New Old Town
By EDWARD HODGKIN
THE rebuilding of old towns on new sites is an activity usually associated with such names as Alexander the Great, the Caliph Mansur and Sir Edwin Lutyens. Their vast under- takings were prompted by the spur of imperial glory and made distinguished by the effects of individual caprice. The new towns which are slowly coming into being in this country have no personal associations and nothing that is particularly glorious or capricious about them. They are the children of committees and blue-books ; their spur is necessity, not unmixed with idealism.
Among these new towns Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, twenty miles from the centre of London, has certain peculiarities which invest it with an interest of its own. The problem here is not to create on a more or less virgin site a new urban entity, but to expand a market town of about 20,000 inhabitants into a city of some other description containing about 60,000 inhabitants. Hemel Hempstead is a town with a history, character and function. It has had a charter of incorporation since 1539. In the nineteenth century it began straggling down from its hill above the River Gade to join those new arteries of progress, the Grand Union Canal and the main L.M.S. line to Birmingham. Since then it has accumulated its appropriate quota of Edwardian villas and Georgian council houses ; it has avoided the extremes of wealth and poverty, and, unlike most of its neighbours, is not to any marked extent a dormitory for London workers.
The boundary of the new town area describes a wide circle round the old town. Five thousand acres have now come under the control of the Development Corporation, and when their plans are com- plete the old town will be the outmoded hub of a huge new brick-and-mortar agglomeration, scattered over the hills and valleys !or two or three miles in every direction. As yet, development has unly begun in the north-east corner. Here 140 houses have already been finished and are occupied ; 600 more are building ; the first shops will soon be opened ; the first factory is already in production, and the first school (a magnificent bungalow affair, consisting mainly of windows and large flat surfaces in primary colours) opens on Monday. In the next three years another 2,500 houses are due to be completed, and building will continue thereafter at the rate of about 1,000 houses a year until, in 1955 or soon afterwards, the project is achieved.
That is the pattern for progress, and it is a pattern which must be an inspiring one for all those who are intimately connected with it and who are stimulated by the prospect of building houses which conform to our current nctions of true homes. The houses which have already been erected are architecturally discreet, excep- tionally light and well-provided, distributed to allow as much space and diversity as possible, and yet to be let at rents which should not be beyond the reach of those they are intended to house—though whether these rents will be sufficient to give an economic return remains to be seen.
But, of course, the most interesting part of the experiment is to discover whether the new town of Hemel Hempstead will succeed in developing an individuality of its Own, at least as marked as that of the old town, which is shortly to suffer death by drowning. It is the belief that this is possible which justifies the labour and expense now being undertaken, and the double process of disloca- tion which is going on, whereby the old inhabitants and the uprooted newcomers are alike being thrown into a state of dis- equilibrium. How the body of a town is given a soul is a question which the lay observer may well be shy of answering, though it is obviously one which has for long occupied many ingenious minds both within and without the Ministry of Town and Country Planning.
In this respect the corporations of the new towns work under many handicaps which were unknown to Alexander and the Caliph Mansur. Their function is mainly to draw up plans and to build houses. The etceteras which go to differentiate a town from a housing estate are for the most part beyond their control. They can, and do, leave blanks on their maps for schools, churches, public-houses, gardens and so forth, but whether or not these blanks are well filled—whether, indeed, they are filled at all—depends not on them, but on various extraneous bodies. Schools at Hemel Hempstead, for example, are the province of the Hertfordshire County Council, churches of the different Church authorities; public-. houses (as in all new towns) come under that jolly innkeeper, the Home Secretary. The Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation has no more power to initiate in these spheres than it has to build club-houses or theatres. But as each of the outside authorities will have sooner or later to wage a private struggle to obtain a building licence (assuming that they can somehow find the necessary money), and as the outlook for all forms of capital expenditure is bleak, there is a fair chance that Hemel Hempstead will be a group of housing estates before it ever becomes a town again.
But, of course, the most important ingredient in a new town is the men and women who inhabit it. The raison detre of all the new towns is that they are to draw off some of the population from the more crowded districts of London, providing the emigrants with work as well as with homes. Each new town is unofficially linked with certain London boroughs; in the case of Hemel Hempstead the link is with the North-West--Acton, Willesden and Harrow. As far as possible the building workers employed on the site are being drawn from these districts, and if they want to move out permanently with their families, homes will be found for them. But the bulk of the new 40,000 who will enter the area in the coming fifteen years will presumably be connected with industries and offices which have not yet emerged on the horizon, and, when they do emerge, it will be pure chance if any of them come from the linked areas of London.
The complex problem -of how London's industries are to be decentralised is one that is now causing fairly general misgiving, largely because there seems to be no reason why, as things are going at present, the new towns should do anything to solve it. If, after obtaining the sanction of the Board of Trade and the Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation, an esjablished factory moves itself pt from a congested district of London to the slopes of the Chilterns, there is nothing to prevent a new industry from moving into the old site ; equally there is nothing to prevent new tenants from moving into the vacated London homes. This process, which fills up London as fast as it is emptied, is, in fact, now going on. Unless something unexpected happens, London in twenty years' time is going to look very much like London today ; it is going to have just as many factories in it and just as many men and women working in the factories. Parts of Hertfordshire, Surrey and Essex, on the other hand, are going to look very different indeed.
The manner in which Hemel Hempstead will develop is therefore still unpredictable. There is no chance of its new quarters being unfilled or of there being insufficient work for the new inhabitants. By careful adjustment it is hoped to keep the rate of industrial development more or less level with the number of houses available for occupation. But whether the newcomers, when their day's work is done, have anything to do, or anywhere to sit or play, or anything to drink, is still more a matter of hope than of certainty. They can always, of course, climb down to the bright lights of the old city—the Hemel Hempstead Kasbah, as it were—if they are pre- pared to brave the stares and muttered criticisms of the ancient inhabitants. Perhaps this would, in any case, be a happier result than that they should become self-centred in their own little corners of the town. By some means or other Hemel Hempstead must be made a real concept for them. The best way for fostering civic solidarity would doubtless be for the whole (new) town to be threatened by a volcanic eruption, but, as this is a remote con- tingency, the next best solution is probably to cultivate a first-class football team.
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