The British New Towns by Meryl Aldridge

Author:Meryl Aldridge [Aldridge, Meryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138047549
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

The mechanisms

When the first generation of new towns began with carte blanche (principally the six around London named above) it quickly became clear that a choice would have to be made between accommodating people on the basis of their housing need, or on their employment situation. By 1949 the choice had been made in favour of a close link being maintained between housing and employment in the new towns. Holding a job with a local firm would take precedence over housing need. This conformed to the Abercrombie/Reith strategy, but deeply disappointed the inner metropolitan boroughs (as was touched on in chapter 3), which had hoped for a more direct avenue to alleviating their housing problems. Thus began a dispute about the rationale and dynamic of new towns that rumbles on still.

Once there was acceptance that housing in the new towns would depend upon employment, it was inevitable that the nature of migrating industry would determine the range of skills and income in all three groups of migrants: the ‘key workers’ of migrant firms, those who successfully negotiated the Industrial Selection Scheme (see below) as a solution to their housing need and those who independently obtained work and were thus eligible for housing. Students of new town development disagree as to whether there was a conscious effort to limit incoming firms to clean, modern technologies with a high demand for skilled staff. Heraud (1968, p. 40) concludes that development corporations were able to be highly selective in their choice of industry. His argument is based on an undated statement from the former chief executive of Crawley, but the large number of firms who ‘had discussions’ with Crawley (ibid.) may not have borne much resemblance to the number that wished then to move, or negotiated the steeplechase of government industrial-location policies and were able to move. The statement may well have been referring to a much later time in the development of Crawley. If it did not, no chief executive would publicly declare that the new town had to grab any mobile industry it could get its hand on, though some towns did have to do so, the most notorious example being Glenrothes and Cadco (see Thomas, 1969b, p. 931 for the whole cautionary tale).

The general position typified by Thomas (1969a, p. 386) seems to be a more accurate reflection of the process. In the earliest days of the new towns, any industry was gratefully received. Later on there was the opportunity for selectivity – but within a limited range. Mobile industry was characteristically in light engineering or advanced technology, with a highly skilled work-force and/or highly automated processes. Extractive and heavy industry are not mobile, nor at the outset was there much scope to develop unskilled and semi-skilled employment in the service industries, like retailing and catering. Many low-wage industries with an unskilled workforce were likely to be found operating on a shoestring in the central city, both unwilling and unable to invest in the move to modern and relatively expensive new town accommodation.

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