Will new towns repeat the same mistakes of high-rise housing?

As Basildon prepares for its 60th birthday, its critics fear that crucial lessons will be lost in the £9bn Thames Gateway project
Show Queen
Mrs Barbara Brady, 'Town Show Queen' of Basildon, Essex, with her two daughters. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

The empty crisp packets blowing through Basildon's Town Square - two facing rows of concrete shops - catch against Bob Fisher's feet as he points to the top of the 1960s tower block standing over us. "I've been on the roof," he says. "It's scary. There was nothing to stop you falling, because in those days they didn't care about health and safety, but now it's all barred off to stop jumpers." The 15-storey building is one of Basildon's landmarks, placing it at the start of the new Basildon Heritage Trail. Fisher was the photographer for the trail, which will open next year to mark Basildon's 60th anniversary; the town having been officially created, by an act of parliament, on 4 January, 1949.

Britain's new towns, built out of little but hope and green fields during the 1940s and 1960s, were the postwar governments' answer to the problem of a booming population in need of housing - a problem very much back on the political agenda. Now, as they reach either their 40th or 60th anniversaries after being roundly criticised for decades as faintly Stalinist concrete failures, the new towns have become a cautionary tale for - and part of - the government's strategy for building three million new homes by 2020. But many commentators are warning that we are about to repeat the mistakes of half a century ago, creating more soulless settlements of high-density, low-quality homes where people simply won't want to live.

Many of the houses will be provided by mass building schemes such as the £9bn Thames Gateway plan, which will include 160,000 homes in new communities along a 40-mile corridor from East London into Kent and Essex. The government is presenting the project as a vision of towns in years to come, regenerating an economically depressed region. But its own favourite architect, Lord Rogers, recently told the House of Lords: "There is something wrong when the Thames Gateway - Europe's biggest regeneration project - is still peppering the banks of the beautiful River Thames with shoddy, Toytown houses and Dan Dare glass towers. I fear that we are building the slums of tomorrow."

Property developer Sir Stuart Lipton, deputy chairman of Chelsfield Partners, added his voice to the criticism, telling the Thames Gateway Forum that the project is at a crossroads: "Will this be one of the biggest projects in UK history that has been dumbed down by Noddy architecture?" If it goes wrong, it could end up with "cheap" and "isolated" estates lacking facilities, he explained.

These are precisely the criticisms that were levelled at most new towns. As Owen Hatherley, architecture writer for the New Statesman, says: "The new towns suffered from the same issues as 1960s tower blocks: they were built on the cheap and stuffed full of poor people; and the idea that people stop being poor because of what buildings you put them in is a myth."

Some 1960s towns are themselves to be an integral part of the urban expansion. Under the sustainable communities plan, Milton Keynes will supposedly become a model for sustainable development - this in a town usually criticised as a Stepford suburbia ruled by cars where even the cows are made of concrete.

The town's population will double to more than 350,000 in the next 15 years, probably making it the 10th largest conurbation in the land. It will mean an end to Milton Keynes's low-density nature in favour of the kind of high-density homebuilding that many fear will characterise British towns from now on.

The "sustainability" plan is itself a controversial idea. "Trying to make Milton Keynes sustainable is a mug's game," says Hatherley. "It was built for the car. And if in the next 100 years we develop a society without the car, Milton Keynes will be obsolete."

Michael Edwards, of the University College London school of planning, was one of the original architects of Milton Keynes, believing then it would be a "vision of the future". Nowadays, when describing the town he helped design, he uses other words: "disaster" for one. In 2001 he published a paper entitled "What went wrong at Milton Keynes?", which serves as a caution to current planners that what looks good on paper can be less pleasing in bricks and mortar.

In it he explained: "In modern jargon MK could be considered a success in terms of an ill-defined 'sustainability': certainly there is a great deal of biomass and urban wildlife. On the other hand the design as built does not 'sustain' local shops or other services nearly as well as it should, helping to 'sustain' a car-dependent way of life." Towns modelled on Milton Keynes run a substantial risk of suffering the same problems.

"As I said in that paper," Edwards explains now, "some big mistakes were made, not least the obsession with the car. It's fashionable among the architectural fraternity to be rather rude about the new towns because they have boxy little houses of a monotonous kind, but we had a vision that these were going to be the towns of the future; in some it was a sensible vision, in some it was a short-sighted vision."

He does not hold out much hope for the government's planned new communities: "They've pitched it all far too small. It's extremely difficult to make towns of 20,000 people the slightest bit self-sufficient. Inevitably people will be commuting to get to some decent shops or the nearest Marks & Spencer."

The original new towns also often uprooted rural communities whose pleas and objections were ignored. While the government promises none of the building will be on green belt land, it admits some will, once more, be on green-field land beyond the current boundaries of some towns. The distinction is a fine one that does not reassure campaign groups. Kate Gordon, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, says: "With the original new towns, there were existing communities that were decanted and destroyed. I hope we don't make the same mistakes we made 60 years ago, but there is a real danger of that happening.

"With so much land now allocated for housing, developers will cherry-pick - they will abandon some areas and go for where they can make the most money, which tends to be more attractive areas and the green fields. When that happens, the cities don't work and the countryside is lost."