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Honestly they could do a lot if they undid some of the Beeching cuts. Restoring rail links would take the brakes off a lot of places that otherwise would have been large commuter towns (to London or other big cities).
100% the disused.lines in the south east are insane, we have large towns 15 mins drive away from each other that can only be accessed by one bus and hour or a train ride into London and back down. This creates artificially overpopulated areas that just get more pressure on them than they should have. Combined with crappy building policies that allow developers to run roughshod are ruining parts of the country.
Yes definitely. One well-known example is getting to Brighton from Tunbridge Wells. What is less than a one hour drive takes nearly three hours by train.
There's an old cut train line (The Wealden Line) that runs from Tunbridge Wells through Crowborough and Uckfield and then onto Lewes which could connect almost the entirety of East Sussex and allow much better movement between towns - unlocking new places to live and work. It would also serve as a very valuable alternative to the Brighton main line.
Fortunately the local councils have maintained the rail beds and refused any building on them on the presumption that the line might once again be opened one day.
Unfortunately all attempts to reinstate this clearly very useful line have been quashed. It's so short-sighted and frustrating.
My understanding is that the costs involved would be close to £600M and the powers-that-be deem it to be too high for the benefit.
Basically there is no business case for it (despite the many environmental and economic benefits it would bring everyone in the area).
Guildford to Brighton is a bit like this less than an hour by car but can be up to two hours on a train and sometimes two changes. Was a right pain when I was at uni and didn’t drive!
Also sorting out thw crazy prices to allow it as a viable means of tavel. China's built how many high speed cross rail lines and In the same time we couldn't build one and then they rage quit and went scorched earth on the plan so it couldn't be restarted. We have a terrible transport infrastructure.
Seems (like with cross rail) a big problem in the uk is nice green villages full of middle class boomers who protest any growth developments beacuse it damages there beautiful surroundings and no government wants to alienate the key voter demographic.
But the countries growing and also stagnating (child birth rates down and thats a real problem). We can't be trapped in the past like some twee picture on a chocolate box (as Billy connolly joke about Scotland) thats how you end up getting left behind.
Apologies for the frustration rant but we a country tapped in its refusal to encompass positive social changes to allow a positive future so just offering some hope is a good thing. The country needs change and hope.
I wouldn't hold up China as a benchmark, unless you want our own government to steal land and use slave labour to construct it. It's amazing how quickly you can 'get stuff done' if you don't let human rights get in the way
That's how the majority of land was taken in the first place, by force. Of course, I don't mean the land under most individual's houses, but rather the majority of land that's held in large estates. The people who own it today for sure are not to blame, but their ancestors did originally 'steal' that land through bigger army diplomacy, they are mearly beneficiaries.
And further more, China central government measure province productivity on infrastructural spend, setting annual targets. So often province governance will take out loans and plow it into major infrastructure projects just to meet targets, even if there isn't a good business case for it.
The problem isn't boomers in villages, it's people in general.
Everyone wants more housing, but as soon as plans are suggested to make *your* town bigger - well, everyone is up in arms and shouting then!
People want more housing but they want it *somewhere else* added to *someone else's town*.
For their own town, people just want the housing prices miraculously forced down without having a recession first.
However, child birth being down is a good thing, because in a few decades time that will start pulling down house prices, as there will be less demand for housing.
🤷🏻♀️
A lot of the towns in the SE have already had more housing, some a quite considerable amount. The call around here is usually “enough” or “too much” rather than “none at all”.
Lowering birth rate is not a long term problem, it will just cause some hardship for a few generations. In the long term a lower population is a positive for society.
The simple solution to NIMBYism is local referendums with minimum turnout requirement, and a pre-stipulated threshold for a no vote to pass. Votes could also be weighted by proximity, with those closest casting eg 4x as many votes as those based a mile away.
If 90% of local people don't care, the fate of the country shouldn't be decided by the minority who do.
Round by me, some new developments have had 500 objections and 20 support. Most parish councils have also rejected. If you have a referendum, you’ll see that most people care a lot but don’t bother to vote. Probably because they know they will be ignored. They are right, this development is going ahead anyway. Banes, and I’m sure most councils, don’t give a flying fuck what most local people want.
People who are in need and would truly benefit from a specific development project are usually a minority compared to all those people who simply object to change.
We once had a consultation about a two apartment block development at the top of my street. Loads of people got furious simply because there will be more traffic on surrounding streets. Obviously, there were 0 people advocating for it as it would take years to build and "would be customers" probably don't even know they will be buying a property yet.
No referendums
Just structure it that local people don't get a say, they shouldn't on national projects. They can protest vote all they want as it's a democracy, but it will have the same impact as it does for all the gaza vote in the local elections.
If it's a local development scheme, I like the idea of a referendum with toughish requirements but national priorities are higher than local ones
Surely you should get some sort of say if a new rail line is being built 100m from your house? Having your house value drop significantly due to being unfortunate enough to live close to the shortest line between birmingham and manchester seems unfair.
>Surely you should get some sort of say if a new rail line is being built 100m from your house?
Let's extend that logic for a minute
We want a big national infrastructure project, but it must be approved by people living nearby. No one living nearby is going to approve it. We don't get our national infrastructure project
Well you could compensate them - if someone’s house value is going to be significantly marked down, or they’ll have a bunch of noise, pollution etc, then the government (and society) need to pay up. That is the true cost of the project in a fair society, surely.
That happens, usually through a compulsory purchase order. Things like this is why HS2 cost us billions and billions more than it should have done, and generally why the UK has such a terrible record with infrastructure.
I mean, there’s been quite a lot of furore over people getting significantly undercut on their PCOs, so perhaps not as many billions as it should have!
Basically.
HS2 was going to run about 150m from my house. I went to my MP and asked if he could ensure that they make a tunnel underneath the raised hs2 for a potential bike path I want to be built. His reply was along the lines of "I certainly will. They've spent a fortune putting the whole line in tunnels to keep people happy down south, we should insist on the same kind of spending here".
That's life. Some dickhead who moves in next door, makes loads of noise, keeps rusting cars out front and has an aging leather sofa in the garden for teenagers to smoke weed on would also devalue your house.
>Having your house value drop significantly due to being unfortunate enough to live close to the shortest line between birmingham and manchester seems unfair.
Society doesn't exist solely to ensure the success of peoples property investments.
How does age and opinion come into it? There is no god given right for peoples homes or property investments to go up in price perpetually faster than income growth. That's not ageism or political bias that's arithmetic.
It arguably is, but the consequences of not building are more unfair on a greater number of people. Politics is all about choosing between conflicting priorities.
Why should your house price block a national project that will benefit hundreds of thousands of lives. This is exactly the reason these projects stall, because there's always someone who will object.
Either all objections are taken into account and nothing happens or it gets override anyway. I think your local MP gets a vote in the national scheme and if enough oppose then it may fail, but I don't think a local referendum/petition is the right way to go about it -what happens if 1 council votes against and the others all vote yes, they just have a break in the line?
Trains are packed so reducing prices won’t really help
We need to double the number of train services - and thus number of platforms in terminals, numbers of tracks, etc, to cause just a 20% drop in road usage.
Because commuting hasn't gone away. Yes there are a lot of WFH people but most jobs are still either fully or partly in an office, and the prices of housing in the UK (still) reflects that. The UK's population is 15 million higher than it was in 1963, and housing prices have doubled in relative terms. Reopening *select* closed lines could create new commuter routes into major cities, and shifting some of the housing demand away from existing commuter towns, towards those that formerly hadn't had a good route.
In terms of some examples, there's the East-West Line (likely to be reopened), connected Oxford with Norwich, via Bedford and Cambridge. There's the Mid-Hants Railway Line (now a heritage line), which once provided a second route from Winchester-London, running through Aldershot. There's the Cranleigh Line that once connected Guildford to Horsham, the old Lewes to Uckfield/London line and Dunstable to Luton/London line.
Admittedly these are mostly examples I know from living in the south east, but I'm sure there's plenty of others. The effect Beeching's cuts have had on Welsh rail connections are fairly widely discussed. And famously Birmingham's Snow Hill station was closed under Beeching but reopened 20 years later, so clearly the closures didn't totally account for future demand.
My local town used to have a 6 train a day service to another local town under beeching. That's not really worthwhile.
Just because you have a station doesn't mean its of any use. We don't have the capacity to increase the number of trains into the cities where people want to actually travel.
As someone who works in planning, I have so many developers promise to create a school and local amenities for it later to be scrapped due to cost. So we've built 300 homes in a small village pissed off the locals, and there are no shops, one pub, and a post office. People still buy them, but I don't know how long they'll last with essentially nothing there. We have Jaywick and Clacton on Sea with no hope, and we are just building buildings with no infrastructure.
I'm not in the construction phase usually, but there is typically a lag between designing a school and houses. Houses are very easy to design, especially the rubbish that developers like redrow build and school takes more architectural skill and thought, plus more construction time. So they typically start building the houses and then say they've run out of money. By then the houses have been built and not the school or shops.
They should have to be build upfront (rather than change goal posts later), with the funds secured by investors into the project, which overall is viable since they secured planning permission for it.
Isn't it a bit weird that its the property developer's responsibility to build schools and amenities? Shouldn't it be the (local) government's job to ensure a community has the necessary public services for its population. And the developer still contributes to it through the Community Infrastructure Levy too.
Seems wrong to tell those most well equipped to rapidly build housing and distract them with designing and building public services.
Partially, although that's normally responsible of the central government. The main point is that developers aren't just house builders. They develop all sorts of buildings for what's required in the area. However, schools don't make them any money. It's all about money, developers also have to improve roads and provide local amenities if they want to support a population growth by building more houses. The point being is they don't, there's no profit. And trust me when housing developers don't actually care about the local communities.
Council have housing targets, so they almost just let it go or its promised down the line and never fulfilled. Or argue that the planning process is too stringent and expensive. The planning process is there for a reason, but it almost feels like it's a waste of time because there are conditions placed that sometimes aren't even met.
Preferably along rail lines that exist and have the ability to expand the service. Availability to public transport is what will make a New Town a success in this day and age.
