Angela Brady on new towns

Angela Brady of the Urban Panel talks about the valuable lessons we can learn from new towns like Harlow and Milton Keynes.

Harlow was once a jewel in the crown of Britain's new towns. But when the BBC returned to mark the town's 60th anniversary in 2007, its reporter found a town that had lost faith in itself. Indeed, one of the original architects, Gordon Hewlett was quoted as saying: "I'm really saddened. It should never have been allowed to get like this."

It is a sentiment that Angela Brady can well understand. A founding partner of Brady Mallalieu Architects, she has been part of the CABE and English Heritage urban panel since the beginning, visiting some of England's new towns during a year of urban panel visits that focused on the new towns movement.

The new towns are important not just for their own sake. Many find themselves at the heart of the government's housing growth areas, while all of them offer up crucial lessons at a time when the government is planning to build 10 eco-towns by 2020.

The Milton Keynes-South Midlands growth area is to build 150,000 homes by 2016, while the London-Stansted-Cambridge-Peterborough corridor of which Harlow is a part, will see 180,000 new homes in the same period.

The urban panel was ahead of the game, visiting Harlow the year before its 60th anniversary. It is not an experience that Brady will forget. She remembers the moment when she and fellow panel member Dickon Robinson first arrived on the train. "The first thing you see in Harlow is the most awful blank housing association building sitting in the middle of the car park. Dickon and I couldn't believe our eyes. That was the first horror."

Sir Frederick Gibberd, who also designed Heathrow Airport and Liverpool Cathedral, set out a vision in 1947 for a new kind of place, a mixture of town and country where you could walk to the shops. The idea was for a series of neighbourhood centres separated by green wedges orbiting the town centre.

The panel report comments on the excellence of what was originally achieved. "In Mark Hall South and Mark Hall North, the panel was reminded of the remarkable achievement of Gibberd and the new town corporation in attracting so many quality architects to work in burgeoning Harlow. Many of the buildings and spaces created remain exemplars of their type and a credit to commissioners and designers." However, it noted how badly they had aged due to lack of investment in repairs and updating. As with all new towns, most of the buildings were constructed at the same time so the need for repairs all occurred at once, putting great financial pressure on local authorities. "The infrastructure is expensive and there generally isn't enough money to go around," says Brady. "Because it's so ignored it means that the whole area is very tatty, the pavement and roads are broken up and the signage bad." The result, she discovered, was that residents had no pride in their town.

The panel was divided over what to do with the green wedges. Brady believes that while it may be necessary to build on some of the outer bands of the wedges, the original Gibberd plan must be preserved. "They should go back to the original vision and a lot of the panel felt the same. In Harlow there's so much potential. It's lovely to see the big green wedges so you feel that you're in the town and the country." In particular, she believes attention must be paid to revamping the centre. "If they could concentrate on getting a really attractive centre then they'd be attracting more people in to develop and possibly intensify some of the inner areas rather than feel they have to go outside Harlow and create a new vision."

The depressing thing is that Harlow, like many of the new towns, has recently gone for the wrong kind of development. The new proposal put forward by Ropemaker Properties for a massive expansion of the town to the north of the Stort Valley might be such a threat, Brady believes. It makes the need for a characterisation study - a comprehensive report on the characteristics of different neighbourhoods that make a town what it is - which would identify what is special about the place and should be expanded on, even more pressing in the new towns "The disappointment of a lot of new towns is that they're building satellite executive housing, which is identikit pastiche, neo-Georgian and without any reference to where it is. So everything was escaping the very thing they should be building up confidence in - the town centre."

Milton Keynes is a far more positive story, where business has been booming. Even its football team has just been promoted to League One. Despite a few failings such as its spread out, car-friendly feel, Milton Keynes is on balance a sustainable success story. "Immediately you can see that this was a brave new attempt at green spaces, all the things we're trying to do today in a built-up city, open it out, make walking and cycling safe."

The problem facing the city now is how to expand without losing its green feel. Despite the huge scale of housing growth, Brady feels it can be achieved. "There is actually room because development is so sparse and low-rise. But you do need a characterisation study to keep the best of what is already there and to improve the public realm."

Harlow has not always had the luck of Milton Keynes. Its defects spring from an underperforming centre, a problem that seems to afflict even economically vibrant new towns like Swindon (more accurately an 'expanded town' rather than a new town). But despite the difficulties it faces, Brady believes that political will and good decision making can turn the less fashionable new towns round.

So what are the lessons today for places like Harlow, Milton Keynes and Swindon? "If you are building a new town all in one go it's very hard to make a success of it," she says. "You don't have a community or the variety of income groups, and they can be car dominated. So the lesson is in appreciating what is there already." In doing so, a balanced assessment of achievements to date must be set against fashionable development models to ensure that the best principles survive and that the worst deficits are corrected. The new towns are already as complex as much older places and the next steps should be equally responsive to place.

Angela Brady is a qualified architect whose architectural practice is known for their contemporary reworking of listed buildings. Angela is past chair of Women in Architecture, the RIBA Equality Forum. She is current vice chair of the Civic Trust awards and is a Trustee of the Building Exploratory in Hackney.

Related links

• English Heritage and CABE urban panel