But what of those that already exist? Once imagined as bastions of social democracy, many in the South East have, since the Seventies, been reliable bellwethers of broader national voting trends. Even today, despite Labour overstating the significance of their residents, the long story of New Town politics remains fascinating as much for what it reveals of the observers as of the observed.

Once conceived by the Labour government in 1946, 11 New Towns were designated in the first phase of construction, with eight forming a ring around London, intended to draw a population of almost 400,000 from a capital then considered dangerously overcrowded. The hopes expressed by Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, in introducing the legislation seem impossibly utopian in these more jaded times. Silkin himself was unembarrassed in channelling Sir Thomas More and thought it “not unreasonable to expect that that Utopia of 1516 should be translated into practical reality in 1946”.

Silkin believed “neighbourhood units, each unit with its own shops, schools, open spaces, community halls and other amenities” (what we might call today a “15-minute city”) would bring people of all classes together. When, having attended some community facility or event together, New Town residents left to go home, he did “not want the better-off people to go to the right and the less well-off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other, ‘Are you going my way?’”. The true measure of New Town success, he said, would be “the kind of citizens they produce, by whether they create this spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship”.

Though Conservative critics may have felt differently, this was not ostensibly a party political appeal. Rather, it speaks to a short-lived moment in British politics when this old country was fundamentally reimagined and a new more rationally organised, socially just and classless society believed possible. It’s no spoiler to state that such extravagant hopes were destined for disappointment, but it’s worth dissecting both their trajectory and the thinking that underlay them.

Stevenage was the first New Town to be designated, in November 1946, and it was one built, more than literally, by its construction workers. Of the first 2,000 houses completed by the Development Corporation (all what we would now call social rented), over a quarter went to building workers and their families. This was a unionised workforce that came to take a leading role in tenants’ associations, community campaigns and local government.

By the Sixties, however, one perceives a certain ambivalence in attitudes towards Stevenage from some who had been its biggest supporters. Frederic Osborn and Arnold Whittick welcomed the New Town’s “dramatic societies, art clubs, horticultural and gardening societies, political groups, sports clubs for almost every sport, numerous women’s and youth organisations”, but somehow seemed less enamoured of the new Locarno ballroom and “American-style bowling hall”. They concluded:

“The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.”

Long before he became a celebrated socialist historian, a young Raphael Samuel, surveying attitudes in Stevenage that might explain Labour’s third consecutive general election defeat in 1959, lamented the “pattern of mass media-imposed misery” that apparently fuelled the acquisitive consumerism of many of his interviewees. This was reflected too in aspirations towards owner occupation; a 1966 survey found that 43% of Development Corporation tenants in Stevenage wanted to own their own home and 93% thought the Corporation should sell houses to sitting tenants. The popularity of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy in the Eighties should come as no surprise.

All this played out to a backdrop of surprising nostalgia for what Michael Young and Peter Willmott (whose 1957 book, Family and Kinship in East London, provided one of its foundational texts) called the “sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries” of the slum districts from which many New Town dwellers had relocated. Their move, the authors suggested, marked a shift from “a people-centred to a house-centred existence”. The implicit suggestion was that the working class was becoming literally and metaphorically domesticated.

Sociologists soon coined the term “the affluent worker”; the title of a major study of Luton workers published by John Goldthorpe et al in 1968. (Employment and lifestyle patterns in Luton were similar to those of nearby New Towns.) The notion that rising living standards would inevitably condition the working class to vote Conservative grew. A 1960 book, Must Labour Lose?, concluded pessimistically that it seemed, in the short term at least, that it must. Left-wing intellectuals talked of embourgeoisement, a belief that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values.

But, of course, the Labour Party won the 1964 and 1966 general elections and Shirley Williams held the Stevenage constituency for Labour from 1964 to 1979.  The reality was more complex — it always is. Dissecting the Stevenage data, Jon Lawrence found that “people’s ambition to ‘better’ themselves… was intertwined with an awareness that this was also a collective endeavour”. Goldthorpe et al concluded that “our affluent workers remain, in spite of their affluence, men who live by selling their labour power to their employers in return for wages”.