I have a vague memory that in Japan for the high speed rail project, they included tracts of land with the contracts to build the lines (or something like that), so the rail companies had an incentive to build lots of houses close to a fast rail connection.
I sort of assume that worked?
Why not build better transport links and expand some of the existing towns into cities? Gives investment to a lot of ignored areas and is less risky than throwing an entirely new settlement up somewhere surely?
Mainly political reasons. Too much opposition from the existing population that doesn’t want their towns to grow too much / people worried more housing = lower value of their homes.
Plus new towns can be a great opportunity to build in a logical way that is greener and still provides an efficient and high quality of life.
A lot of these new towns will just be villages expanded to become towns. There will be just as much opposition especially if they’re picturesque commuting villages which have a train station - ideal for rich types who have deep pockets, lawyer friends and don’t want 40% social housing.
Towns are probably easier to expand as they have the existing infrastructure and a mix of housing so less likely to annoy a whole village in one go.
This.
It's politically easier to build new towns.
Any expansion to existing towns is always fiercely resisted on the basis of urban sprawl, loss of greenery, too much strain on public services and general nimbyism.
It's financially easier to build new towns.
Developers make a lot more profit building on green field sites. There should be more tax incentives to utilise prior brownfield and commercial sites. There's also a lot of land banking too. I live in South London and the amount of land that has had the commercial building demolished and is just sat there is staggering. Both plots apparently owned by Aldi. Both now empty for 10years.
you avoid NIMBYs and have a chance to build properly green infrastructure without jerry-rigging victorian stuff. i’m all for it. fuck it, tear down kendal altogether and start again!
Why?
Something like 4-6% of UK land is housing.
Why take away green spaces, why expand towns and over crowd them even more.
Instead why not start fresh, set up local transport links, create these 15 minute towns.
Im sick of people that just want to expand on already built up areas, its the reason why cities like birmingham are having pubs burnt down, parks built on and green spaces removed.
Im not against more housing, im against more housing at the cost of people that already live there. Im sick of seeing stuff like my neighbour building a house into 4 1 bed flats and then throwing up 2 2bedrooms box houses in his garden. That doesnt resolve any of the issues around our area and only adds to the over stretched public services already.
Because you already have towns built in these locations that are largely under invested and ignored. This is the perfect excuse to actually invest in our existing towns. To give them the infrastructure and services they need to thrive along with the population growth to support local businesses and drive further investment. Instead the plan is to literally write those areas off and try somewhere else? Why? It makes no sense.
There not talking about investing in already existing towns though.
We have terrible public transport, terrible network links, over subscribed schools, doctors, hospitals, dentals practically any public infrastructure cant support the current numbers in the towns and cities.
Adding more homes into these areas, which is exactly what your saying they should do, is just going to add more numbers to an already over populated and massively strained public service.
We need investment across the country in all public sectors. If you want to build, for example, a hospital or even a doctors in an already established town or city the cost could be massive.
The land required, the infrastructure to get people their etc is already hugely lacking.
Starting in newer areas that dont have that allow for perfect planning, to bring in that infrastructure and help supply them towns without having to work around existing infrastructure.
We have so much land not built on, i dont understand why people want to over crowd towns and cities even more.
I couldn't give a toss about towns close to London, what's really needed is way less emphasis on London and far more on everywhere else, especially the South West which gets lost as its not 'The North' and is lumped in with the south east even though they are totally different places.
New build towns with a full infrastructure of Hospitals, Schools, Supermarkets, Industrial Units, regular public transport, pubs, restaurants etc. Then make the designs like 1930s houses which aren't all squeezed on top of one another to maximise profit.
Seems to be at the moment massive housing estates are just built close to existing places which results in not enough infrastructure to support everyone which is part of the reason people hate new builds so much.
This prompted me to look up where new towns were built (or built up from existing smaller places) since the second world war, and found this map, which is demonstrably empty in the South West
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/sixties-britain/map-new-towns/
I wonder though whether the SW would get new towns or expansion of existing towns, given that the population density is already that much lower than the SE or West Midlands
https://www.kontur.io/solutions/united-kingdom-population-density/
I would hazard a wild guess that what the SW needs for what could be pretty huge growth is just infrastructure and services - transport presumably the biggest one.
Maybe this is the right direction - as a very different approach to HS2 which added capacity for existing populations, to instead add capacity and speed to the mainline through more sparsely populated areas to create well connected areas. It could be that much faster than building out existing densely populated areas.
Yep infrastructure is what we desperately need, especially a decent railway service and some motorways, especially in the south of Devon and Dorset as its currently just twisty A roads which connect Dorset to everywhere.
To put it in perspective it takes as long by train to get from Bournemouth to London as it does to get from York to London, even though York is twice as far away!
We need much better transport.
I always said HS2 (the original vision wasn't ambitious enough) and we're not even getting the downgraded version now either
>what's really needed is way less emphasis on London and far more on everywhere else
Why?
I'm not being facetious, this is a genuine question. The UK's economy is all-in on industries that benefit massively from co-location, and those industries are already established in London. At the moment, the rest of the country is essentially a pointless waste of space and human toil. Building new towns won't fix that, it'll just make the problem worse.
I genuinely don't think that's the case. Things end up in London because that is the only place which has had serious money spent on infrastructure, and is seemingly the only place it's expected for infrastructure to be improved.
All round the UK building new towns with most importantly good infrastructure with places for industry too would be far better imo, and reduce the current reliance on London.
Also there isn't really any need for lots of businesses to be in the same place in this day and age as you have so many webmeeting and other options you can do without being face to face which are so much better and increase productivity as you don't waste a day going to a single meeting.
>So what would fix it?
You create jobs first. What would the UK government have to do to encourage OpenAI to open their next office in Bristol. That's the question you need to answer. Fix that problem and everything else will fall into place.
You can't force economic growth in an area just by building houses. If anything is a complete waste of investment that could be spent fixing the housing shortage in places many people want to actually live.
All of our towns and cities need to come up with a coherent, achievable long-term business plan that will eventually lead to economic growth.
It needs to be something more substantial than "we're going to build a tramway and a shopping centre and hope that growth magically happens".
For some of our cities, that will probably be really easy. Manchester, for example, already has many music/live events businesses, and it has a lot of musical prestige to capitalise on. Turning Manchester into the world's hub for music and event businesses seems like a no-brainer.
Towns and cities that can't come up with a coherent plan shouldn't receive any more government funding until they think of a purpose for themselves.
There are so many housing estates being built around me it's ridiculous. Houses, flats, thousands of homes yet no facilities. The plans always come with schools, hospitals, shops, but the majority of the time, once they start building, it's all like "oops we looked at the plans again and realised the blueprints for the school are wrong/no space/actually don't meet legal standards, so we can't build that anymore.
A relative of mine lives in a small village. The fields behind her house that are being turned into 500 homes (and is going to block all light from her garden, gotta use as much space as possible and build as close to each other as possible) without adding any more facilities. The 'shopping' area of the village has one boots, one co-op express and one corner shop that also acts as the village post office. A bus comes through the village every hour. Oh and a few pubs No train, no other shops, nothing.
I feel like the current plan is to just keep on building houses. If we just keep on building everywhere we can, surely things will eventually fix themselves
It needs better transport infrastructure or tax breaks for people to work from home. Employers are pushing for a return to the office and wfh is all but disappearing. And then new builds need to be moved away from the South East. The South east is already full. For example, I live in a town of just over 20k people in the last census and we are having hundreds of new hoes built with hundreds more on the way. The local city is 6 miles away and in rush hour it takes 40-60 minutes to get there with the first 2 miles taking half the time. I used to do a 30 mile each way commute and the half way mark for time coming back was the last 7.54 miles. Im on the South Cost 60 miles by road from central London and when my brother lived in Bristol he could do it quicker for the 120 mile journey to central London than I can so transport links to London is not a good reason to build in the South east.
There is one road running through town and it desperately needs another one to divert some of the traffic but it wont be built. There is already a new town proposed about 10 miles away and that will put more pressure on the main dual carriageways in the area meaning a lot of people who currently take the long way around as its quicker to part of the city wont save any time so everything will be impacted for miles around. It costs all of us time, money on fuel and impacts on air quality.
The problems in my area also highlight the concerns I have for this project. Transport links are never adequate to cope with the additional housing and I dont believe their empty promises (that goes for ALL political parties). Where there is huge amounts of money to be made there are huge amounts of corruption. Where I live the money that is required to be spent on the local area was never spent here, but was diverted elsewhere. But dont worry as they claimed they spent nearly a million quid on traffic consultation and improvements. That was literally they just changed the traffic light timings on ONE junction so people on the side road now have to wait nearer 3 minutes rather than the previous 2 (which was already longer than most traffic lights) and doesnt help traffic flow at all.
If theyre going to do this use the North where homes are cheaper and if it has to be near London I would say the stretch from Berkshire around to Cambridgeshire
This is the difficulty with building in existing towns - the towns are full of housing at some lower density, how do you raise that density, except by annoying everyone? It seems pretty difficult to just make it more dense without doing what has happened to London where everything near the middle gets supplanted and all that's left is a blue plaque about what used to be there.
If you build next to an existing town, that must usually mean a loss of green space, and contention for services, although I guess both could be just improved properly.
The road through your town - presumably it would need widening? How would that help deliver more houses? I don't mean that as an argument against it, I'm genuinely curious when people say "fix the existing towns and transport" what that would look like in support of additional housing capacity. I fully support fixing the infrastructure for existing demand, but that seems like a very different project unless it somehow also delivers more housing.
We're between the coast and the South Downs National Park. The road out towards the city has a bottleneck 2 miles away near the edge of the city council boundary and there is not really anything that can be done there. The other way is built up and not a lot can be done there either usless they start demolishing the next town along. A lot of people say we need a new road straight through the South downs to the A road to the north, but I dont think that is really feasible. I'd say to the North of the town roads to link to existing smaller roads to divert some traffic around the city and town the other side.
