New Town, Home Town (1979)

Here's an excellent 1979 BBC documentary about the British postwar new towns. The presenter, Colin Ward, is famous both as a writer on urban issues, and as an anarchist, with a profound distrust of traditional hierarchies. In the documentary he covers Harlow, Peterlee, Runcorn and 'the Muhammed Ali of new towns' Milton Keynes.








It's full of excellent interviews with residents as well as historical detail. We meet an elderly, chipper Frederick Gibberd in Harlow, explaining his philosophy of using the landscape to define the character of the town. Then we meet residets too - young people who liked it, but still dreamed of moving away, and people their parents age who suffered from new town blues and had either adjusted to the slower pace of life or suffered from withdrawal from London.

Peterlee was a different story. The coal mining town suffered almost immediately from the scaling back of the coal industry, and, according to this documentary, turned instead to a rather rose-tinted backward-looking appreciation of mining history. Fears of the death of smaller surrounding communities caused by the creation of Peterlee also played a part in the lack of momentum behind the town. Then there was the estate of Sunny Blunts, with water pouring through the roofs, one of many problems that didn't stop the slow leakage of money from the new town.







Runcorn, a second generation new town, gets more favouable treatment in the documentary, with its figure of eight road layout and frequrnt bus services. Well, all apart from James Stirling's futuristic design for Southgate, which Ward refers to as a colossal ego trip. Southgate was finished in 1977 and demilished by 1992. Watch out for the interviews with the newsagents, which is a social history of tobacconists all by itself.








Finally, Milton Keynes sweeps in at the end as the Joan Collins-style superstar, draping its mink coat on the mic stand and throwing a martini over the rest of the competitors. We travel from those famously controversial early estates of Beanhill and Netherfield to the more desirable (make that middle class) Eaglestone and Fishermead, more typical of what was to come. The whole documentary starts off with a couple being shown round a new house in the town and getting their garden centre voucher. You can see the ambition of the place not only in the helicopter shots of grid roads but also in the plan for the 'new city' (they may even bid for the Olympics, says Colin) where there's much more gloss on display than in the other towns shown.





It's a fabulous documentary. Hard to think of a better introduction to the English new towns, at any rate.