ABSTRACT
The Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population (Barlow Commission, 1940) was the first – and some would say the only – attempt comprehensively to examine the processes leading to differential economic growth and population movement in Great Britain. The second generation of new towns reflected the pressure of a rising birthrate and the Tory government's late conversion to a belief in economic planning. The National Plan was destroyed by the deflation of 1966. During the latter part of the 1960s, the Town and Country Planning Association refined its position on the use of the New Towns Act. Its earlier emphasis on the need for an ever-larger programme of self-contained towns at some distance from the parent city, with its focus on the 'micro' problems of high density, high rise, etc., gave way to a 'macro' approach.