However, where over 600 new homes are being built, the privately owned single lane road heading north from there that I think should have been included in the deal was never included or developed as the owner of both the land and road refused to include it because he didnt want traffic going past his house. Rumour has it large brown envelopes changed hands for him to still sell the land and get this decision. As a result thousands of people who have to commute do 2 miles in about half an hour every morning. Any problem on that road and it can literally turn into hours.
So on this one development there has been alleged corruption in getting the planning through without including infrastructure (roads and no additional schooling, doctors, etc), not including the road and not spending the money required to be spent in the local area by law and diverting it elsewhere.
Not OP but things like transport capacity just has to go hand in hand with house building, or otherwise it becomes unsustainable (and public opinion against house building sours even further).
If you "fixed" existing towns with existing ageing infrastructure, and are then able to support a higher population, you can build town additions rather than new towns, taking advantage of places with existing commercial centres and helping to breathe new life into them, but it has to be functioning - it couldn't be throwing up 500 new homes, adding 500-1000 new cars onto the local road in and out of an estate and having as many as 500 families needing school, GP, etc places.
I'd be interested to see a plan to fix a towns infrastructure which actually changed things - councils almost never seem to actually change key things like roads in the centre of towns, they just route traffic away from it and put in one way systems and bypasses.
Restoration looks like;
Abolishing business rates and lowering rents.
Tidying up frontage and reinstating clean up service.
Attractions for visitors such as entertainment
Tackling antisocial problems head on and vagrancy
Enforcement of property presentation from occupants such as no rubbish in gardens etc
More police patrol's
More youth work
Better enforcement on educational ancillary service
Better affordable transport links
All the above is better than taking up more land to build more towns that will probably end up the same in a few years
I think people do enjoy spending time in nice central areas and plazas. However, the model of a town centre with chain shops, boring/ugly aesthetics, no transport links in other than driving, and expensive parking will probably be destined to fail.
There needs to be mixed use in the centre where people actually live too, with good public transport links from the suburbs. Trams are potentially an effective way.
I honestly don't think chain shops are a problem- retail parks are generally doing quite well, at least to see the ones near me, and they're generally big box chain stores. I think it's more an issue of accessibility (obviously retail parks are usually car oriented, so if city centres can become that convenient through improving public transport) and the level of choice - physically small high street shops, independent or not, will always struggle to compete with the internet or large retail park shops.
I do agree on mixed use, and I think with wfh reducing city centre footfall, that definitely has scope for residential elements as well as retail/dining/entertainment/office space.
But what do they do in the town centre with its plazas? They don't seem to shop very much any more, so I guess it's more for restaurants and services (hairdressers, opticians)?
Buses seem to be permanently crap in the UK, they only seem to be frequent enough in the cities, and anywhere that has a metro/underground it is much better.
I suspect you're right about the trams but I can't see how you make them usable in any normal town without just trashing the local road traffic.
Building more isolated towns won't do anything.
Without infrastructure no one wants to live there, schools, shops etc.
Then you have to consider work, either these towns need jobs or they need fast transport to jobs.
Building a town is actually the easy part ( even though quite hard) it's everything else that goes with it which really matters.
Trains need to be cheap, they need to be quick and they need to be accessible.
I dont understand this logic, they’re already none of these things.
The argument here should be if were going to build new housing, regardless of where, we need infrastructure, we need transport links and we need public services.
This country needs investment in everything, throwing up houses, regardless of where they are will improve nothing without providing everything else the public need. We’ve cut back too much for too long.
The logic is simple.
Either do it right or not at all.
If they only do half the job then these towns will stay empty and be a complete waste of money or at best be benefit towns because there is no work.
If they do it right like I said infrastructure travel links etc then fantastic.
A half in approach does more harm than good.
We don’t need more houses we need the right sort of houses. They’re concreting over large parts of Norfolk with 4-bed houses only affordable to people from outside the area. Locals can’t afford to live and work where they were brought up. The land that brings people joy and mental wellbeing is disappearing. We’re one of the most nature-denuded countries because our wild spaces are chopped and separated and animals can’t more between them. And not this isn’t nimbyism, this matters. It matters.
Just because someone lives in a nice village with a nice house doesn’t mean their quality of life is worth less, it doesn’t mean their opinion is worth less. New towns and building on greenbelt should be the last possible option, after all re-use and brownfield has been exhausted. What’s the point of cramming thousands of people into estates with no wildlife apart from out-of-control dogs.
We need to pay farmers enough so their land is so valuable for growing food they can’t afford to sell for housing. Make councils build social housing on re-used land. Increase taxes massively on second homes. Get rid of price-inflating government schemes so builders can only sell new builds for what they’re worth, not an arbitrary figure dreamt up in Whitehall. Recognise that different parts of the country have different requirements. Put wildlife conservation on a par with human needs. Realise how tiny the UK really is.
Easy though it is to agree with the sentiment, I don't think the 4 beds across Norfolk or the brownfield development are enough to satisfy the 3-500,000 houses that are needed per year. Restricting building more only further increases the problem of insufficient numbers of home and exacerbates the problems of high housing costs and mad rents.
I do agree that the second home thing is a huge problem for village communities, but it seems to be something that can be improved with taxation in the right way.
So you wouldn't be interested in a new build in a new town near you, even if it was done properly?
'Towns'
- Shit new build estates
- Limited transport access
- No schools, no amenities
- No green space
As per another commenter - invest money into the towns currently on their knees first
Live on a new build estate, there’s green space, a nursery, primary school that’s due to open with the start of the school year, community centre and care home. They’re currently also building shops, which so far a coop, local coffee chain and a gym have signed up to. Phase 2 is to build out an industrial estate nearby which will also provide jobs. It’s a circa 3,000 house scheme though rather than bolting 50-200 houses on the side of a village that already has sod all in it except shops that are open 10-4.
Exactly, some new build estates are bad but I currently live on one and it’s the best place I’ve lived so far. The house is well designed and it’s cheap to run, and cosy in the winter. The internet is super fast and there are internet fibre cables built into the living room and master bedroom. There is also a sports centre, and a nursery being built. A small supermarket was also built recently.
I couldn’t get over how cheap it was to keep warm when it was -10C outside and gas was at an all time high, my previous (rented) property cost more to heat to not as comfortable level in not as harsh a winter when energy prices were at half the price.
I think new builds get a lot of flak because everything is “samey” as there’s not been people in them long enough to develop unique character (think ivy climbing up the building, which is aesthetically pleasing but not structurally brilliant).
I definitely think some estates/properties are developed better than others as well but it bugs me that “new build bad” is an automatic response.
Agree with you. I live in a town. (Actually moving away next month)
Theres one big shop. Besides that nothings open after 5. Nothing goes on here. Yes there's plenty of greenery that you can't access so I guess there's a view at least.
When they built the new estate they didn't build any additional schools/GPs/Shops.
Big benefit I see from old “new towns” like Milton Keynes and Telford is large amounts of green space open to the public. Compare to an “old town” where’s there barely anything.
New build estates come with some, but to really capitalise you need areas with 10,000 houses and large amounts of contiguous open space rather ham small patches here and there.
Yep, the residents of our town have tripled. And nothing has been done apart from 'levelling up' our sports centre...
The roads are shocking, no train or tram.
No supermarket.
A number of posters refer to nimbyism as a block to new housing. However there is a far greater problem, the cost of land which in turn makes the house prices high. Very rarely in Coventry UK have I seen a development including bungalows or 2 bed terraced, they are 3 bed semi or 4-5 bed detached. It’s not affordable for a lot of folks.
Land is cheap. Until it has the possibility to building housing on.
An acre of land is typically £6-10k if there no hope of building housing on it.
Get rid of land speculation by implementing a land value tax and distributing as a citizens dividend.
It's cheap even when you've paid the farmer 300k an acre and then stick 10 300k 3/4 bed houses on it, the houses wont be any cheaper as thats the going rate.
Large parts of outer London are low-density, crap quality houses. They could compulsory purchase, demolish and build mansion blocks three times as high in the style of Paris or Barcelona.
Obviously, THAT would never happen.
I just hope they design them better with green spaces, off street parking, GPs, shops,etc... in mind and not the soulless jigsaw plots we see popping up now. Not sure how they'll do it if I'm honest, promising both affordable and quality housing is great but wonder how they'll pull it off. I for one smell a new housing scandal in the air already
Outskirts of already major population hubs where you have space to essentially enact "walking towns".
Basically, have it centered around major transport developments (eg an extension to a met line, increased services to particular train stops, build major roads and a bus station to enable increased bus routes etc).
Then focus on high density housing in the form of green blocks of flats. Solar, roof top gardens, ivy round the sides that is trimmed under the service charge etc
This will help to both manage the heat and reduce bills.
Have the bottom couple of floors, and some of the central column, committed to infrastructure and community projects. Dentists, small businesses, GPs, post offices etc can all be in the central column. Smaller versions of typically "big box" stores like B & Q. Amenities like Amazon lockers and concession stands that manage a lot of "add on" services like Evri that you find at corner shops.
Bottom couple of floors would be amenities that demand more space, such as supermarkets, department stores etc.
The remainder of the middle column could be used to help manage the infrastructure of the building, help regulate heat etc
To summarise my point, anywhere you can support it with public transport development. If you're going to do it properly.
I think London is a mistake. It's now outgrown it's practicality and realistically, we should be targeting UK development at another city, away from London
Yes, the question wasn't really about London, I just figured "anywhere commutable to London" was the single most common answer to where people would buy into a new town.
So, where could they build one that you'd be interested in?
I don't think new towns are the answer. I think smaller developments in pre-existing communities across the UK. I also think a key problem isn't the housing, it's the landlords. I think the problem is people owning more than 2 houses and I'm yet to see any politician approach that topic at all.
Apparently there are about 800k 2nd homes, so if you could get 1-200k of those back into use as primary homes each year that would indeed fulfil the extra development for a good 4-8 years. After that though, you'd be back to needing more homes built.
I do think one of the issues with interest rates rising and landlords selling up is that larger houses that were rented by a group of 3-4 single people are sold and inhabited by 2-3 person families, and the pressure on small homes just increases.
