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  Harlow was to be 6,400 acres in size, and in 1946 consisted of four villages, containing a total of 4,000 people. A large house, Mark Hall manor, stood in the northeast corner of the designated area, and the development corporation had an eye on its land. Godfrey Arkwright, the landowner, wrote to Eric Adams, a member of the corporation, about vacating the area where his family had lived for 130 years for the sake of the new town. ‘It is a very, very sad moment for me … I’ve got criticisms about the new town, but I admit the necessity for these satellites.’ Despite his attachment to the house and the area where he’d grown up, Arkwright was loath to stand in the way of progress. ‘I hope that we can remain friends,’ he wrote.11

  ‘It’s the neighbourhood that best represents the Gibberd plan,’ enthused Museum of Harlow curator David Devine of the first area to be built, Mark Hall North, on the site of Godfrey Arkwright’s former land. ‘It was built with everything as he wanted it, the right size plots, the right sized gardens, the roads. Afterwards, as the town was being built, pressures were on the corporation from the government for the density and to build faster.’ In many ways, Mark Hall North is an undiluted glimpse of the vision the planners and architects had been nurturing all through the war. Large houses were set well back off the road behind vast verges, overlooking beautiful ‘green wedges’ where municipal lawns were interrupted by huge old trees growing in copses and playgrounds. Then there are the smaller, sparsely detailed red-and-yellow brick terraces that sit behind neat lawns on narrow, quiet roads. Even the smallest of these side roads feature grand old trees and expanses of grass. ‘The idea of the landscape wedges breaking up the housing wedges? Integral,’ explained David. Of all the new town planners, Frederick Gibberd was particularly fascinated by landscape architecture, and hired the mother of the modern form, Sylvia Crowe, to make the most of rural features such as wooded valleys within his design. Her influence was most expansively demonstrated by the Town Park that drifts in an unstructured way from the centre, a perfected wilderness as vast as any by Capability Brown. This all served to embody Gibberd’s theory about the best relationship between the buildings and the green spaces: ‘Housing, instead of being spread all over the town as a mixture of buildings and open space, was concentrated together in a more urban form. The land thus saved was added to the broad belts of landscape which separate one built up area from another.’12 The roads too were screened from the built up areas by dense banks of trees and shrubs. Green wedges would become one of the defining features of the early new towns. ‘To see children riding, playing with kites or chasing butterflies on those wedges in spring or summer is to see Gibberd’s vision bearing fruit, and a moving sight it is,’ wrote a journalist visiting for The Times.13 Although later areas in Harlow would be more densely packed, in Mark Hall North the green wedges were victorious.

  When I visited the south Wales new town of Cwmbran the green wedges were much in evidence there too. Retired planner Jim Griffiths led me through the neighbourhood of Coed Eva, where he and his wife Jo had lived in the early seventies. Although one of the later estates in Cwmbran, it bore many similarities to Mark Hall North, most obviously in the landscaping.

  ‘That area we walked through is pretty generous with greenery outside of gardens compared to any other residential estate I’ve ever been on,’ Jim commented later, when we were sitting in his kitchen.

  ‘It did mean you could have quite a small garden because of your vista,’ added Jo. ‘It did very much feel countrified.’

  It was at this point that Jim’s background as a planner began to show:

  ‘Everywhere there are builders building regular housing estates, which have a few trees in them,’ he said. ‘Compare that with a housing estate round here or Milton Keynes – there’s a difference. And it’s in the trimming. Even at the same densities, the regular house builders will not afford a great wide strip of trees or an avenue. They might put a tree in your front garden or a green corner. He’s paid a lot of money for this land and he’s going to get as many houses as he can on there. It’s a battle with the town planners. Whereas this is a designated area. All of it’s green and it’s all for the corporation and it was all bought at agricultural value. And they had room to breathe and room to manoeuvre. They had plenty of space to make things happen, to make the park big enough for 24 football pitches or whatever. Not squidged in the corner with a little play area. It’s a mind thing: do you start with a blank sheet or do you start with a great big bill you’ve just paid for a small field?’

  The first-generation new towns, of which Cwmbran is one, had a lot in common in terms of design. They took much from Ebenezer Howard’s disciples in the United States, where his ideas were being actively promulgated, in their desire to marry the best of the countryside with the best of the town. For instance, they adopted the idea of ‘neighbourhood units’, areas for anything up to 7,000 residents – a number derived from the population that could be supported by a single primary school. The unit would have its own small centre – a parade of shops, a pub and a community centre – and the neighbourhood itself would be made up from various smaller clusters of housing. In Harlow, these neighbourhood centres were called ‘Hatches’, an old Saxon word. Howard’s vision for the garden cities had been that industrial, residential and central areas could be separated, rather than muddled together as they were in the overcrowded centres of the big towns and cities. Neighbourhood units, the theory went, would encourage neighbourliness: those green spaces and community centres would be buzzing with activity as residents pursued healthy activities. As Harlow planner Frederick Gibberd characterised it, channelling the idealism of Garden Cities of To-morrow, ‘[the new town resident] prefers segregation of home and work, has an innate love of nature, enjoys open air exercise – and, while demanding privacy for the individual family, likes some measure of community life.’14

  Gibberd had been a rising star before the war, and brought in some big name architects to design the housing in these early areas: married modernists Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who later worked with Swiss master Le Corbusier; F. R. S. Yorke, fresh from an architectural partnership with Bauhaus refugee Marcel Breuer; and Powell and Moya, a dynamic pair of 20-somethings who’d designed the Skylon for the Festival of Britain. Yet Gibberd’s most remarkable feat was to design many of the buildings himself while also master-planning the entire town.