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The battle for Thamesmead

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In other words, aspiration and self-improvement were not antithetical to working-class affiliations but central to them. There remains, however, a caveat. This was not necessarily the self-improvement that earnest liberal reformers and the more idealistic Labour politicians envisaged. Silkin’s speech had referred to New Town residents enjoying “amateur theatricals” or playing “their part in a health centre or community centre”. One infers, perhaps unfairly, from the words of Osborne and Whittick a faint disappointment that Stevenage residents had been so easily bought off by consumer baubles. The laudable drive to improve working-class conditions has very often been associated with a desire to “improve” the working class themselves according to more elite ideas of what constituted rational, respectable or worthy behaviour.

As to class — a felt sense of one’s socioeconomic status and position, it remained central to people’s lived experience. Hierarchy, a certain precarity even in the prosperous Sixties, remained defining. It encouraged working-class people to join a union; it disposed them to vote Labour when the party spoke most directly to their interests and values. At the time, the Conservatives were signed up to a broadly social democratic, post-war political consensus centred on full employment, a mixed economy and the National Health Service. To many working-class electors, there was no great betrayal in voting for a party pledged to sustain the progress made since 1945.

Twenty years on much had changed. The New Towns were older, somehow more ordinary, and subject to some of the same economic pressures that afflicted more traditional working-class areas. The post-war consensus had frayed and then been broken by the election of a New Right Conservative government in 1979 that was to hold office for eighteen years. “Basildon Man” — more often “Essex Man” — became the avatar of this shift. Basildon had been created a New Town in 1948 but, far from embodying the progressive ideals of its post-war foundation, it now came to represent pure Thatcherism. To advocates, such as Simon Heffer who coined the “Essex Man” phrase in 1990, these were people who had escaped what he described as “the nasty workers’ barracks” of the New Towns to pursue an unashamedly acquisitive and individualist lifestyle of material self-improvement. (Harry Enfield’s character “Loadsamoney” was their hostile caricature.) Critics echoed Heffer’s definition for the most part but saw only boorish vulgarity lacking redeeming features. This was “the affluent worker” gone very rogue. Both Basildon and Stevenage (under shifting boundaries) were securely Conservative from 1979 to 1997.

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By Fred Skulthorp

It takes perhaps another political stereotype to allow a more nuanced and sympathetic view of the politics in play here. Tony Blair introduced us to “Mondeo Man” in his 1996 speech to the Labour conference. He had met him, so he claimed, four years earlier “in the Midlands on an ordinary, suburban estate”, polishing his Sierra. (It became a Mondeo after Ford phased out its Sierra line.)

“His Dad always voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing quite nicely. “So, I’ve become a Tory”, he said… His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him.” 

“But that,” Blair continued, “was never our history or purpose.” In many ways, the New Labour project — like it or loathe it — was an attempt to persuade that man and a wider cohort of so-called C2 voters in skilled manual occupations that Labour was the party that both respected and best reflected their interests.

Basildon and Stevenage were Labour-held from 1997 to 2010, but have voted Tory ever since.  After a run of four election defeats, Starmer’s project — aided greatly by the record of successive Conservative governments — has been to offer just that reassurance and promise again, now not only to “Stevenage Woman” (the “Fortysomething disillusioned suburban voters with little time for politics” once thought vital to Labour gains), but to a far wider swathe of voters who have seen their living standards fall and the public services on which they depend decimated. In this context, electorally, ideologically perhaps, the red meat of socialism is subordinate, even counterproductive.

The New Town programme — 32 developed between 1946 and 1996, now housing around 2.8 million people — was an astonishing achievement, a mark of government ambition and accomplishment that today seems almost unimaginable. That the more extravagant hopes placed in it were unfulfilled is unsurprising, but it reminds us that any politics predicated on myths of class identity and destiny — whether Marxist-inspired or more modestly socialist — is bound for failure. Labour’s job now, as it has always been, is to persuade working-class and middle-class voters to vote for it not out of virtue but out of self-interest. That perhaps is the real lesson of New Town politics.