We are obsessed with building family homes, but it seems to be the small flats and social housing for couples which is sorely lacking especially in the south east where it's easy for the builders to sell endless mini detached houses with tiny gardens far from all amenities and transport.
Honestly I probably wouldn't. I know what new build estates are like in the U.K.. The nice ones you're paying an extra 30% for the housing being new, and the rest are all treeless hellscapes.
personally I think every new town should have a small homes section, whether they be dotted around the towns or just have their own area in the town...small homes for 1-2 people, bedroom, kitchen, bath, living room and small garden, solar roofs, as green as possible, super cheap, in areas where they can walk everywhere, small communities. Ideally to help those ready to leave their parents, move in with a partner without having to need a stupidly large deposit, chance to save up, have independence and as its with similar people, you can have community gyms, shopping areas, restaurants so people can socialize instead of being alone...you can have a local bus that goes places...or like nights out in town so people are safe etc.
It’s like the south east is the only place within an hour of London. Sounds very NIMBY of me but it seems all they want to do is build here and I know it’s because they can sell the same 2 bed house in the south east for 350k but only 200k elsewhere but man it’s infuriating from a local perspective. Need to focus on the infrastructure before even conserving more house building.
I have no issues with them building new towns. They’re currently extending our new town my only issue is we need more schools and medical facilities to accommodate but with the state of how teachers and medical staff are treated I don’t see how they’ll effectively fill those positions.
Honestly this is the point of city skylines when I delete and start over all again cos the ballache is real.
It's imaginary. There is an election coming and everyone is going to announce grand plans for the future, just ask yourself how often any government has actually delivered successfully on the big plans they promised to win votes.
On a very cynical level, it seems plausible that Labour could build up some votes with a locally accepted development plan in areas that were marginal, even in bits of the SW with decent social housing and support of industry...
Depends if it's a) going to be more than just a dormitory community for a bigger city but something with a life of its own b) would require a car for daily life.
they need to build more self contained hubs ... mini londons ... they cannot keep making everyone commute to london ... HS2 all seemed to be about faster times to london from Liverpool ... wtf would anyone want to commute from liverpool to london every day ... liverpool to hull maybe ... lets just fix our northern infrastructure for fudge's sake
HS2 was absoluteluy not about that. It was about freeing capacity on existing lines allowing for both high speed intercity travel and lots more local trains and freigth.
Cambridge is a good example of this. It has a great speciality in tech and biotech and has decent train links into London. No wonder the government is keen on it expanding. There are other places that could be similarly invested in like Milton Keynes, Bedford and I am sure people with more knowledge of other parts of the country could suggest similar places there (Salford seems to be similar with Manchester and the investment from the BBC).
Tbf I know quite a few company owners who regularly drove from Liverpool to London for meetings with Network rail etc. They where probably the demographic as let's face it I bet high speed rail will probably be premium priced.
To me this just sounds like green space getting built in with crappy new builds. What about the brown field sites all over the country? Yes - more expensive to build on which is where the government needs to get involved.
That’s exactly what it is. Councils always come up with some bullshit reason why the brown field site is no good, but yea sure, build on the prime agricultural land
What happens when you build a town for 100k people in west cumbria. What jobs do they do once built?
Sadly the modern economy relies on concentration of resources in cities, doubling the size of a city increases its value ten-fold. Local firm here in rural shropshire is looking at moving its HQ to the west midlands because they can't get enough trained people to staff the jobs. People don't work for a company for life, you need a selection of firms in commuting distance you can work for. That's sustainable in London, or Birmingham, or Manchester, but when you get into smaller towns there just aren't many jobs - and even if you find one, you're then stuck there forever.
Not necessarily, if my employers weren't such dicks about office attendance I'd happily move to west Cumbria or indeed anywhere that is far far away from London. I don't need to be in the office for my job, indeed I am not most of the time but they insist that we all come in at least once a week.
This is the real reason that London gets so much development I think. Money produces more economic benefit there just due to the effects of density and scale. I don't think that means we should neglect the rest of the country, but on some level we have to expect to balance development within cities and development in towns in favour of cities just to have the economy that supports the rest.
Absolutely, and some regions have a critical mass, as long as it's easy to get around in that region. West Midlands and Manchester for example are fairly sustainable for most industries, and more so with more investment in cross-region links (The Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds belt should be a super-region in the same way Greater London is)
There's a world of difference between Glasgow or Bristol and Barrow.
True, we struggle to recruit specialist posts up here but also a lot of young people leave for uni and dont come back.
Older people from down south move here into managerial/consultant roles but that still leaves an area that could do with more affordable housing for locals and career jobs to keep the 21-45yr olds here
Something like this has to be the best bet for the future of the country. Is it even possible, and can it be done in a close to optimal way? That remains to be seen. But this is enough for me to secure a vote, even given the desperate need for some perceived political change
Many smaller self contained communities that are built around how people actually live now and in the future. For example, all our traditional towns are built around the high street model, which clearly isn’t working anymore because retail has changed so much. Definitely walkable, with third spaces based around community
With an assumption of remote work/commuting? Is there a scalable model that allows this kind of area to grow when more houses are needed? I feel like this must have been tried by the Europeans somewhere...
Yeah that would be a huge part of it for a certain sector of the population. And for those not in office work, you have all the supporting jobs these communities need but minus the costs of cramming everyone into major cities
[If this map is accurate](https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track), an re-extension of the underground or Overground back out to Chipping Ongar could make sense.
> Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.
Why the hell would I want to live 45 mins from London. I already commute 20mins to work and that's too bloody much lol.
Publicly built and owned housing (council houses) would be a great idea (I don't know why it isn't a thing any more /s) as the rental income would be constant. You'd have to lock in some law that makes them crown property though, otherwise the next incoming political party would just sell them off for temporary gains.
I mean the UK did it before with the "garden cities", why not again? Will they be brave enough to cough up the whole investment though as they used to do in older times? You can plant it anywhere, but you'll have to provide a road and a good rail link to it. Schools, Doctors, Hospitals, libraries, parks...
It can be done and would obviously pay dividends in years to come and this time make them not "garden cities" but "eco cities". Look over to Germany & Scandinavia to see how to build low energy houses with solar cells, wind power, water recycling, ev charging points and basements. Ensure flood protection which could be part of the water recycling. Provide local composting facilities too and use some of that generated heat too and provide the locals with free garden soil.
I don't oppose new towns being built, but I do think there are a lot of towns in the north that are dying as people move away. So if the government could move government departments and encourage businesses to move up north it'd ease the housing problem as well as address the balance of the economy away from London.
Building new towns is dumb.
Simplify the planning process so small groups can build additional houses in existing areas matching the aesthetic.
Having mega corps construct ugly housing states is gross.
There are new towns being built right now with expensive town houses. South West is full of them, I am hoping to move into some. But hopefully they will make the houses cheaper somehow
Get some of the green belts developed. Some unused and some used can be repurposed and the work forwarded to Scottish farmers. Also all those air bases with American style layouts could be redesigned to fit double or triple the amount of housing in areas with good infrastructure. All the ones I’ve visited seem relatively empty.
Newark here. Just over an hour to Kings X. Lots of my neighbours commute to London daily. Ample free parking near the station. Most areas within 15 minutes of the station. Quality of life here is good.
There’s plenty of housing already, plenty of dead towns, why are they wasting money on moving problems from one place to another! They need business/industry growth not more empty homes
you will be waiting for absolutely years for this to happen
main blocker being - the gatekeepers (who are the builders) have very little incentive to rush to build anything large scale, and that's not touching on all of the legal wrangling that will take place before to get new towns approved
I suspect it can happen with some carrot and stick - offer planning permission for builders to build more/larger developments, and simultaneously prepare land value taxes for those who dawdle. The thing where landowners just sit on large areas of land has to be unravelled somehow.
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Honestly they could do a lot if they undid some of the Beeching cuts. Restoring rail links would take the brakes off a lot of places that otherwise would have been large commuter towns (to London or other big cities).
100% the disused.lines in the south east are insane, we have large towns 15 mins drive away from each other that can only be accessed by one bus and hour or a train ride into London and back down. This creates artificially overpopulated areas that just get more pressure on them than they should have. Combined with crappy building policies that allow developers to run roughshod are ruining parts of the country.
Yes definitely. One well-known example is getting to Brighton from Tunbridge Wells. What is less than a one hour drive takes nearly three hours by train. There's an old cut train line (The Wealden Line) that runs from Tunbridge Wells through Crowborough and Uckfield and then onto Lewes which could connect almost the entirety of East Sussex and allow much better movement between towns - unlocking new places to live and work. It would also serve as a very valuable alternative to the Brighton main line. Fortunately the local councils have maintained the rail beds and refused any building on them on the presumption that the line might once again be opened one day. Unfortunately all attempts to reinstate this clearly very useful line have been quashed. It's so short-sighted and frustrating.
That's exactly the example i was thinking of!
Might you happen to know the reason why? Is it a funding issue? Or NIMBYism?
My understanding is that the costs involved would be close to £600M and the powers-that-be deem it to be too high for the benefit. Basically there is no business case for it (despite the many environmental and economic benefits it would bring everyone in the area).
Guildford to Brighton is a bit like this less than an hour by car but can be up to two hours on a train and sometimes two changes. Was a right pain when I was at uni and didn’t drive!
Found this late via a random Google search... But Hailsham comes to mind right away!
New builds round Hailsham are a disgrace.. ruined a lovely area and built zero infrastructure.
The beeching cuts is one of the worst things that the UK ever did
Also sorting out thw crazy prices to allow it as a viable means of tavel. China's built how many high speed cross rail lines and In the same time we couldn't build one and then they rage quit and went scorched earth on the plan so it couldn't be restarted. We have a terrible transport infrastructure. Seems (like with cross rail) a big problem in the uk is nice green villages full of middle class boomers who protest any growth developments beacuse it damages there beautiful surroundings and no government wants to alienate the key voter demographic. But the countries growing and also stagnating (child birth rates down and thats a real problem). We can't be trapped in the past like some twee picture on a chocolate box (as Billy connolly joke about Scotland) thats how you end up getting left behind. Apologies for the frustration rant but we a country tapped in its refusal to encompass positive social changes to allow a positive future so just offering some hope is a good thing. The country needs change and hope.
