This is the second in a series looking at Britain’s post-war new towns and planned communities across the North East, in light of the Government’s decision to build more new towns. Last time I visited Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe, places that turned out to be rather better than their reputations suggest. This time the story shifts north to Newcastle and Killingworth, and to one of the most ambitious — and controversial — figures in post-war planning.
My earliest memory is playing with a toy police car.
I was sat at the living room window on Garden Farm in Chester-le-Street, pushing it up and down the windowsill, when an identical real police car pulled up outside. This, I thought, was magic.
Even better, a policeman got out, walked into my neighbour’s house and took him away in handcuffs.
He was chairman of the planning committee at Durham County Council, and he had been arrested in connection with bribes taken to approve the estate that he, and I, happened to live on.
This was the beginning of the Poulson scandal.
Garden Farm was never technically a new town, but it belonged to the same post-war planning logic. Built from the late 1950s onwards on farmland outside Chester-le-Street, it reflected the optimism of the period: planned housing, green space, separation from through traffic and the belief that government could build communities as well as homes.
That optimism shaped much of the North East.
The Poulson scandal centred on architect John Poulson, whose practice became deeply entangled with local government and planning in the 1960s and early 1970s. Poulson built a lucrative business designing civic buildings, housing estates and offices across northern England, but much of his success relied on systematic bribery of councillors, officials and politicians. Rapid post-war development created huge opportunities for anyone willing to bend planning systems in their favour.
When Poulson’s empire collapsed, it exposed a web of corruption stretching across local government and Parliament. Home Secretary Reginald Maudling resigned. Poulson himself was jailed in 1974.
My neighbour, it turned out, had approved some of the developments while sitting on Durham’s planning committee. He bore an unfortunate resemblance to the councillor in Get Carter, filmed just around the corner from where I went to school. He was a big neighbour, but out of shape. Being a neighbour is a full-time job.
But while Poulson became the symbol of corruption, the bigger figure in the North East story was T. Dan Smith.
Smith remains one of the strangest political figures the region ever produced. The son of a miner from Wallsend, he came from what people used to call the hard left and set about remaking Newcastle with a level of ambition British local politics rarely sees today.
He talked of turning Newcastle into a “Brasilia of the North” or a “Milan of the North”. Grandiose, certainly. But also oddly serious.
Today Smith is often remembered as the villain of the piece: corrupt, destructive, the man who bulldozed Newcastle’s architectural heritage for backhanders. Austin Donohue in Our Friends in the North was based heavily on him; the fictional embodiment of political vanity and corruption.
And yes, Smith was corrupt. He worked closely with Poulson, accepted bribes and eventually pleaded guilty in 1974, later claiming illness and exhaustion had pushed him into accepting a plea deal while surviving on “Valium and Carlsberg Export”.
But there is something uncomfortable about the modern verdict on T. Dan Smith.
He was also right.
Modern Newcastle — the commercial, cultural and shopping capital of the North East — owes far more to Smith than many people care to admit.
The Newcastle he imagined largely came into being.
My gran would always have shopped in Sunderland rather than Newcastle. Not because of some County Durham tribal loyalty, but because Sunderland genuinely had the better shops.
She adored Joplings. Her wardrobe was full of matching hat-and-coat combinations bought there, always perfectly coordinated in respectable shades of navy, beige or lilac. Add in Binns and Blacketts and Sunderland offered a kind of respectable provincial glamour Newcastle lacked.
That world has vanished. Blacketts closed in 1972. Binns disappeared in 1993. Joplings survived until 2010.
Meanwhile Newcastle steadily absorbed the economic gravity of the North East. Eldon Square transformed retail. The Metro made the city more accessible. Later the MetroCentre pulled shoppers from every corner of the region.
My gran’s world quietly disappeared with it. Today I don’t know anyone would choose Sunderland over Newcastle for shopping.
T. Dan Smith won.
Up the road from Newcastle is Killingworth. While Smith was remaking Newcastle, places like Killingworth were being built around it.
Designated as a new town in the 1960s, Killingworth embodied the optimism of post-war planning. Planned neighbourhoods, green space, family housing, civic infrastructure, separation of cars and pedestrians — all the same ideas that shaped Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe.
But Killingworth was different. Unlike the County Durham new towns, it was not built around heavy industry or a single major employer. It was designed in orbit around a city that planners believed would become a prosperous regional capital.
In many ways, Killingworth was built for a Newcastle that had not quite arrived yet.
Killingworth still bears the marks of that ambition. It is not the dystopian wasteland of lazy stereotypes. The housing has stood up well. There is greenery, space, evidence of thought. It still feels like somewhere designed by people who believed planning and architecture might improve ordinary lives.
But the social world Killingworth, Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe were built for slowly disappeared.
The first blow came under Thatcher. Places like Killingworth were designed around the assumption that people would work together, socialise together and build communities together. The post-war world was one of mass employment. Pits, shipyards, factories and engineering works did not simply provide wages; they provided purpose, identity and social life.
Brass bands, working men’s clubs, welfare halls, trade union branches, youth football teams, amateur dramatics — the institutions of everyday life rested on large groups of people sharing workplaces and routines.
When those industries disappeared, communities lost more than jobs, they lost the social world organised around them.
Even in places like Killingworth, which was not built around a single major employer in the way other new towns were, the wider regional economy changed. Stable working-class communities became more fragmented, less rooted, more uncertain.
The second shift came under Blair.
New Labour did many things well in the North East. Universities expanded. More young people went into higher education than ever before. Newcastle flourished. The Quayside regenerated, professional employment grew and the city increasingly became what T. Dan Smith had imagined decades earlier: a successful regional capital.
In one sense this was exactly the future post-war planners had hoped for.
Opportunity.
Mobility.
Prosperity.
But there was a catch.
To take advantage of those opportunities, people increasingly had to leave places like Killingworth and Peterlee. Like the pit villages before them, many of the young did not come back.
Only now they were not leaving for collieries or shipyards.
They left for Newcastle, or Manchester. Leeds. London. Jesmond. Heaton. Ouseburn. South Gosforth.
Newcastle itself increasingly sucked in graduates and professional talent from across the North East and beyond.
The people most likely to become councillors, organise fêtes, run youth clubs, coach football teams or simply sustain civic life increasingly built their lives elsewhere.
Newcastle prospered, places like Killingworth became commuter settlements orbiting a successful city.
Then came austerity.
If Thatcher weakened the social fabric and New Labour redistributed talent toward successful cities, austerity stripped away much of what remained.
Libraries closed. Community centres disappeared. Youth services vanished. Councils lost the funding that quietly held places together.
The state retreated just as communities had become more fragile.
This was when the social life of many post-war communities truly began to thin out.
And when people lose neighbours, it becomes easier to resent strangers.
Places with established immigrant populations tend to be relaxed about immigration because people actually know immigrants. They work together, become neighbours, see each other every day.
Places where the social realm has weakened are often different.
People retreat online.
Algorithms offer explanations, enemies and communities. The politics of resentment. But resentment is easiest when directed at people you never meet.
The tragedy of places like Killingworth is not that they failed. It is that they were designed for a kind of collective social life that Britain gradually dismantled.
The new towns were built around the assumption that people would work together, know each other, join clubs, raise families, argue in pubs and organise fêtes.
Instead many people now find their identities online, in communities built not on solidarity but grievance.
And yet, walking around these places sixty years later, I found something else too.
Evidence that some of the optimism remains, in tidy houses and neat green spaces.
