2016 sees the 70th anniversary of the 1946 New Towns Act being passed by Parliament. The wartime bombing of London led to the 1944 Greater London plan by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, which called for 8 new towns to built around London. The post war Labour Government responded by setting up the New Towns Commission, which considered how to put this into practice nationwide. The resulting legislation allowed the government to designate areas as new towns and create development corporations to oversee their building. The new towns were to have a population up to 60,000, house single families in low density housing and be created around neighbourhood centres featuring schools, shops and leisure facilities. 25 new towns were created by the act, five of them in Hertfordshire; Hatfield, Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead and the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn. Stevenage was the first of the ring of new towns built around London as originally recommended by the Abercrombie plan. Despite much opposition from residents of the small pre-existing town, Lewis Silkin, the housing minister, pushed through the plans for construction. Gordon Stephenson was the town's first chief architect, and along with Peter Shepheard, produced the town plan, including what would become Britain's first pedestrianised town centre. Leonard Vincent took over as chief architect in the early 1950’s and along with assistants like L.W. Aked, Clifford Holliday, D.P. Reay and E.C. Claxton designed many of the buildings that make up Stevenage today. Hatfield had boomed in the interwar years after the De Havilland factory opened in 1930. Architect Lionel Brett created the plan for the new town, placing it on the opposite side of the railway tracks to the old town. Brett (later Lord Esher) and his partner Kenneth Boyd, designed much of the early housing, starting in the Roe Green area. Their reputation suffered when one night in November 1957, 28 houses lost their roofs in high winds with over 60 others also suffering damage. Housing was expanded into the Oxlease estate from the end of the 1950s, with a variety of architects designing dwellings, like Basil Spence, Andrew Renton, Richard Sheppard and Fry & Drew. Maxwell Fry also oversaw the new town centre plan from 1968, an area which is currently being redeveloped Geoffrey Jellicoe drew up the plan for Hemel Hempstead, aiming to create "not a city in a garden, but a city in a park”. He planned the new town centre around water gardens, created by the River Gade. The administrative centre of the town was designed by the firm of Clifford Culpin and Partners, featuring the town hall, magistrates court, library and a health centre. Neighbourhood centres were designed as at other new towns with housing clustered around shops, medical facilities and churches. The first to be built was Adeyfield designed by HK Ablett, with Judith Ledeboer designing Bennetts End, and the firm of Fuller, Hall & Foulsham doing the same at Grove Hill. Ebenezer Howard's vision of garden cities had led to the established of Letchworth and Welwyn in the first part of the century, and influenced the idea of new towns. The garden cities themselves were now designated new towns, with their development corporations adding large housing estates to the established towns. Geoffrey Jellicoe planned the Grange Estate to the north of Letchworth town centre, which was built from 1947, and the Jackmans estate was built to the west in the 1960’s to plans by Associated Architects. In Welwyn, expansion occurred to the north and west of the town centre designed in the 1920’s by Louis de Soissons. His post war firm of De Soissons Peacock Hodges Robertson & Fraser designed housing and community centres at Knightsfield, Shoplands and Blythway from the mid 1950’s onwards. A decade later Oliver Carey, working for the Commission for New Towns, spearheaded the Panshanger estate that still make up the eastern edge of the town. With new towns and garden cities still on the national agenda, it's worth remembering why they were built. These new settlements, along with Harlow,Basildon and others, were supposed to provide integrated, progressive towns for the displaced populations of central and east London who had seen their homes destroyed in the war. The plans provided space for children to play and open plan schools to learn in, neighbourhood centres were built for help these new communities integrate and factories constructed to provide work. They may not have created Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, but they provided badly need modern places to live. To celebrate the 70th anniversary, for the remainder of 2016 we will be exploring the modernist architecture of these towns, on this blog and on our twitter @mod_in_metro and tumblr modernism-in-metroland.tumblr.com pages. We hope you enjoy it!
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15/4/2016 03:52:35 am
Hi, just to let you know that www.talkingnewtowns.org.uk is a project website and does not hold any rights to photographs in itself. If you like to use our photographs you will need to get permission from the rights holder, which is primarily the project partners, including Stevenage Museum. You are also welcome to put a link to Talking New Towns on your website, we would be happy to return the favour.
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15/4/2016 05:29:48 am
Hi,
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