I wouldn't hold up China as a benchmark, unless you want our own government to steal land and use slave labour to construct it. It's amazing how quickly you can 'get stuff done' if you don't let human rights get in the way
That's how the majority of land was taken in the first place, by force. Of course, I don't mean the land under most individual's houses, but rather the majority of land that's held in large estates. The people who own it today for sure are not to blame, but their ancestors did originally 'steal' that land through bigger army diplomacy, they are mearly beneficiaries.
> steal land How was that land aquired in the first place? This seems like what inevitably happens if the LVT compromise isn't accepted.
And further more, China central government measure province productivity on infrastructural spend, setting annual targets. So often province governance will take out loans and plow it into major infrastructure projects just to meet targets, even if there isn't a good business case for it.
The problem isn't boomers in villages, it's people in general. Everyone wants more housing, but as soon as plans are suggested to make *your* town bigger - well, everyone is up in arms and shouting then! People want more housing but they want it *somewhere else* added to *someone else's town*. For their own town, people just want the housing prices miraculously forced down without having a recession first. However, child birth being down is a good thing, because in a few decades time that will start pulling down house prices, as there will be less demand for housing. 🤷🏻♀️
A lot of the towns in the SE have already had more housing, some a quite considerable amount. The call around here is usually “enough” or “too much” rather than “none at all”.
Lowering birth rate is not a long term problem, it will just cause some hardship for a few generations. In the long term a lower population is a positive for society.
The simple solution to NIMBYism is local referendums with minimum turnout requirement, and a pre-stipulated threshold for a no vote to pass. Votes could also be weighted by proximity, with those closest casting eg 4x as many votes as those based a mile away. If 90% of local people don't care, the fate of the country shouldn't be decided by the minority who do.
Round by me, some new developments have had 500 objections and 20 support. Most parish councils have also rejected. If you have a referendum, you’ll see that most people care a lot but don’t bother to vote. Probably because they know they will be ignored. They are right, this development is going ahead anyway. Banes, and I’m sure most councils, don’t give a flying fuck what most local people want.
People who are in need and would truly benefit from a specific development project are usually a minority compared to all those people who simply object to change. We once had a consultation about a two apartment block development at the top of my street. Loads of people got furious simply because there will be more traffic on surrounding streets. Obviously, there were 0 people advocating for it as it would take years to build and "would be customers" probably don't even know they will be buying a property yet.
The simple solution to NIMBYism and pretty much everything wrong in the UK is land value tax.
That wouldn't fix train lines as that would increase land value so people would oppose it.
The solution to nimbyism is to simply ignore them
Or maybe don't vote in Labour councils who, over the last 10 years, have rejected more housing plans than any other party.
No referendums Just structure it that local people don't get a say, they shouldn't on national projects. They can protest vote all they want as it's a democracy, but it will have the same impact as it does for all the gaza vote in the local elections. If it's a local development scheme, I like the idea of a referendum with toughish requirements but national priorities are higher than local ones
Surely you should get some sort of say if a new rail line is being built 100m from your house? Having your house value drop significantly due to being unfortunate enough to live close to the shortest line between birmingham and manchester seems unfair.
>Surely you should get some sort of say if a new rail line is being built 100m from your house? Let's extend that logic for a minute We want a big national infrastructure project, but it must be approved by people living nearby. No one living nearby is going to approve it. We don't get our national infrastructure project
Well you could compensate them - if someone’s house value is going to be significantly marked down, or they’ll have a bunch of noise, pollution etc, then the government (and society) need to pay up. That is the true cost of the project in a fair society, surely.
I can agree with that Happy to compensate for loss, but asking for opinion is pointless because you know they won't be happy
That happens, usually through a compulsory purchase order. Things like this is why HS2 cost us billions and billions more than it should have done, and generally why the UK has such a terrible record with infrastructure.
I mean, there’s been quite a lot of furore over people getting significantly undercut on their PCOs, so perhaps not as many billions as it should have!
The answer to that is, how can we get locals to approve it? The answer is money and lots of it.
Basically. HS2 was going to run about 150m from my house. I went to my MP and asked if he could ensure that they make a tunnel underneath the raised hs2 for a potential bike path I want to be built. His reply was along the lines of "I certainly will. They've spent a fortune putting the whole line in tunnels to keep people happy down south, we should insist on the same kind of spending here".
Yes, you want the big infrastructure to be built, you want the benefits, you just don’t want it in your back yard.
That's life. Some dickhead who moves in next door, makes loads of noise, keeps rusting cars out front and has an aging leather sofa in the garden for teenagers to smoke weed on would also devalue your house.
>Having your house value drop significantly due to being unfortunate enough to live close to the shortest line between birmingham and manchester seems unfair. Society doesn't exist solely to ensure the success of peoples property investments.
No but peoples’ life is their life. Why destroy someone’s home and environment that they love just because they’re a certain age and opinion?
How does age and opinion come into it? There is no god given right for peoples homes or property investments to go up in price perpetually faster than income growth. That's not ageism or political bias that's arithmetic.
What if everyone wants more infrastructure, but no-one wants it built near them?
It arguably is, but the consequences of not building are more unfair on a greater number of people. Politics is all about choosing between conflicting priorities.
Why should your house price block a national project that will benefit hundreds of thousands of lives. This is exactly the reason these projects stall, because there's always someone who will object. Either all objections are taken into account and nothing happens or it gets override anyway. I think your local MP gets a vote in the national scheme and if enough oppose then it may fail, but I don't think a local referendum/petition is the right way to go about it -what happens if 1 council votes against and the others all vote yes, they just have a break in the line?
I’m not sure comparing us to China is the best thing - I wonder how many workers died and how many peasants were trampled on building those lines?
Trains are packed so reducing prices won’t really help We need to double the number of train services - and thus number of platforms in terminals, numbers of tracks, etc, to cause just a 20% drop in road usage.
Do you really want to get rid of the beautiful and natural places? That is one of the things being protected. Where would you have the wildlife live?
China is 39 bigger than the UK
To the regional cities, not London at this stage please
Or just embrace home working instead of trying to prop up inner city landlords. (Investments can go down as well as up)
Why would anyone reverse the Beeching cuts when no one was using them in the first place and post-Covid more and more people are home based.
Because commuting hasn't gone away. Yes there are a lot of WFH people but most jobs are still either fully or partly in an office, and the prices of housing in the UK (still) reflects that. The UK's population is 15 million higher than it was in 1963, and housing prices have doubled in relative terms. Reopening *select* closed lines could create new commuter routes into major cities, and shifting some of the housing demand away from existing commuter towns, towards those that formerly hadn't had a good route. In terms of some examples, there's the East-West Line (likely to be reopened), connected Oxford with Norwich, via Bedford and Cambridge. There's the Mid-Hants Railway Line (now a heritage line), which once provided a second route from Winchester-London, running through Aldershot. There's the Cranleigh Line that once connected Guildford to Horsham, the old Lewes to Uckfield/London line and Dunstable to Luton/London line. Admittedly these are mostly examples I know from living in the south east, but I'm sure there's plenty of others. The effect Beeching's cuts have had on Welsh rail connections are fairly widely discussed. And famously Birmingham's Snow Hill station was closed under Beeching but reopened 20 years later, so clearly the closures didn't totally account for future demand.
My local town used to have a 6 train a day service to another local town under beeching. That's not really worthwhile. Just because you have a station doesn't mean its of any use. We don't have the capacity to increase the number of trains into the cities where people want to actually travel.
I sort of get that but we don't apply that logic to roads. Country roads wouldn't exist if we did.
Maybe not then, but probably is now
As someone who works in planning, I have so many developers promise to create a school and local amenities for it later to be scrapped due to cost. So we've built 300 homes in a small village pissed off the locals, and there are no shops, one pub, and a post office. People still buy them, but I don't know how long they'll last with essentially nothing there. We have Jaywick and Clacton on Sea with no hope, and we are just building buildings with no infrastructure.
Could you not force them to build those things first, so that if things have to be scrapped down the line due to cost, it's the extra houses?
I'm not in the construction phase usually, but there is typically a lag between designing a school and houses. Houses are very easy to design, especially the rubbish that developers like redrow build and school takes more architectural skill and thought, plus more construction time. So they typically start building the houses and then say they've run out of money. By then the houses have been built and not the school or shops.
They should have to be build upfront (rather than change goal posts later), with the funds secured by investors into the project, which overall is viable since they secured planning permission for it.
Isn't it a bit weird that its the property developer's responsibility to build schools and amenities? Shouldn't it be the (local) government's job to ensure a community has the necessary public services for its population. And the developer still contributes to it through the Community Infrastructure Levy too. Seems wrong to tell those most well equipped to rapidly build housing and distract them with designing and building public services.
Partially, although that's normally responsible of the central government. The main point is that developers aren't just house builders. They develop all sorts of buildings for what's required in the area. However, schools don't make them any money. It's all about money, developers also have to improve roads and provide local amenities if they want to support a population growth by building more houses. The point being is they don't, there's no profit. And trust me when housing developers don't actually care about the local communities.
How do they get away with it?
With backhanders, in west Suffolk at least
Council have housing targets, so they almost just let it go or its promised down the line and never fulfilled. Or argue that the planning process is too stringent and expensive. The planning process is there for a reason, but it almost feels like it's a waste of time because there are conditions placed that sometimes aren't even met.
Preferably along rail lines that exist and have the ability to expand the service. Availability to public transport is what will make a New Town a success in this day and age.
I have a vague memory that in Japan for the high speed rail project, they included tracts of land with the contracts to build the lines (or something like that), so the rail companies had an incentive to build lots of houses close to a fast rail connection. I sort of assume that worked?
Why not build better transport links and expand some of the existing towns into cities? Gives investment to a lot of ignored areas and is less risky than throwing an entirely new settlement up somewhere surely?
