Those hoping to radically reshape society post-pandemic might look to an unlikely source of inspiration: Stevenage, Hertfordshire – and indeed, all UK New Towns.

August 2021 marks 75 years since the 1946 New Towns Act, the law that launched construction of Stevenage, Harlow, Hemel Hempstead, and a host of other post-war settlements. And while the history of these New Towns is often written off as pedestrian—in ways it literally was, pioneering car-free shopping streets—it also contains radical examples of how to, in the words of this government, ‘Build Back Better’.

For many critics, the only radical thing about New Towns was the scale of state intervention involved: a story of overbearing paternalism, encapsulated in the ‘Silkingrad’ graffiti protests that met government planning minister Lewis Silkin on a visit to original Stevenage in May 1946. Recently, writers including Owen Hatherley and John Boughton in Municipal Dreams have sought to rework the narrative on post-war reconstruction – its concrete accomplishments having been thrown into relief by subsequent state efforts at building affordable homes.

As Hatherley observes, New Towns from Stevenage to Cumbernauld, Scotland are ‘oddly neglected in the current wave of nostalgia for post-war architecture, too much like the sort of sleepy suburbia from which many Brutalism enthusiasts have emerged’. Yet radical architecture exists in these places, too – reflecting the progressive aims and ideas of architects including Frederick Gibberd (Harlow, Essex) and Basil Spence (Basildon, Essex); Berthold Lubetkin briefly worked on Peterlee, County Durham, although his plans were never realised.

There was also ground-breaking public art – sculptures by Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, and William Mitchell, installed in the open and often used as playground equipment; Harlow today offers audio tours of its collection, including works by Barbara Hepworth, and even a Rodin. Less fashionably, we might also remember the New Town engineers like Eric Claxton, whose subtly radical achievement was to ensure that daily life was as far removed from recent wartime danger as possible (and you can still bike care-free down Claxton’s undulating cycle paths in Stevenage).

Silkin’s claim in 1946 that the nation’s New Towns would attract international attention is still derided, but he was right: architects, planners, and engineers from around the globe came to study the UK’s post-war settlements, which were genuinely ‘world-beating’ – at least for a time.

But what about their residents? As attention turns to how we might recover from our own life-changing crisis—certainly not war, but more acute than any other we have known—what might New Towns suggest about people, and how we might wish to rebuild things?

Some strongly opposed to New Towns in 1946 perhaps feared radical social and political change – not just the ‘Stalinist’ approach of government planning ministers, but mass working-class mobilisation; the creation of satellite sites for socialism, even communism.

Such concerns were not necessarily irrational. Monica Felton, the first chair of Stevenage’s Development Corporation, was fired from her post and expelled from the Labour Party in 1951 after visiting North Korea and allegedly adopting pro-communist views. There was also certainly militant organised labour: builders employed to construct Stevenage carried out strikes in their hundreds over wages and standards; one later recalled how workers had interrupted a Conservative Party meeting in the Old Town, where witnesses ‘thought the Revolution had started!’

Significantly, the builders also took industrial action over rents. They were in many cases constructing their own homes, and as labourer-residents they were doubly invested, and doubly effective as campaigners. Builder Bert Lowe later claimed that Stevenage ‘had the sort of atmosphere you would expect in a mining village’.

This was not an all-male show. Women in New Towns also pioneered the establishment of new community organisations, including many women’s groups. These not only helped to facilitate change, but enabled many men and women to experience positions of power—for example, as chairs of new neighbourhood associations—for a first time.

The development of these bodies, and wide participation in them, was necessary—and possible—because conventional structures of authority were absent. Connie Rees, who moved with her husband from Hackney to Stevenage in 1952, remembered that ‘we came like everyone else, to an almost classless society. We were all newcomers – we hardly knew what to expect. There were no pillars of the establishment, no local worthies.’

These newcomers established the UK’s first nursery group to include disabled children, the ‘Opportunity Class’, at a school in Stevenage. The New Town’s residents founded one of the nation’s first free community newspapers, the Echo, produced exclusively by them (and edited by a woman, Winifred Fowler); its builders also constructed one of the austere post-war era’s first community swimming pools – a deep feat for those wishing to maximise health benefits of life outside London for their children.

Nothing so positive can be said on race relations, not least because black and ethnic minority residents made up only a fraction of the early populations of New Towns. First movers to Stevenage later claimed that it had ‘less racialism, less community segregation and less ethnic violence than in most other towns’ – unsurprising perhaps, given its composition. According to the journalist Gary Younge, who later grew up in Stevenage, racism there was ‘petty and persistent but episodic rather than endemic’.

The Rees family made the move from London to Stevenage because ‘the prospect of a new modern house in a planned town in the healthy surroundings of Hertfordshire sounded almost like Utopia.’ As Hatherley also observes, the ‘big secret’ about the UK’s New Towns is that they were very popular with those facing queues of several years for social housing in cities.

It was not an easy move to make, however. Many commuted arduously for months to secure work and homes; landscaping, furnishing, and decorating was done on boot-string budgets, and in spite of omnipresent mud and insects; close family and friends back in the cities felt another country away.

Early New Town residents have been patronised for too long as having been ‘bussed out’, but this was not a passive process – it required sweat and stamina. Similarly, so much has been made of ‘New Town Blues’ (a quite unscientific concept, which failed to consider the emotional wellbeing of house-tied housewives nationwide), but not enough of the overwhelming majority who stuck it out, and worked to forge new communities.

And these were radical. In New Towns the state intervened on a massive scale to recover from the destruction of war, but it was arguably the civic innovation, drive, and spirit of their residents that remains most significant. As we try to work out how to reshape our own society post pandemic, this is worth thinking about.