Why New Towns?
Some readers of The Times must have been a little shocked when they read in its correspondence columns a few days ago a letter from a member, of the committee responsible for the preparation of the development plan for London setting out the reasons for building new towns in the Greater London area. It • might have been assumed that those reasons had been settled once and for all before work began on a project to house some 400,000 people in eight new towns. But -however clear those reasons once were—provision for the overspill-from the redevelop- ment of London of course dominates all others—it is still very doubtful whether movements of population are going to conform either in direction or in quality with the ideas of the planners. There are protests from those smaller and older com- munities which have been chosen as the core of some of the new projects—protests which continually harp on the theme that land values are being undermined and the planners' schemes for balanced communities defeated by their own actions. There are fears that new firms and new workers will move in to the areas in London from which the inhabitants for the new towns move out. There are complaints that the new town authorities have not the powers to make the plans work. There are protests that the Government departments which have some authority in the question of the location of industry—the Board of Trade in particular—are not greatly impressed by the claims that new industries should be set up in the new towns rather than in the old development areas. There is some truth in each one of these statements that all is not well. It will always be impossible to canalise large movements of population in accordance with the ideas of planners, so long as the population has any choice in the matter. But it still seems that the time is coming for a new conspectus of the whole of the new towns movement not with a view to stopping it—it is too late for that—but with the minimum aim of ensuring that from now on those who profess and call themselves planners shall, as far as possible, co-ordinate their plans.
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