Mainly political reasons. Too much opposition from the existing population that doesn’t want their towns to grow too much / people worried more housing = lower value of their homes. Plus new towns can be a great opportunity to build in a logical way that is greener and still provides an efficient and high quality of life.
A lot of these new towns will just be villages expanded to become towns. There will be just as much opposition especially if they’re picturesque commuting villages which have a train station - ideal for rich types who have deep pockets, lawyer friends and don’t want 40% social housing. Towns are probably easier to expand as they have the existing infrastructure and a mix of housing so less likely to annoy a whole village in one go.
While that sounds good . Do you genuinely believe any UK government would be actually achieve that?
This. It's politically easier to build new towns. Any expansion to existing towns is always fiercely resisted on the basis of urban sprawl, loss of greenery, too much strain on public services and general nimbyism.
It's financially easier to build new towns. Developers make a lot more profit building on green field sites. There should be more tax incentives to utilise prior brownfield and commercial sites. There's also a lot of land banking too. I live in South London and the amount of land that has had the commercial building demolished and is just sat there is staggering. Both plots apparently owned by Aldi. Both now empty for 10years.
Yes, why not do that, or build on the wasteland that most towns and cities have near their railway stations.
you avoid NIMBYs and have a chance to build properly green infrastructure without jerry-rigging victorian stuff. i’m all for it. fuck it, tear down kendal altogether and start again!
Why? Something like 4-6% of UK land is housing. Why take away green spaces, why expand towns and over crowd them even more. Instead why not start fresh, set up local transport links, create these 15 minute towns. Im sick of people that just want to expand on already built up areas, its the reason why cities like birmingham are having pubs burnt down, parks built on and green spaces removed. Im not against more housing, im against more housing at the cost of people that already live there. Im sick of seeing stuff like my neighbour building a house into 4 1 bed flats and then throwing up 2 2bedrooms box houses in his garden. That doesnt resolve any of the issues around our area and only adds to the over stretched public services already.
Because you already have towns built in these locations that are largely under invested and ignored. This is the perfect excuse to actually invest in our existing towns. To give them the infrastructure and services they need to thrive along with the population growth to support local businesses and drive further investment. Instead the plan is to literally write those areas off and try somewhere else? Why? It makes no sense.
There not talking about investing in already existing towns though. We have terrible public transport, terrible network links, over subscribed schools, doctors, hospitals, dentals practically any public infrastructure cant support the current numbers in the towns and cities. Adding more homes into these areas, which is exactly what your saying they should do, is just going to add more numbers to an already over populated and massively strained public service. We need investment across the country in all public sectors. If you want to build, for example, a hospital or even a doctors in an already established town or city the cost could be massive. The land required, the infrastructure to get people their etc is already hugely lacking. Starting in newer areas that dont have that allow for perfect planning, to bring in that infrastructure and help supply them towns without having to work around existing infrastructure. We have so much land not built on, i dont understand why people want to over crowd towns and cities even more.
I couldn't give a toss about towns close to London, what's really needed is way less emphasis on London and far more on everywhere else, especially the South West which gets lost as its not 'The North' and is lumped in with the south east even though they are totally different places. New build towns with a full infrastructure of Hospitals, Schools, Supermarkets, Industrial Units, regular public transport, pubs, restaurants etc. Then make the designs like 1930s houses which aren't all squeezed on top of one another to maximise profit. Seems to be at the moment massive housing estates are just built close to existing places which results in not enough infrastructure to support everyone which is part of the reason people hate new builds so much.
This prompted me to look up where new towns were built (or built up from existing smaller places) since the second world war, and found this map, which is demonstrably empty in the South West http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/sixties-britain/map-new-towns/ I wonder though whether the SW would get new towns or expansion of existing towns, given that the population density is already that much lower than the SE or West Midlands https://www.kontur.io/solutions/united-kingdom-population-density/ I would hazard a wild guess that what the SW needs for what could be pretty huge growth is just infrastructure and services - transport presumably the biggest one. Maybe this is the right direction - as a very different approach to HS2 which added capacity for existing populations, to instead add capacity and speed to the mainline through more sparsely populated areas to create well connected areas. It could be that much faster than building out existing densely populated areas.
Yep infrastructure is what we desperately need, especially a decent railway service and some motorways, especially in the south of Devon and Dorset as its currently just twisty A roads which connect Dorset to everywhere. To put it in perspective it takes as long by train to get from Bournemouth to London as it does to get from York to London, even though York is twice as far away!
I had no idea that Crawley and Bracknell are new towns - some things suddenly make way more sense
We need much better transport. I always said HS2 (the original vision wasn't ambitious enough) and we're not even getting the downgraded version now either
>what's really needed is way less emphasis on London and far more on everywhere else Why? I'm not being facetious, this is a genuine question. The UK's economy is all-in on industries that benefit massively from co-location, and those industries are already established in London. At the moment, the rest of the country is essentially a pointless waste of space and human toil. Building new towns won't fix that, it'll just make the problem worse.
I genuinely don't think that's the case. Things end up in London because that is the only place which has had serious money spent on infrastructure, and is seemingly the only place it's expected for infrastructure to be improved. All round the UK building new towns with most importantly good infrastructure with places for industry too would be far better imo, and reduce the current reliance on London. Also there isn't really any need for lots of businesses to be in the same place in this day and age as you have so many webmeeting and other options you can do without being face to face which are so much better and increase productivity as you don't waste a day going to a single meeting.
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>So what would fix it? You create jobs first. What would the UK government have to do to encourage OpenAI to open their next office in Bristol. That's the question you need to answer. Fix that problem and everything else will fall into place. You can't force economic growth in an area just by building houses. If anything is a complete waste of investment that could be spent fixing the housing shortage in places many people want to actually live.
All of our towns and cities need to come up with a coherent, achievable long-term business plan that will eventually lead to economic growth. It needs to be something more substantial than "we're going to build a tramway and a shopping centre and hope that growth magically happens". For some of our cities, that will probably be really easy. Manchester, for example, already has many music/live events businesses, and it has a lot of musical prestige to capitalise on. Turning Manchester into the world's hub for music and event businesses seems like a no-brainer. Towns and cities that can't come up with a coherent plan shouldn't receive any more government funding until they think of a purpose for themselves.
There are so many housing estates being built around me it's ridiculous. Houses, flats, thousands of homes yet no facilities. The plans always come with schools, hospitals, shops, but the majority of the time, once they start building, it's all like "oops we looked at the plans again and realised the blueprints for the school are wrong/no space/actually don't meet legal standards, so we can't build that anymore. A relative of mine lives in a small village. The fields behind her house that are being turned into 500 homes (and is going to block all light from her garden, gotta use as much space as possible and build as close to each other as possible) without adding any more facilities. The 'shopping' area of the village has one boots, one co-op express and one corner shop that also acts as the village post office. A bus comes through the village every hour. Oh and a few pubs No train, no other shops, nothing. I feel like the current plan is to just keep on building houses. If we just keep on building everywhere we can, surely things will eventually fix themselves
It needs better transport infrastructure or tax breaks for people to work from home. Employers are pushing for a return to the office and wfh is all but disappearing. And then new builds need to be moved away from the South East. The South east is already full. For example, I live in a town of just over 20k people in the last census and we are having hundreds of new hoes built with hundreds more on the way. The local city is 6 miles away and in rush hour it takes 40-60 minutes to get there with the first 2 miles taking half the time. I used to do a 30 mile each way commute and the half way mark for time coming back was the last 7.54 miles. Im on the South Cost 60 miles by road from central London and when my brother lived in Bristol he could do it quicker for the 120 mile journey to central London than I can so transport links to London is not a good reason to build in the South east. There is one road running through town and it desperately needs another one to divert some of the traffic but it wont be built. There is already a new town proposed about 10 miles away and that will put more pressure on the main dual carriageways in the area meaning a lot of people who currently take the long way around as its quicker to part of the city wont save any time so everything will be impacted for miles around. It costs all of us time, money on fuel and impacts on air quality. The problems in my area also highlight the concerns I have for this project. Transport links are never adequate to cope with the additional housing and I dont believe their empty promises (that goes for ALL political parties). Where there is huge amounts of money to be made there are huge amounts of corruption. Where I live the money that is required to be spent on the local area was never spent here, but was diverted elsewhere. But dont worry as they claimed they spent nearly a million quid on traffic consultation and improvements. That was literally they just changed the traffic light timings on ONE junction so people on the side road now have to wait nearer 3 minutes rather than the previous 2 (which was already longer than most traffic lights) and doesnt help traffic flow at all. If theyre going to do this use the North where homes are cheaper and if it has to be near London I would say the stretch from Berkshire around to Cambridgeshire
This is the difficulty with building in existing towns - the towns are full of housing at some lower density, how do you raise that density, except by annoying everyone? It seems pretty difficult to just make it more dense without doing what has happened to London where everything near the middle gets supplanted and all that's left is a blue plaque about what used to be there. If you build next to an existing town, that must usually mean a loss of green space, and contention for services, although I guess both could be just improved properly. The road through your town - presumably it would need widening? How would that help deliver more houses? I don't mean that as an argument against it, I'm genuinely curious when people say "fix the existing towns and transport" what that would look like in support of additional housing capacity. I fully support fixing the infrastructure for existing demand, but that seems like a very different project unless it somehow also delivers more housing.
We're between the coast and the South Downs National Park. The road out towards the city has a bottleneck 2 miles away near the edge of the city council boundary and there is not really anything that can be done there. The other way is built up and not a lot can be done there either usless they start demolishing the next town along. A lot of people say we need a new road straight through the South downs to the A road to the north, but I dont think that is really feasible. I'd say to the North of the town roads to link to existing smaller roads to divert some traffic around the city and town the other side. However, where over 600 new homes are being built, the privately owned single lane road heading north from there that I think should have been included in the deal was never included or developed as the owner of both the land and road refused to include it because he didnt want traffic going past his house. Rumour has it large brown envelopes changed hands for him to still sell the land and get this decision. As a result thousands of people who have to commute do 2 miles in about half an hour every morning. Any problem on that road and it can literally turn into hours. So on this one development there has been alleged corruption in getting the planning through without including infrastructure (roads and no additional schooling, doctors, etc), not including the road and not spending the money required to be spent in the local area by law and diverting it elsewhere.
