ABSTRACT
The importance of the Barlow Commission in the history of British urban and regional planning can never be overestimated. It was directly responsible for the events that led up to the creation of the whole complex postwar planning machine during the years 1945–1952. The particular contribution of the Barlow Commission to understanding and treating the problem was this: it united the national/regional problem with another problem, the physical growth of the great conurbations, and presented them as two faces of the same problem. The 1920s and 1930s had witnessed an intense debate between opposing forces either advocating new housing development in greenfield locations, or the protection of the countryside. The New Towns Act of 1946 passed into law with remarkable speed soon after the Reith Committee’s final report in order to expedite the designation of the first of the new communities.
