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THE NEW TOWNS

with an excellent brochure, and this gives the names and addresses of more
than a hundred organisation secretaries, apart from the representatives of
the churches. Harlow has Caledonians, Cymrodorians, toxophilites and
Fabians, as well as pigeon fanciers and a long list of more common pursuits.
Not all these organisations survive, of course; and not all those who
survive do so without some struggle to retain old members and attract new
ones, or balance their budgets, or find quorums for their meetings. Yet,
despite the counter claims of the home and of television, an astonishing
number of these essential cells in the community structure have thrived and
developed. For any New Town resident who is gregarious, and has a normal
spread of interests, the leisure-time question is not ‘ Is there anything to do?’
but ‘ What is the most interesting or important of the claims on my spare
time.’

3. THE PROBLEM OF FINANCE
This pamphlet is not concerned with the interesting technical problems
raised by New Town construction, such as the choice of site, the shape and
size of neighbourhood units, the design of houses and the methods used to
build them. Informed criticism on such matters must come from specialists,
though some of the ‘specialist’ criticism seems to be prejudiced, distorted
and even nonsense, springing from a priori convictions rather than from a
study of how people really live and how they want to live. Such, to take a
notable example, was the attack on ‘ prairie towns ’ launched in the Architectural
 Review of June, 1953, and accompanied by a set of photographs which
seem to have been taken from trick angles. The answer to this abuse is that
while New Towns have not been as experimental in their achitecture as they
might have been, and have produced a rather monotonous profile— more
building than architecture —they are very much better sthetically than
bye-law or most modern local authority housing, and, I think, in social terms
they are immensely superior to mammoth blocks.
Most of the defects, in design as well as in the provision of amenities,
have been due to financial pressure. For the outstanding problem facing
all the Corporations has been to make a limited amount of money go a long
way. A little more generosity and flexibility in their finance would permit
a very great improvement, and allow them more adequately to fulfil their
master plans in the spirit of the 1946 Act.

What do New Towns Cost ?

There is a popular misconception that New Towns are a luxury, and
that the taxpayer is meeting the cost. The contrary is the case. In national
terms, they are an economy, and the New Town residents are carrying more
than the normal share of the expense of building them.
The Reith Committee in its second interim report of April, 1946, set
New Towns in their right perspective: —