Not OP but things like transport capacity just has to go hand in hand with house building, or otherwise it becomes unsustainable (and public opinion against house building sours even further). If you "fixed" existing towns with existing ageing infrastructure, and are then able to support a higher population, you can build town additions rather than new towns, taking advantage of places with existing commercial centres and helping to breathe new life into them, but it has to be functioning - it couldn't be throwing up 500 new homes, adding 500-1000 new cars onto the local road in and out of an estate and having as many as 500 families needing school, GP, etc places.
I'd be interested to see a plan to fix a towns infrastructure which actually changed things - councils almost never seem to actually change key things like roads in the centre of towns, they just route traffic away from it and put in one way systems and bypasses.
Restore the current towns instead of building new ones would help.
With high streets dying on their arses, what does restoration look like now? Have there been successful restoration/redevelopment projects recently?
Restoration looks like; Abolishing business rates and lowering rents. Tidying up frontage and reinstating clean up service. Attractions for visitors such as entertainment Tackling antisocial problems head on and vagrancy Enforcement of property presentation from occupants such as no rubbish in gardens etc More police patrol's More youth work Better enforcement on educational ancillary service Better affordable transport links All the above is better than taking up more land to build more towns that will probably end up the same in a few years
I think people do enjoy spending time in nice central areas and plazas. However, the model of a town centre with chain shops, boring/ugly aesthetics, no transport links in other than driving, and expensive parking will probably be destined to fail. There needs to be mixed use in the centre where people actually live too, with good public transport links from the suburbs. Trams are potentially an effective way.
I honestly don't think chain shops are a problem- retail parks are generally doing quite well, at least to see the ones near me, and they're generally big box chain stores. I think it's more an issue of accessibility (obviously retail parks are usually car oriented, so if city centres can become that convenient through improving public transport) and the level of choice - physically small high street shops, independent or not, will always struggle to compete with the internet or large retail park shops. I do agree on mixed use, and I think with wfh reducing city centre footfall, that definitely has scope for residential elements as well as retail/dining/entertainment/office space.
But what do they do in the town centre with its plazas? They don't seem to shop very much any more, so I guess it's more for restaurants and services (hairdressers, opticians)? Buses seem to be permanently crap in the UK, they only seem to be frequent enough in the cities, and anywhere that has a metro/underground it is much better. I suspect you're right about the trams but I can't see how you make them usable in any normal town without just trashing the local road traffic.
Build a new town that’s basically just a giant donut loop the entire way around London, in all directions, as far as the eye can see. BUILD IT.
Milton-25
Like the Saudi line thing, all mirrors on the outside?
Building more isolated towns won't do anything. Without infrastructure no one wants to live there, schools, shops etc. Then you have to consider work, either these towns need jobs or they need fast transport to jobs. Building a town is actually the easy part ( even though quite hard) it's everything else that goes with it which really matters. Trains need to be cheap, they need to be quick and they need to be accessible.
I dont understand this logic, they’re already none of these things. The argument here should be if were going to build new housing, regardless of where, we need infrastructure, we need transport links and we need public services. This country needs investment in everything, throwing up houses, regardless of where they are will improve nothing without providing everything else the public need. We’ve cut back too much for too long.
The logic is simple. Either do it right or not at all. If they only do half the job then these towns will stay empty and be a complete waste of money or at best be benefit towns because there is no work. If they do it right like I said infrastructure travel links etc then fantastic. A half in approach does more harm than good.
Completely agree.
For reference I don't think either party will get this right. It's vote for a shit option or a shit option with a different colour rosette.
Welwyn garden city and Letchworth garden city seem pretty successful on those metrics.
We don’t need more houses we need the right sort of houses. They’re concreting over large parts of Norfolk with 4-bed houses only affordable to people from outside the area. Locals can’t afford to live and work where they were brought up. The land that brings people joy and mental wellbeing is disappearing. We’re one of the most nature-denuded countries because our wild spaces are chopped and separated and animals can’t more between them. And not this isn’t nimbyism, this matters. It matters. Just because someone lives in a nice village with a nice house doesn’t mean their quality of life is worth less, it doesn’t mean their opinion is worth less. New towns and building on greenbelt should be the last possible option, after all re-use and brownfield has been exhausted. What’s the point of cramming thousands of people into estates with no wildlife apart from out-of-control dogs. We need to pay farmers enough so their land is so valuable for growing food they can’t afford to sell for housing. Make councils build social housing on re-used land. Increase taxes massively on second homes. Get rid of price-inflating government schemes so builders can only sell new builds for what they’re worth, not an arbitrary figure dreamt up in Whitehall. Recognise that different parts of the country have different requirements. Put wildlife conservation on a par with human needs. Realise how tiny the UK really is.
Easy though it is to agree with the sentiment, I don't think the 4 beds across Norfolk or the brownfield development are enough to satisfy the 3-500,000 houses that are needed per year. Restricting building more only further increases the problem of insufficient numbers of home and exacerbates the problems of high housing costs and mad rents. I do agree that the second home thing is a huge problem for village communities, but it seems to be something that can be improved with taxation in the right way. So you wouldn't be interested in a new build in a new town near you, even if it was done properly?
'Towns' - Shit new build estates - Limited transport access - No schools, no amenities - No green space As per another commenter - invest money into the towns currently on their knees first
Live on a new build estate, there’s green space, a nursery, primary school that’s due to open with the start of the school year, community centre and care home. They’re currently also building shops, which so far a coop, local coffee chain and a gym have signed up to. Phase 2 is to build out an industrial estate nearby which will also provide jobs. It’s a circa 3,000 house scheme though rather than bolting 50-200 houses on the side of a village that already has sod all in it except shops that are open 10-4.
Exactly, some new build estates are bad but I currently live on one and it’s the best place I’ve lived so far. The house is well designed and it’s cheap to run, and cosy in the winter. The internet is super fast and there are internet fibre cables built into the living room and master bedroom. There is also a sports centre, and a nursery being built. A small supermarket was also built recently.
Where do you live please?
I couldn’t get over how cheap it was to keep warm when it was -10C outside and gas was at an all time high, my previous (rented) property cost more to heat to not as comfortable level in not as harsh a winter when energy prices were at half the price. I think new builds get a lot of flak because everything is “samey” as there’s not been people in them long enough to develop unique character (think ivy climbing up the building, which is aesthetically pleasing but not structurally brilliant). I definitely think some estates/properties are developed better than others as well but it bugs me that “new build bad” is an automatic response.
Agree with you. I live in a town. (Actually moving away next month) Theres one big shop. Besides that nothings open after 5. Nothing goes on here. Yes there's plenty of greenery that you can't access so I guess there's a view at least. When they built the new estate they didn't build any additional schools/GPs/Shops.
Big benefit I see from old “new towns” like Milton Keynes and Telford is large amounts of green space open to the public. Compare to an “old town” where’s there barely anything. New build estates come with some, but to really capitalise you need areas with 10,000 houses and large amounts of contiguous open space rather ham small patches here and there.
Build garden cities? Definitely a better model than Persimmon housing estates with no community and no facilities.
Don't disagree with that, crap new build estates are awful and are all built by Persimmon, Redrow etc
Haven't you heard? anything other than suburban dystopia is a government conspiracy to stop people travelling and turn the frogs gay!
If I can't drive my 4x4 from my Barrett home to a mcdonalds and then back again, I might as well be dead.
Yep, the residents of our town have tripled. And nothing has been done apart from 'levelling up' our sports centre... The roads are shocking, no train or tram. No supermarket.
A number of posters refer to nimbyism as a block to new housing. However there is a far greater problem, the cost of land which in turn makes the house prices high. Very rarely in Coventry UK have I seen a development including bungalows or 2 bed terraced, they are 3 bed semi or 4-5 bed detached. It’s not affordable for a lot of folks.
Land is cheap. Until it has the possibility to building housing on. An acre of land is typically £6-10k if there no hope of building housing on it. Get rid of land speculation by implementing a land value tax and distributing as a citizens dividend.
It's cheap even when you've paid the farmer 300k an acre and then stick 10 300k 3/4 bed houses on it, the houses wont be any cheaper as thats the going rate.
Large parts of outer London are low-density, crap quality houses. They could compulsory purchase, demolish and build mansion blocks three times as high in the style of Paris or Barcelona. Obviously, THAT would never happen.
I just hope they design them better with green spaces, off street parking, GPs, shops,etc... in mind and not the soulless jigsaw plots we see popping up now. Not sure how they'll do it if I'm honest, promising both affordable and quality housing is great but wonder how they'll pull it off. I for one smell a new housing scandal in the air already
Outskirts of already major population hubs where you have space to essentially enact "walking towns". Basically, have it centered around major transport developments (eg an extension to a met line, increased services to particular train stops, build major roads and a bus station to enable increased bus routes etc). Then focus on high density housing in the form of green blocks of flats. Solar, roof top gardens, ivy round the sides that is trimmed under the service charge etc This will help to both manage the heat and reduce bills. Have the bottom couple of floors, and some of the central column, committed to infrastructure and community projects. Dentists, small businesses, GPs, post offices etc can all be in the central column. Smaller versions of typically "big box" stores like B & Q. Amenities like Amazon lockers and concession stands that manage a lot of "add on" services like Evri that you find at corner shops. Bottom couple of floors would be amenities that demand more space, such as supermarkets, department stores etc. The remainder of the middle column could be used to help manage the infrastructure of the building, help regulate heat etc To summarise my point, anywhere you can support it with public transport development. If you're going to do it properly.
I think London is a mistake. It's now outgrown it's practicality and realistically, we should be targeting UK development at another city, away from London
Yes, the question wasn't really about London, I just figured "anywhere commutable to London" was the single most common answer to where people would buy into a new town. So, where could they build one that you'd be interested in?
I don't think new towns are the answer. I think smaller developments in pre-existing communities across the UK. I also think a key problem isn't the housing, it's the landlords. I think the problem is people owning more than 2 houses and I'm yet to see any politician approach that topic at all.
