Rethinking it could provide homes for as many people as Milton Keynes, and still leave the capital’s golfers with a couple of dozen courses to choose from.
At any rate, the new government will need to do something about the supply of land for housing, and it’s by no means clear talk of grey belt and new towns will be enough. Milton Keynes, again, may be telling: despite the fact the city’s raison d’être was to provide housing, local campaigners have been recently up in arms about the threat further growth might pose to its “character”, while the Tory MP for the north of the city has been campaigning on a pledge to protect the city’s greenbelt. The funny thing is, it doesn’t have one.
Jonn Elledge is the author of “A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps” (Published by Wildfire)
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