The UK government is pressing ahead with plans for a new generation of new towns to tackle the housing crisis. The details are still emerging, but the direction of travel is clear: large-scale planned settlements, focused on sustainability, “gentle density” and transport links.
The reasons are straightforward. Labour wants to build 1.5 million homes and is already behind target. A handful of large developments are easier to manage than thousands of smaller ones.
None of this is new.
Britain has done this before. The original post-war new towns, created under the New Towns Act 1946, were designed to tackle housing shortages, overcrowding and industrial decline. Stevenage was the first, quickly followed by a wave of planned communities across the country.
In many ways, the new towns were to housing and planning what the NHS was to healthcare and the welfare state was to poverty: an ambitious attempt to use government to solve deep social problems.
Among them were a number of settlements in the North East, including Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe. Over the next few weeks, I will be revisiting these communities, alongside places such as Killingworth, and Billingham.
These places do not enjoy a good reputation.
They are often portrayed as dowdy, unfashionable and left behind. When they appear in the national media at all, it is usually as shorthand for decline — places of boarded-up shops, social problems and the kind of political anger that supposedly breeds support for Reform UK.
But there is a puzzle here.
Because what I found in County Durham was, frankly, rather good.
I should declare an interest. I grew up in Garden Farm, near Chester-le-Street. It was not technically a new town, but it was built at much the same time and according to many of the same principles. New towns feel like home to me. The municipal optimism — even the planned socialism — that inspired them sits comfortably with my own politics.
And the housing has stood up remarkably well.
Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe are not architectural masterpieces, but they work. The estates are clean, spacious and surprisingly well maintained. The landscaping, generous by modern standards, has matured beautifully. There is little of the neglect often associated with post-war estates.
In truth, some of this is among the best post-war housing I have visited.
But the new towns were never just about housing.
They were designed around work as well as homes, built near major roads and industrial estates to provide employment. And this is where the story becomes genuinely surprising.
Newton Aycliffe Industrial Estate is one of the largest industrial estates in Britain, supporting hundreds of companies and thousands of jobs. Major employers such as Hitachi Rail, Gestamp and Cummins anchor a manufacturing cluster that extends far beyond the town itself. For a settlement of around 27,000 people, it is one of the clearest examples in Britain of a planned employment town functioning more or less as intended.
Peterlee tells a similar story. Its industrial estates continue to provide thousands of jobs, with employers including Caterpillar, NSK and the rapidly expanding SeAH Wind operation.
Business, in short, is booming.
Which raises an awkward question.
If the housing broadly works, and the employment base remains surprisingly strong, why do places like Peterlee have such a poor reputation? Why have some become fertile territory for parties such as Reform UK?
The answer, I suspect, lies in something harder to measure.
The public realm has deteriorated. Shopping centres feel tired. High streets have emptied. But the problem runs deeper than aesthetics.
In the old pit villages, social life was dense and interconnected. There were brass bands, allotments, leek clubs, miners’ galas, welfare halls and community organisations of astonishing richness. County Durham produced not only miners but artists, writers and musicians. The Spennymoor Settlement was world-class. I should know — this is me as a teenager playing the tuba.
Work and social life overlapped. People laboured together, socialised together and often looked after one another.
That world has weakened.
Increasingly, the people using town centres are retired, long-term sick or disconnected from the labour market. Meanwhile, many of the people working on industrial estates commute in from elsewhere. Employment survives, but the social ecosystems that once surrounded it have frayed.
The empty shops reflect a deeper emptiness.
Politics, too, has changed. People once encountered political ideas through trade unions, clubs, churches, neighbours and workplaces. Today, much of local political life arrives via Facebook feeds optimised for outrage.
This helps explain one of the stranger features of modern County Durham: widespread anger about immigration in places where many people rarely encounter migrants or asylum seekers directly. Political beliefs are increasingly shaped online rather than through lived experience.
But there is something deeper going on too.
Pit villages combined an odd mix of left-wing economics and social conservatism. My grandfather was to the left of Karl Marx on economic policy and to the right of Bernard Manning on social issues. This was not unusual.
These were practical, solidaristic communities — suspicious of ideology, fiercely loyal to their own, but often deeply conformist. Looking after one another extended most easily to people who felt familiar.
The socialism has faded. The social conservatism, in many places, remains.
But stripped of its social institutions — the clubs, unions, workplaces and everyday solidarities that once softened its edges — it has curdled into something harder and angrier.
That, perhaps, is the real paradox of County Durham’s new towns.
The buildings survived. The jobs often survived.
What disappeared was the social fabric that made communities feel like communities in the first place.
I used to go to Peterlee college back in the early 90’s when it was on Yoden Way, its town centre was always lively, had a busy market and no boarded-up shops at all. Lots of Seaham kids (and I presume surrounding schools) went to Peterlee college; there was no 6th form for us, Peterlee was the go to for your A-Levels and BTEC’s.
How times have changed.
I went to Peterlee over the Christmas period, I remember walking down the high street thinking to myself Lee House looked like it might have snipers nest in it somewhere. I did my work experience in that building – The Prudential.
People from Peterlee and the surrounding villages point to a lack of investment for the reason for the decline, they point to Seaham as an example of what can be done. The thing is, Seaham has had some money spent on it, but Seaham also has things that attract visitors like its beaches and a seafront, a marina, places to eat, bars, and a 5 star hotel with a spa. Seaham or at least the harbour area is pleasing to the eye.
I’m not sure what you could do with Peterlee town centre, would a big investment really make people return to it? Times have changed, Peterlee town centre has to compete with Hartlepool, Seaham, Sunderland, Durham, Dalton Park and other out of town retail outlets. At one point in time there was a reason to go there, it had better shops than the surrounding areas, an alternative to Sunderland or Hartlepool, but now thats not the case. It needs a new purpose, but what that is, I don’t know.
I think a lot of town centres have been ruined by commercial landlords (in Peterlee that would be Praxis Retail) who overpaid for retail property during the Blair-era boom, and now charge too much rent for their units to find tenants, as cutting the rent would devalue their property to the extent that it would put them in negative equity.
It looks though as though the former shops in the enclosed section of the Chare and Upper Chare (all of which have now closed) are planned to be converted to flats: will this help by putting residents in amongst the shops, which as a result will no longer be dependent on the custom of car-based shoppers who could just as easily go elsewhere: any thoughts on this?
I used to work for Northern Rock, they didn’t like properties above or next to businesses, and if the property was a flat with a walkway it was always declined, the reason being is that they are very hard to sell. So I’d presume if they were to be converted to flats they would be social or owned by Praxis.
The problem is nobody would want to live in them, and anyone that had the choice, would choose not to. That means anyone that did live in them, would be doing so out of necessity. I’d guess they would attract people that would be seen as ‘undesirable’ by the community, and could have further negative consequences for Castle Dene.
I don’t think you can blame the rise in anti-immigration sentiment in County Durham entirely on social media: for example my own mother never uses social media but is nevertheless bewildered as to why I’m so afraid of the rise of Reform UK (she once said to me something like “the way you’re going on is as if you think they’re Nazis or something!”).
Rather it’s my understanding that Durham’s pit villages have seen a great influx of newcomers: not immigrants from abroad (they go to places with genuine opportunities), but mostly poor people relocated from more prosperous parts of the country (especially London) by local authorities there seeking to free up housing.
This is likely to have fuelled the rise in Reform in two ways: non-white newcomers (into villages that until recently had been 100% white) are sure to have aggravated existing local racists, while white newcomers may well have been spreading racist ideas, especially if they believe they were kicked out of London in the first place to make room for (more productive) foreign immigrants.