Crawley, Sussex: An English New Town

CRAWLEY, SUSSEX: AN ENGLISH NEW TOVi7N Norman J. W. Thboweb University of California, Los Angeles One of the most significant and controversial developments in Britain since World War II has been the creation of fifteen new towns. These were brought into being by national legislation—the New Town Act of 1946. Under this act Parliament initially approved a sum of fifty million pounds which will probably be increased to a total of ten times this amount before the work is complete. Each new town is administered by a so-called development corporation with a staff of architects, managers, and legal advisors. The corporations have wide powers to discharge their duties and are responsible to ministers in the central government. When "balanced" communities have been achieved the assets and responsibilities of the new towns will be transferred to local authorities. Principal reasons for the development of the new towns were: to prevent the unrestricted spread of large cities by means of planned decentralization, to facilitate urban renewal in older centers and to accommodate the overspill of population from the metropolitan areas. Eight new towns now ring Fie. 1.—Locations of English New Towns with metropolitan areas of London and Glasgow shaded. 21 London at an average distance of twenty-five miles from the center of the capital, one is in the Midlands and two are in the northeast of England. Three new towns are sited in the Central Lowlands of Scotland and another is in South Wales. According to the provisions of the Act of 1946 the new towns are to be completely planned communities controlled in size, form, and character and to be as self-contained as possible. The intention is that the residents shall live and work in pleasant surroundings without the necessity of commuting long distances. Although most of the new towns are designed to take the surplus population of large cities, they are not intended to be dormitory towns and, in nearly all of them, industrial sections have been developed. Planned communities are by no means a new phenomenon in Britain. Winchelsea in Sussex was laid out on a rectangular plan by order of King Edward I following the inundation of an earlier town in 1288. There was considerable interest in planning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries particularly, when some of the most beautiful British towms and parts of towns were constructed. These good examples were largely ignored in the nineteenth century during a period of rapid industrialization, speculative building, and urbanization. During the nineteenth century the percentage of people living in large towns in Britain rose from 20 per cent in the first decade to 80 per cent in the last. Houses for industrial workers were built in monotonous rows and packed as closely as possible to the factories and mines. A reaction to this situation set in at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century when a number of planned company towns and two garden cities were built. Bournville, near Birmingham, which was designed to house the workers of the Cadbury chocolate factories by the Quaker owners of that firm, is a notable example of a planned industrial community. The garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, north of London, arose through the pioneering efforts of Ebenezer Howard and his followers and, unlike the new towns, were constructed through private enterprise. Welwvn, which has been studied by planners from all over the world during its fortv or so years of existence, is now being extended as a new town under the Act of 1946. Although these earlier examples were not without influence, the immediate cause of the creation of Britain's post World War II new towns was the publication of Sir Patrick Abercrombie's historic, Greater London Plan 1944. Sir Patrick proposed the development of a number of communities beyond a