  ‘How he managed to do all of this,’ said Harlow museum curator David Devine, ‘is amazing.’ Yet his powers were not without limit. ‘He moved into a house on Marsh Lane on the edge of the town in 1956 and applied to have an extension. He applied to his own corporation, and guess what? No! The man who built the whole town can’t even get his own extension!’ The acclaimed architects weren’t the only ones behind the building of the new towns: almost all of the development corporations were run by retired colonels and the like – in the case of Harlow, it was Churchill’s pal General Ridley Pakenham-Walsh – and the workforce was made up of men and women who had been so recently fighting in Europe.

  Cwmbran’s Jim Griffiths had a theory:

  ‘They’d built new towns in the desert, they’d built new towns in Italy, they’d built new towns on the Ardennes: why wouldn’t they build one here? And they had the same get up and go about it. We just get engineers over here and we put it there – there was no finesse about the new towns. That came a bit later as they got a bit more sophisticated. But the first wave were just: map it out, give us a diagram and here we go! It was a product of the thinking of the Second World War. An awful lot of people had nothing to do in 1945. They could turn out a sewage works, they could make a road nice and straight.’

  John Reed, who’d moved to Harlow’s Mark Hall North as a boy in 1952, vividly recalls the situation his parents’ generation found themselves in after the war:

  ‘The bloke next door had been in the army with Slim in Burma. My Dad had been in the desert. Gone there via, I might add, Cape Town. He’d been to see the pyramids, Cairo, places like th
at. These were places people had never seen! Another bloke had been a submariner. My teacher had been a navigator in a Lancaster. Well, of course, people had seen these things, they’d come home, and they thought, so we’ll go back to living in an upstairs flat in Holloway or something?’

  John and I went on a slow walk around his neighbourhood. He pointed out landmarks as we strolled along, and waited patiently while I took bad photos of design detailing with my phone.

  ‘My father was a builder. It was obviously a happy hunting ground for bricklayers and the like. I used to be sent out with his lunch. I used to go round asking if anyone knew where he was working today ’cos if he found someone else was paying another tuppence an hour down the road then off he’d gone. He was certainly involved in those houses up the top of the road there, that’s one of the places I found him.’

  We were looking at some austere two-storey brick terraces with flat-roofed porches. ‘Of course, when it started to slow down round here, he trotted off to Basildon and Stevenage.’ We rounded a corner and ahead of us was a sloping green wedge, with a small row of corner shops at the bottom – a ‘Hatch’. ‘It consisted originally of a chip shop, a greengrocers, a grocers, a newsagent-tobacconists and a pub,’ he explained. ‘The pub’s the White Admiral.’ All of Harlow’s pubs were named after butterflies. John vividly remembered the workmen from when they first arrived there. ‘The chip shop queue used to go round the block! A lot of the men were still stag, they were living in wherever they could find anywhere, waiting for their houses to be issued, so of course they made a lot of use of the chip shops and such like.’

  Everyone expected the new towns to be garden cities with Arts and Crafts cottages for everyone, but the planners had other ideas. Gibberd and his peers were keen to create something that felt urban: they built flats. For the most part these were small blocks of four or five storeys, but in Harlow Gibberd pushed it further, and introduced a new form to British housing: the high-rise ‘point block’ from Sweden. Point blocks were residential towers where the flats were situated off a central lift shaft or stairwell. Several had been built in the Stockholm district of Danviksklippan in the early forties, and they became one of prime lures for visiting architects. They were a symbol of how Swedish architecture had been in the ascendant as an international force since the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. ‘While other nations have been talking about building landscapes of towers,’ wrote Gordon Logie admiringly in his book The Urban Scene in 1954, ‘the Swedes have quietly gone ahead and done it.’15 Pages of beautifully shot photos of point blocks followed.

  The Lawns, Britain’s first ‘point block’, designed by Frederick Gibberd, nearing completion in 1951. © Harlow Museum and Science Alive

  Point blocks had several advantages over their lower-lying cousins: by piling flats on top of each other they freed up space on the ground for parks; town planners loved them because they provided a vertical feature akin to a church spire; and they were perfect for the elderly or single people who didn’t have the time or energy for a garden of their own. Gibberd saw the chance in Mark Hall North to build something shockingly modern: ‘A tower block of bed-sitting and one-room flats for single people.’16 John Reed and I wandered up to The Lawns. The ‘block’ is really a rather pretty fan shape, and each small flat has its own balcony. The paintwork looks fresh and it seems generally in good nick for a festival-era building – it even has a plaque to commemorate its history and listing. The most obvious point is that it really does work as a landmark. It’s the only tall building in the district, and this prototype for the tower block must have felt huge when it first appeared, with nothing comparable anywhere else in the country and when so little of the town had been built. Still surrounded by large trees and rows of low-rise flats, houses and garages, the block may no longer look unique, but it remains a dignified country gent mellowing with age.

