There’s a joke that sums up the reputation that Britain’s largest new town has long been trying to shake. Q. What’s the difference between Milton Keynes and a yoghurt? A. A yoghurt has culture. Repeat this to someone from MK, as its busier residents like to refer to it, and they will tell you at some length why it’s wrong.
Mean-spirited commentators spent so long treating Milton Keynes as a punchline, in fact, that many of them seem to have missed the fact the place has been a huge success. It passed its population target of 250,000, set when first designated as one of the third and final wave of new towns back in 1967, around a decade back, and is now bigger than Norwich or Aberdeen. And despite the shameless pledge of its former Tory MP to protect its non-existent green belt, it’s still building. It’s also one of the few cities – a status it was officially awarded back in 2022 – to combine both high wages and relatively affordable family housing. That is probably not a coincidence.
Ministers seem to have noticed, even if no one else has. Last week Keir Starmer visited Milton Keynes to announce that his government had identified 100 possible sites for “the next generation of new towns”. The plan now is to pick 12 of them by the summer, then task regional development corporations with building them out. Loans from the taxpayer, used to buy land, would be recouped once it had been sold, at higher prices to private developers, and a share of the profits used to fund infrastructure.
Although the government is using the phrase “new towns”, most of them likely won’t be: they’ll instead be extensions of existing settlements, not so much new towns as new suburbs. That is a very different prospect from the 20th century equivalents, which were conscious efforts to move population out from overcrowded and bombed out inner cities, and which genuinely were new, or at least, significantly larger than the places they subsumed. Perhaps word of Milton Keynes’ success has spread farther than I thought.
Or perhaps something else is going on. Significantly increasing housing supply is going to require an increase in the land we build on. Perhaps “new towns” are a convenient way of repackaging a potentially unpopular greenfield development as a reassuring blast from the past – plus, of course, a signal that, so long as your town is not in the programme, your much-loved though horrible edgelands may yet be safe from the builders.
The political profile of the chosen sites, when announced, will be fascinating. Letting the market rip – to meet all that demand – would risk infuriating Nimbys everywhere. And so, new towns look like a way of consolidating the worst of the short-term electoral pain into a relatively small number of areas.
It is also, as decades of mean-spirited jokes about Milton Keynes suggest, a lot easier to build houses than it is to build places. (This is not the same as it being easy, of course.) In the half century or more since the new town programme formally concluded, there have been sizable new settlements or urban extensions that are new towns in all but name. Often, though, these have been overgrown housing estates, without any of the pubs or shops or other signs of urban life that once seemed to spring up organically: sometimes just houses on some cleaned up industrial wasteland and not a lot else. Residents started moving into Northstowe, a new dormitory town on a former RAF base eight miles north of Cambridge, back eight years ago. As of 2023, it didn’t have a single cafe or shop.
Such soullessness is not merely an inconvenience. The Local Trust has identified over 200 neighbourhoods that are not just deprived on the standard economic measures, but lacking in social infrastructure (meeting spaces, community organisations, digital and physical connectivity), too. Roughly a tenth of these “doubly disadvantaged” places are in new towns or similar overspill developments: a number way out of proportion to the share of Britain’s urban fabric these actually make up. Some of this can probably be credited to decades of economy-wide trends for people to live some miles from their jobs; some, we can blame on the decline of everything from church to trade unionism to pubs, all the things that once provided a measure of social glue.
None of which is to suggest the new towns plan is bad. But it does mean it needs to be done carefully. Even with the level of careful master planning that went into Milton Keynes, it took decades for it to develop its own culture and sense of place, and even then it had to buy in a football team from south London. Other new towns, not blessed with Milton Keynes’ scale or location or fame, have not done half so well.
In recent decades, Britain’s planning system picked up a nasty habit of dropping homes on the landscape based on where it’s least contentious to build, rather than where people actually want to live, and then assuming the market will plug the gaps. Very often, it hasn’t. Ministers should beware of history repeating.
[See more: Reform is very wrong about net zero]
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