She was reiterating an all-too-common contempt for other Sixties estates. But John Grindrod, Britain’s foremost chronicler of post-war modernism, saw something very different in that scene: “The town’s formal beauty, lakes and crisp white architecture were enhanced by his use of classical music to make the scenes of sudden violence even more shocking and incongruous.” In the early Seventies, Thamesmead still seemed futuristic, utopian even — “the town of tomorrow”, as it was dubbed when the Greater London Council embarked upon the “Woolwich-Erith Project” in 1966. The practical intention, in the Council’s words, was to “create a reservoir of housing for decanting population from the hard-pressed inner area”. In an era of mass slum clearance, the form of its early implementation was exhilarating.

These two senses of Thamesmead — coexisting interpretations of it as dystopian and utopian — are now in open warfare against each other. The social housing provider Peabody has unveiled a proposal to demolish the Lesnes Estate, an area of almost 600 homes located just to the south of Southmere Lake. However, residents are fighting to save the estate, protesting against both the loss of their own homes and the nature of their proposed replacement. Beyond this David-and-Goliath struggle, though, their conflict is a microcosm of a broader battle in British social housing: one which pits developers’ ambitions to radically redevelop estates against both the interests of those who live in them and the model of communal living they symbolise.

Here, the chief protagonist — they certainly wouldn’t consider themselves the villain of the piece — is Peabody, one of our largest social housing providers and the organisation that was seen to be coming to the rescue of Thamesmead when it took over its management back in 2014. By then, the Thamesmead project was widely judged to have failed. Its population stood at 32,000, around half of the 60,000 originally planned. The new town seemed remote and forlorn; to some, most pejoratively, even a kind of giant “sink estate” inhabited by people housed from waiting lists lacking the choice or opportunity to live somewhere better.

This was a sad betrayal of the visionary planning that had inspired Thamesmead’s early construction. The difficult site prone to flooding was treated as a chance to create water features; Southmere Lake, for example, provided drainage as well as recreation. There was even talk of “being able to travel by punt right across the site along four and a half miles of canals”. The first-floor walkways, “streets in the sky”, and ground-floor garaging of the Lesnes Estate blocks in the first phase South Thamesmead’s development reflected this location too, but also the contemporary planning ideal that cars and people should be separated for what seemed obvious reasons of health and safety.

What still excites, however, is the form of the 1,500 homes built around Southmere Lake in this phase of construction. Four 13-storey towers line the southern edge of the lake adjacent to a (since demolished) ziggurat-style, half-mile long spinal block along Binsey Walk and Coralline Walk, forming a barrier between its eastern shore and the arterial A2401, all constructed in the gleaming white concrete panels of the Balency system of prefabrication. The artists’ impressions and early photographs of Thamesmead would surely turn the head of even the most hardened traditionalist. So, what went wrong?

The conventional explanation for Thameside’s failure is straightforward. The new town was isolated by the abandonment of projected transport connections to Greater London via an extension to the Jubilee Line and a new river crossing. The failure to provide facilities within the scheme was equally damaging: the first residents moved in 1968, the first school in the same year and the health centre two years later — but incredibly the first shops not till 1971. Momentum faltered and decline set in. In any case, later phases pursued a far more conventionally suburban pattern of design and construction though possibly one better fitted to popular tastes.

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Michael Gove's Cambridge folly

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Thamesmead suffered a confused period of governance after Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 until the promised revival of Peabody’s takeover in 2014. Its “plan for Thamesmead [was] simple — to create an amazing place that people love to work in, to visit, and of course, call home”. It’s hard to take issue with that — but how has it done? The most significant and positive change has been the arrival at Abbey Wood in 2022 of the Elizabeth Line, reducing the time taken to travel to central London to a mere 30 minutes. There’s also serious talk of a DLR connection from Beckton to Thamesmead itself. “This southeast London estate is the buzzing next neighbourhood to be,” Metro gushed in September 2023.