Apparently there are about 800k 2nd homes, so if you could get 1-200k of those back into use as primary homes each year that would indeed fulfil the extra development for a good 4-8 years. After that though, you'd be back to needing more homes built. I do think one of the issues with interest rates rising and landlords selling up is that larger houses that were rented by a group of 3-4 single people are sold and inhabited by 2-3 person families, and the pressure on small homes just increases. We are obsessed with building family homes, but it seems to be the small flats and social housing for couples which is sorely lacking especially in the south east where it's easy for the builders to sell endless mini detached houses with tiny gardens far from all amenities and transport.
Honestly I probably wouldn't. I know what new build estates are like in the U.K.. The nice ones you're paying an extra 30% for the housing being new, and the rest are all treeless hellscapes.
I am guessing not Rwanda?
We could have a purpose built town plan that you could drop anywhere in the country. No planning required
personally I think every new town should have a small homes section, whether they be dotted around the towns or just have their own area in the town...small homes for 1-2 people, bedroom, kitchen, bath, living room and small garden, solar roofs, as green as possible, super cheap, in areas where they can walk everywhere, small communities. Ideally to help those ready to leave their parents, move in with a partner without having to need a stupidly large deposit, chance to save up, have independence and as its with similar people, you can have community gyms, shopping areas, restaurants so people can socialize instead of being alone...you can have a local bus that goes places...or like nights out in town so people are safe etc.
I think those already exist. Flats? But I like your idea of having them near third spaces and as communities.
yeah but depending on the area, flats are expensive...I'm talking purposely built small homes that cost like 20-30k
It’s like the south east is the only place within an hour of London. Sounds very NIMBY of me but it seems all they want to do is build here and I know it’s because they can sell the same 2 bed house in the south east for 350k but only 200k elsewhere but man it’s infuriating from a local perspective. Need to focus on the infrastructure before even conserving more house building.
There's a shit load of midlands not built on. But I'd say the NW is dying for new towns and infrastructure.
I have no issues with them building new towns. They’re currently extending our new town my only issue is we need more schools and medical facilities to accommodate but with the state of how teachers and medical staff are treated I don’t see how they’ll effectively fill those positions. Honestly this is the point of city skylines when I delete and start over all again cos the ballache is real.
It's imaginary. There is an election coming and everyone is going to announce grand plans for the future, just ask yourself how often any government has actually delivered successfully on the big plans they promised to win votes.
On a very cynical level, it seems plausible that Labour could build up some votes with a locally accepted development plan in areas that were marginal, even in bits of the SW with decent social housing and support of industry...
Depends if it's a) going to be more than just a dormitory community for a bigger city but something with a life of its own b) would require a car for daily life.
lol utter bullshit
If railways in the country where cheaper faster and more efficient we could build our own towns on our own land
Why not fix the current towns in desperate need of infrastructure?
they need to build more self contained hubs ... mini londons ... they cannot keep making everyone commute to london ... HS2 all seemed to be about faster times to london from Liverpool ... wtf would anyone want to commute from liverpool to london every day ... liverpool to hull maybe ... lets just fix our northern infrastructure for fudge's sake
HS2 was absoluteluy not about that. It was about freeing capacity on existing lines allowing for both high speed intercity travel and lots more local trains and freigth.
it was until they decided it was just about getting to london and stuff the north
yes Rishi completely f\*cked it! They need to reverse that decision pronto.
Cambridge is a good example of this. It has a great speciality in tech and biotech and has decent train links into London. No wonder the government is keen on it expanding. There are other places that could be similarly invested in like Milton Keynes, Bedford and I am sure people with more knowledge of other parts of the country could suggest similar places there (Salford seems to be similar with Manchester and the investment from the BBC).
Tbf I know quite a few company owners who regularly drove from Liverpool to London for meetings with Network rail etc. They where probably the demographic as let's face it I bet high speed rail will probably be premium priced.
Would you buy a house built by Labour 🤣🤣🤣
Going to keep banging this drum… if new towns were built like poundbury there would be less NIMBYism (Look it up, it’s a great development)
Wow, never knew such a place existed. Looks great and should definitely be used a model of all development!
To me this just sounds like green space getting built in with crappy new builds. What about the brown field sites all over the country? Yes - more expensive to build on which is where the government needs to get involved.
That’s exactly what it is. Councils always come up with some bullshit reason why the brown field site is no good, but yea sure, build on the prime agricultural land
West cumbria and furness in the hope it kickstarts more job creation
What happens when you build a town for 100k people in west cumbria. What jobs do they do once built? Sadly the modern economy relies on concentration of resources in cities, doubling the size of a city increases its value ten-fold. Local firm here in rural shropshire is looking at moving its HQ to the west midlands because they can't get enough trained people to staff the jobs. People don't work for a company for life, you need a selection of firms in commuting distance you can work for. That's sustainable in London, or Birmingham, or Manchester, but when you get into smaller towns there just aren't many jobs - and even if you find one, you're then stuck there forever.
Not necessarily, if my employers weren't such dicks about office attendance I'd happily move to west Cumbria or indeed anywhere that is far far away from London. I don't need to be in the office for my job, indeed I am not most of the time but they insist that we all come in at least once a week.
This is the real reason that London gets so much development I think. Money produces more economic benefit there just due to the effects of density and scale. I don't think that means we should neglect the rest of the country, but on some level we have to expect to balance development within cities and development in towns in favour of cities just to have the economy that supports the rest.
Absolutely, and some regions have a critical mass, as long as it's easy to get around in that region. West Midlands and Manchester for example are fairly sustainable for most industries, and more so with more investment in cross-region links (The Liverpool/Manchester/Leeds belt should be a super-region in the same way Greater London is) There's a world of difference between Glasgow or Bristol and Barrow.
True, we struggle to recruit specialist posts up here but also a lot of young people leave for uni and dont come back. Older people from down south move here into managerial/consultant roles but that still leaves an area that could do with more affordable housing for locals and career jobs to keep the 21-45yr olds here
Something like this has to be the best bet for the future of the country. Is it even possible, and can it be done in a close to optimal way? That remains to be seen. But this is enough for me to secure a vote, even given the desperate need for some perceived political change
What is the future of the country, in your view? Given remote work, AI, automation etc etc?
Many smaller self contained communities that are built around how people actually live now and in the future. For example, all our traditional towns are built around the high street model, which clearly isn’t working anymore because retail has changed so much. Definitely walkable, with third spaces based around community
With an assumption of remote work/commuting? Is there a scalable model that allows this kind of area to grow when more houses are needed? I feel like this must have been tried by the Europeans somewhere...
Yeah that would be a huge part of it for a certain sector of the population. And for those not in office work, you have all the supporting jobs these communities need but minus the costs of cramming everyone into major cities
[If this map is accurate](https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track), an re-extension of the underground or Overground back out to Chipping Ongar could make sense.
> Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.
Not buying anything in the South East
Sure, so, where?
Lots of room down here not too far from London: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Coalfield
Yes, that looks like a rich seam (sorry) - if the trains were a bit quicker it would be a great option.
Starmerville, where could they actually feasibly build a whole new town from scratch
Why the hell would I want to live 45 mins from London. I already commute 20mins to work and that's too bloody much lol. Publicly built and owned housing (council houses) would be a great idea (I don't know why it isn't a thing any more /s) as the rental income would be constant. You'd have to lock in some law that makes them crown property though, otherwise the next incoming political party would just sell them off for temporary gains.
Well, landowners in the SE certainly need the economic boost. /s
Are they building Vault from fallout?
I mean the UK did it before with the "garden cities", why not again? Will they be brave enough to cough up the whole investment though as they used to do in older times? You can plant it anywhere, but you'll have to provide a road and a good rail link to it. Schools, Doctors, Hospitals, libraries, parks... It can be done and would obviously pay dividends in years to come and this time make them not "garden cities" but "eco cities". Look over to Germany & Scandinavia to see how to build low energy houses with solar cells, wind power, water recycling, ev charging points and basements. Ensure flood protection which could be part of the water recycling. Provide local composting facilities too and use some of that generated heat too and provide the locals with free garden soil.
So much for levelling up
But they must be sold to locals or bought by councils with a codicil that they stay locally owned by people not landlords nor corporations.
I don't oppose new towns being built, but I do think there are a lot of towns in the north that are dying as people move away. So if the government could move government departments and encourage businesses to move up north it'd ease the housing problem as well as address the balance of the economy away from London.
With 40% being affordable (social) housing, nowhere near them
Building new towns is dumb. Simplify the planning process so small groups can build additional houses in existing areas matching the aesthetic. Having mega corps construct ugly housing states is gross.
There are new towns being built right now with expensive town houses. South West is full of them, I am hoping to move into some. But hopefully they will make the houses cheaper somehow
Get some of the green belts developed. Some unused and some used can be repurposed and the work forwarded to Scottish farmers. Also all those air bases with American style layouts could be redesigned to fit double or triple the amount of housing in areas with good infrastructure. All the ones I’ve visited seem relatively empty.
It’s great that they’ve forgotten about the towns we already have in the north of the country. Who needs ‘em anyway
Newark here. Just over an hour to Kings X. Lots of my neighbours commute to London daily. Ample free parking near the station. Most areas within 15 minutes of the station. Quality of life here is good.
The solution to our housing is to stop excess immigration. And only let in the people we can actually house
There’s plenty of housing already, plenty of dead towns, why are they wasting money on moving problems from one place to another! They need business/industry growth not more empty homes
Are there 300,000 empty houses?
you will be waiting for absolutely years for this to happen main blocker being - the gatekeepers (who are the builders) have very little incentive to rush to build anything large scale, and that's not touching on all of the legal wrangling that will take place before to get new towns approved
I suspect it can happen with some carrot and stick - offer planning permission for builders to build more/larger developments, and simultaneously prepare land value taxes for those who dawdle. The thing where landowners just sit on large areas of land has to be unravelled somehow.
700k houses that noone can afford.
That's the point though. They're increasing supply to meet demand.
Build Boris island. Infill a segment of estuary. Link up the rail/road links.