ABSTRACT
Although the New Towns Programme was a policy of the 1945 Labour Government in direct response to the circumstances created by the Second World War, the New Towns did not come out of the blue. The origin of the campaign for their creation lies some fifty years earlier as a response to the way that Britain’s housing had developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The aim of producing homes and places that provided a better quality of life than those built in the Victorian and Edwardian era was a great social cause that mobilised both top-ranking politicians and activists on the ground.
