In the 1950s, following the New Towns Act of 1946, a number of new towns on the outskirts of larger cities sprung up around the UK. After the war there was an appetite for healthy, fresh environments free from the trauma of bombing and evacuation. These towns became not sites of affluence, with low-income people contained within the cities, as had been hoped by many, but the opposite: “The accidental achievement of New Towns,” writes Colin Ward, “was to provide rented housing for non-affluent outward migration.” But housing swiftly became an issue in these towns as populations grew – as did employment. “Some time next century, a bunch of amateurs will have to reinvent the New Town idea.”
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