Since one of its oft-stated aims is “the creation of a more mixed community at South Thamesmead”, this must have been music to the ear of Peabody. But, as always, the devil is in the detail and implementation. What does that “more mixed community” look like in the context of plans to demolish the Lesnes Estate? It means the construction of 1,849 homes to replace the 596 to be cleared. It means directly the replacement of 411 social and “affordable” rent homes with 368 of which 307 are to be let at “London Affordable Rent” and just 61 (intended for existing residents who wish to remain) at social rent.

Peabody makes three principal claims to reflect its sensitivity to this issue. Firstly, that the floor space dedicated to affordable housing is greater in the new scheme than in the existing estate. Secondly, in a dubious stretching of the term “affordable”, that it will additionally be providing 279 homes for shared ownership. For all this pleading, the officers of the Greater London Authority concluded that the scheme failed to comply with the London Plan and resulted “in a loss of affordable housing when assessed on a per unit and per habitable room basis”.

Thirdly, and most disingenuously, Peabody suggests that residents have approved the scheme. In March 2020, 70% of residents approved (in a ballot in which two-thirds voted) the following statement: “Are you in favour of Peabody’s proposal to include Lesnes Estate in their regeneration plans for South Thamesmead?” The glossy leaflet advertising the vote urged residents to “Please read” and to “not throw away, your estate, your future”. The words “demolish”, or “demolition”, were conspicuously absent, however.

That this was not by any means a vote for the current proposals is made clear by the protests that have erupted in recent weeks. Many residents, particularly those who have already bought their houses, are up in arms, complaining about the loss of homes in which they have invested so much, and the inadequate compensation offered to enable them to purchase elsewhere. The words of Dolorosa Buhari, 69, summarise their anger: “Most of us here are retired and we have worked our lives to pay and to say ‘this is our home’, and then Peabody come in to tell us we cannot live here and they want to take our property, offering peanuts.”

The protest has also drawn the support of a wide range of housing activists opposed to the form of council -state regeneration in recent years — a familiar tale of “densification” in which developers build significantly more “units” (I’ll use the jargon for once) and yet contrive a net loss of social rent housing; in which profits accrued by the sale of homes for purchase or private rental all too frequently fail to benefit existing residents, let alone the 300,000 households on social housing waiting lists in London and the 170,000 (half of them children) living in temporary accommodation. Peabody will resent the banners proclaiming “Housing for Need not Greed” but they resonate strongly for the many displaced by estate regeneration.

Finally, at a time of climate crisis, should we really demolishing buildings — with all the loss of embodied carbon entailed — that could be effectively retrofitted to meet current environmental standards? Peabody have referred to the “poor quality and dated appearance” of the current estate but residents testify to its comfort and structural soundness.

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The battle for Zone 6's soul

By Fred Skulthorpe

If the climate crisis offers a new challenge, the need to house all our people well remains a persistent one. Thamesmead reflects part of the ambitious attempt to meet that challenge after 1945; one element of a national programme that built on average 126,000 social rent homes annually between 1945 and 1979 and which provided what Conservative prime minister Theresa May called, in a 2018 speech to the National Housing Federation, the “biggest collective leap in living standards in British history”.

At Thamesmead, there were obvious and avoidable planning missteps that undermined its potential, but it has suffered equally from the perfect storm of circumstances that have undermined and marginalised social housing more broadly in recent decades. The statutory right to social housing given in 1977 to those in “priority need” was a well-intentioned and progressive measure. However, in a subsequent era when social housing stock was sharply reduced by Right to Buy (well over 300,000 social rent homes have been lost in London alone) and the near cessation of new-builds, it has led to what sociologists call the “residualisation” of social housing — the perception that it is, sometimes the belief that it should be, housing of last resort.

It has never been that to the millions who have benefitted from the decent, secure and affordable homes it has offered; it is not that now to the many in desperate housing need. We must build a new generation of social rent homes supported by direct public investment — expenditure that by every rational calculation saves far money in the long-term than it costs in the short-term. We need more homes and we need more social housing. The plans and protests at the Lesnes Estate illustrate precisely why the former should not be achieved at the expense of the latter.