Architects should rejoice that Britain’s latest new towns aren’t new towns at all

By Ben Derbyshire, chair at HTA Design, former RIBA president, and President of the London Forum.

I don’t generally play for laughs, but I got one anyway at Design West’s Arnolfini conference on Labour’s then-new housing plans when I urged the audience not to hold their breath waiting for the twelve promised new towns. We still haven’t finished the ones Richard Crossman began in the 1960s. As it turns out, we needn’t have worried because of the seven finally announced, all but one are not new towns at all, but much more sensible urban extensions.

Housing ministers seem unable to resist Ebenezer Howard’s romantic vision in the Garden City Movement of “restoring the people to the land” as the cure for social ills. Today’s half‑hearted imitations borrow only the rhetoric of garden cities, ignoring Howard’s business model in which land value uplift was captured and reinvested in the community, and are built in unsuitable locations – disused airfields and power station sites wherever government happens to own land.

Urban extensions, by contrast, are a far more rational strategy, even if they come with more local opposition than isolated rural sites. They can plug into existing infrastructure, reinforce the viability of shops and services, and achieve real sustainability – if designed at higher densities, on biophilic principles and with proper walking and cycling connections. Poundbury in Dorchester and New Addington in Cambridge show what can be achieved when design quality is taken seriously from the outset.

The government’s promise of “well‑connected new communities” with “homes, jobs, schools, green space and transport links planned from the start” is, of course, the bare minimum. These phrases seem intended to head off public anxiety rooted in memories of new town blues and early social isolation. But reassurance is not the same as delivery, and here lies the danger.

Despite the abolition of CABE and the Office for Place, the government does still have sound design guidance. The recently published draft Design and Placemaking Planning Practice Guidance – derived from the National Model Design Code developed under Andy von Bradsky’s leadership – is the best we’ve had since the Urban Design Compendium. But guidance, no matter how good, achieves nothing if it is optional, inconsistently applied or ignored. And without clear national leadership on design, local authorities are left under-resourced, housebuilders default to lowest‑effort plotting and standards slip.

That is why longstanding colleagues, including von Bradsky, and I have published Placemaking NOT Plotting – a timely intervention calling for modest but effective changes to the planning system. Not another upheaval but six practical steps that link demonstrable design quality to a faster, more reliable approvals process. The report was initially commissioned by members of the House of Lords for use in scrutinising legislation and developed alongside civil servants at MHCLG to explore mechanisms for improving quality. It is, in essence, a recovery plan for design leadership in England.

It proposes that the lower‑density greenfield extensions that will supply much of our future housing cannot deliver sustainable, well‑connected neighbourhoods if they continue to be designed through speculative “plotting” – a method that prioritises the sales value of individual homes over the character and function of the neighbourhood. Disjointed geometries, over‑engineered roads and car‑dependent layouts are not accidents, but the output of a system optimised for plot value, not place value.

Placemaking is the alternative: a holistic approach that considers layout, density, mix of uses, movement networks, social and green infrastructure and long‑term stewardship as a single, coherent proposition. The recommendations in our report show how national guidance could be given real weight; how masterplans and design codes could be required earlier; how design review could be embedded; and how compliance could be rewarded with quicker, more predictable approval. This is not about adding process – it is about replacing uncertainty with clarity, raising standards without slowing delivery and ensuring communities see real benefits rather than familiar sprawl.

In our response to the recent MHCLG design consultations, we urged government to build on the promising direction set out – but to go further, faster. What we now need is a new generation of street‑based urbanism that is landscape‑rich, biodiverse, mixed‑use and properly connected. The opportunity for a legacy of sustainable suburban development fit for the mid-21st century should not be wasted.

This article was first published in The Architects’ Journal