ABSTRACT
Although attention during reconstruction and renewal focused on the major cities, to which the New Towns ‘were only a small appendix’,2 the latter nevertheless offered the chance to see what might happen when architects were presented with a clean slate. This opportunity came in the 1950s when two separate groups of planners and architects came to work on schemes for New Towns: one was built and the other cancelled at the planning stage. Both schemes allowed their designers to look again at the design policies of the first generation of New Towns, designated between 1947 and 1950, and to reconsider the conventional handling of traffic, density and layout. Their reformulations led to striking departures from previous practice. Both devised plans that abandoned the typical cellular arrangement of neighbourhood units that had underpinned the Mark I schemes in favour of cohesion and compactness. They embraced commensurately higher densities than their predecessors, looked to modern design rather than back to Arts and Crafts or vernacular traditions, and even accepted limited use of multistorey buildings (Figure 7.1). Traffic planning also sharply diverged from earlier precedent. Pre-Buchanan and strongly influenced by American experience, their planners applied ideas for handling large throughputs of traffic to create a town engineered – a verb commonly applied at the time – for the motor age.3 They both also offered determinedly modernist town centres, known initially to their design teams as ‘Central Areas’ rather than town or city centres. These were envisaged as single multi-storey complexes, with car parks and service areas at ground level linked by stairs and lifts to shops, offices, leisure facilities and dwellings above.4 As originally designed, they gave rise to what still have claims to illustrate the most comprehensive vertical separation of pedestrians and vehicles seen in town centre
The earlier, and built, scheme was at Cumbernauld in Scotland. Cumbernauld, designated in late 1955, was Britain’s fifteenth New Town and the only one created in the 1950s. Occupying ‘an unpromising moorland ridge fifteen miles north-east of Glasgow’,5 it owed its rationale to the appalling housing problems facing Scotland’s largest city (see Chapter 5). Cumbernauld, however, was always much more than just overspill housing with requisite amounts of industry and services thrown in. Catching the flood tide of architectural innovation, the combined architecture and planning team in the Development Corporation had the time and freedom to pursue a plan contemporaneously described as ‘epochmaking’.6 As that plan evolved, it had a major impact on the team working on the second and unrealised scheme, intended for Hook in Hampshire. Unlike Cumbernauld, Hook was not part of the official New Towns programme, but a private New Town project for the London County Council. Initiated in 1958, the scheme had reached only concept planning stage before it was abruptly cancelled in 1960. As such, it would have remained little more than a minor footnote in New Towns history had it not been for the LCC’s decision to produce an extensive report to ensure that the effort invested was not completely wasted. The result was an extraordinary text that would explain better than any other available source the philosophy behind not only Hook but also Cumbernauld, from which its designers had drawn considerable influence.
