New Towns Acts

The New Towns Acts were a series of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to found new settlements or to expand substantially existing ones, to establish Development Corporations to deliver them, and to create a Commission to wind up the Corporations and take over their assets and liabilities. Of these, the more substantive acts were the New Towns Act 1946 and the Town Development Act 1952. "The New Towns Act [1946] was intended to pre-emptively direct urban growth and infrastructural development into new towns, thereby decentralising population and economic opportunity while inhibiting urban sprawl."[1]

New Towns were developed in three generations.

  • The first generation set up in the late 1940s concentrated predominantly on housing development with provision for rail and seldom for cars; eight were in a ring around London.
  • The second generation in the early 1960s included a wider mix of uses and used more innovative architecture.
  • The third generation towns were larger and tended to be designed around car travel.[2]

By 2002, about 2 million people were housed in the New Towns, in about 500,000 homes.[2]

  1. ^ Piko, Lauren Anne (November 2017). Mirroring England? Milton Keynes, decline and the English landscape (Thesis). The University of Melbourne. p. 49. Archived from the original on 20 December 2023.
  2. ^ a b Regions Nineteenth Report 2002, para.22.