When the building work began on Harlow new town in 1949, it was intended to relieve the chronic housing shortages caused by years of neglect and wartime bomb damage in the north-east London boroughs. Two years earlier, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had set up the New Town Commission. It decided to rebuild urban areas ravaged by poverty and war with publicly funded development corporations.

Harlow’s chief architect, Frederick Gibberd, devised a scheme which would provide housing and employment for working-class families. His vision was a self-contained community surrounded by rural belts and green wedges. Harlow’s new town would contain a mixture of residential and agricultural areas with purpose-built industrial zones and financial incentives to entice manufacturing employers from London and further afield. The plan was to make it largely self-sufficient — providing everything the people who had moved there would need for a good life.