  Gibberd admitted later that there was

  ‘a selfish reason for the block in that, as joint author, along with F. R. S. Yorke, of The Modern Flat, this would be an opportunity to try out some of its theories. There was the special appeal that a point block would orientate the new town towards Le Corbusier’s vertical city – the “ville radieuse” – and away from the garden city movement.’17

  Le Corbusier’s powerful vision of a city of parkland punctuated by mighty tower blocks as a solution to urban living had inspired and incensed architects and planners in equal measure. In Harlow even a modest nod to this idea, in the form of a ten-storey, Swedish-style, concrete-and-red-brick point block, was almost derailed by government opposition to the cost of constructing such an experimental building. ‘One of the test samples of the reinforced concrete failed,’ recalled Gibberd in 1980. ‘As a result the columns had to be stripped down to the reinforcement. The situation was a gift to journalists but thanks to Adams’ [the General Manager] control over every situation it did not leak out.’18 The opening ceremony was performed in May 1951 as an official event of the Festival of Britain.

  The Lawns in 2011, still well maintained and surrounded by mature trees.

  Like many of the people I interviewed about Harlow, Janet Search expressed a fondness for the block. ‘They were nice flats in there. I have a friend who lived in one.’ She’d been very keen to get a look inside. ‘We were only being nosey really. We were dying to find someone who lived there.’ Did her friend like it? ‘Oh yes. The view, and the fact it was something, it was something different. They’ve built two or three since but somehow that one seems special.’ Two months after it was opened, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, made his thoughts known on the state of town planning in the UK: ‘He is a keen advocate of blocks of flats in the country,’ reported the Observer, ‘such as that just finished at Harlow, pointing out their advantages for the newly married or the old couple.’19

  With all this revolutionary building work going on, relations between the newcomers and the residents from village of Old Harlow were not without friction. Janet Search was 14 when her family moved from the village of Langford in Essex to the new town in 1952, where her father was to be a Clerk of Works on the new industrial estate.

  ‘We did all our shopping in Old Harlow. A lot of people, well, they didn’t like the new town coming, and I can understand it – all this beautiful rural ground and all this concrete arriving. As children we weren’t really liked in Old Harlow. The people were all, Keep your children away from us!’

  Yet this was a boom time in Old Harlow for the shopkeepers, before any of the new town’s own shopping centres opened. She remembered how the pioneers banded together to overcome the inconveniences of living without the most basic infrastructure:

  ‘There was no soul or character to it to start with. You all had to put your own mark on things. When the gardens were all cordoned off it was amazing how people put all different paths down. My dad put brick down. You had to do that yourself. All you got was a concrete standing outside your back door. And it had to be open plan at the front. There were no gates or hedges.’

  In fact, Gibberd was determined that residents should not cordon off the front of their houses at all, and fences and hedges were banned. Walking round with John Reed it was remarkable to see how widely this rule was still being adhered to.

  ‘The rate of growth was phenomenal,’ he told me. ‘By the time I went to secondary school in ’57 there were 40,000 people in the town. And when I came here in ’52, just five years earlier, there were literally hundreds. I don’t suppose there were 200 houses.’ I also spoke to a boundlessly energetic Michael Caswell, whose family had lived next to a paint factory in Canning Town, been bombed out three times, and moved to Harlow in 1953 alongside a vast cohort of his extended family.

  ‘I was four and I loved it. The door numbers weren’t on the door. I remember holding my mother’s hand. The men were still laying the paving slabs, the roads were just being built. I remember my mother saying, “where’s number 77?” and the workman going [he mimes counting the doors of
their street]. We were making camps in the ditches, it was great, all of us kids had grown up in slums. It was fantastic. My parents were amazed they had a bathroom, and a garden instead of a yard. I think what we found when we came to Harlow was that the community spirit was still very much the London spirit.’

  Michael’s experience wasn’t shared by John Reed, who felt the dislocation endured by many after their move to a town of strangers.

  ‘In those days there were no extended families. A few people had cars, no one had phones, so when they came out here they were very isolated. Some of the women particularly found it very difficult I think, ’cos women didn’t work.’

  Not all Harlow residents had been city dwellers. Janet Search’s family had arrived from a small village, and found it hard to adjust. ‘My mother never settled, she hated it,’ said Janet. As a teenager, Janet had been similarly unenthusiastic at first, although they’d all loved the house itself. ‘I just thought it was fantastic to go to an inside toilet and bathroom. Never had a bathroom before. Three bedrooms, oh yes, it was marvellous.’