In June 2024, the Labour Party, still in Opposition, launched a vision for a “next generation” of new towns using “traditional, high-density designs like tree-lined streets and Victorian-style terraced housing”. These developments aimed to create walkable, “gentle density” communities that reduce environmental impact and speed up housing delivery through a “New Towns Code”. I should know because their vision was based on work led by Create Streets. They even used our images in the newspaper coverage.

Almost two years later, how is the project going? The Government has just cut five of its 12 proposed new towns. Seven remain: five brownfield schemes, one urban extension, and the new town of Tempsford in Bedfordshire.

So, will the towns happen? And, crucially, will they be any good? Starting with the good news, the remaining sites are broadly sensible, given that most are urban extensions rather than totally new sites. This is wise, being quicker to deliver and taking advantage of existing infrastructure. The only remaining “real” new town, Tempsford, is a well-judged exception, situated at a major rail junction. It’s no surprise that Labour has cut five sites. Most should never have been selected, being in lower-demand areas. Last year I predicted that, ultimately, we will be left with only three or four “new towns” that deliver additional homes.

Now the bad news. The remaining urban extensions should be bigger and more ambitious, while I am suspicious about how many homes are genuinely accretive. The program is also going far too slowly, and thus risks becoming a textbook example of “broken Britain”. Here is a clear Government priority, in the manifesto and with an unarguable democratic mandate. And yet, despite the program boasting some excellent civil servants, the country seems systemically unable to execute such projects at pace. In nearly two years we have achieved what the Britain of yesteryear would have managed in less than six months. Within two years of the 1945 election, for instance, we were actually starting to build the first new towns. Today, we still talk.

Finally, and most worryingly, the new towns risk being loveless lumps. The deathly silence on aesthetics was the original sin of last year’s New Towns Taskforce report, junking all advice on the need to take people with you and how to do it.

This matters. There is an unavoidable public-sector role in the program. But due to the “design disconnect” between elite and popular opinion, and the absence of any corrective within the program, there is currently a risk of unpopular “design” being forced onto new towns as was done 70 years ago. One of the reasons that so many of the postwar new towns failed was that they were ugly and unpopular. They were placeless and inhumane: admired by architects, hated by most people. Cumbernauld and Runcorn were the most notorious.

We risk repeating the error, setting visions and policy for new towns that fail to respond to popular preferences. If we do, then we will create less valuable, less viable and less happy places. That is, if we create them at all.