Villages of Vision

From an architectural perspective, possibly the finest example of such developments has to be Port Sunlight, a model village on the Wirral peninsular built by William Hesketh Lever, of the soap and cleaning agent giants the Lever Brothers.

In the late 1800s, the Lever Brothers had more or less outgrown their site in Warrington, and began to search for a new site on which to enable the expansion of their booming business. A new 56-acre site in a prime location between the River Mersey and a railway line on the Wirral was secured, and the company developed a new factory and a garden village to house their employees, which Lever himself helped to plan. Between 1899 and 1914, some 800 homes were built, alongside allotments, public buildings, schools, a cottage hospital, and an open air swimming pool. Following the approach taken by Robert Owen at New Lanark almost a century earlier, Lever introduced a series of schemes to benefit his employees in terms of their welfare, education, and entertainment.

Lever employed thirty different architects to design his Utopia, and influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement – and in particular William Morris – and through its unique combination of model workers’ housing and the architectural and landscape values of the emerging garden suburb, created a place of major historic significance.

Indeed, Port Sunlight is now home to over 900 Listed Buildings (Stoke-on-Trent, a city of around a quarter-of-a-million has just 193 Listed Buildings, many of which are falling down around our ears), was declared a Conservation Area in the late 1970s, and has been suggested for World Heritage Site status. The village is also significant in that it was the location for Ringo Starr’s debut with the Beatles on 18^th August (also notable as my birthday!) 1962. Port Sunlight is also the birthplace of Dead or Alive ‘legend’ Pete Burns.

Housing at Port Sunlight

Unfortunately, Port Sunlight has since lost its raison d être, and in the main, is no longer home to the working class. The Wirral is often described as Merseyside’s answer to Surrey, and as such, attracts high-flyers from Liverpool. As a result, places such as Port Sunlight, with its rich architectural heritage and mature landscape setting have been taken over by those with posher accents, bigger cars, and even bigger bank balances, and average house prices in the village are way beyond the means of those the place was originally intended for.

Utopianism continued apace throughout the early twentieth century thanks to the likes of Sir Ebenezer Howard and his influential writings in To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Underpinned by his “three magnets”, Howard outlined a vision of towns free of slums which enjoyed the benefits of both town and country. Howard led the creation of the ‘Garden Cities Association’ (now the Town and Country Planning Association), and attracted enough attention and financial backing to enable the development of Letchworth Garden City north of London; Welwyn Garden City followed after World War I.

Howard’s Garden City concept

The “three magnets”

The Garden City Movement proved extremely influential in the provision of social housing and the Inter-War ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ campaign, which developed following the Government’s shock at the poor health and physical condition of urban recruits to the army.

The influence of the Garden City Movement continued in the aftermath of World War II, when the Government instigated the creation of a series of New Towns through the 1946 New Towns Act, and were envisaged to house those displaced by war damage and slum clearance programmes. Many of the New Towns were developed within London’s hinterland and were identified through 1944’s Plan for London by Sir Patrick Abercrombie. Of the New Towns that were built, a number were dominated by Modernist architectural theory, and saw the creation of highways-dominated settlements incorporating enclosed, inward looking malls as town centres, and housing estates developed to the often discredited Radburn-style layout.

Aerial view of the New Town at
Skelmersdale in Lancashire

Many of the New Towns that were developed bred many problems, such as widespread unemployment as planned industrial developments failed to materialise, and the alienation and failure of communities, and subsequent ‘newer’ social problems such as drug and alcohol dependency, such problems often branded ‘New Town Blues’.

Despite some high-profile failures in the creation of planned settlements, they have more often not stayed high-up on the housing and planning agendas, with the Urban Villages Forum pushing the development of new settlements within urban areas, an approach that was championed by HRH Prince Charles who went on to promote the development of a new settlement (Poundbury) on land that he owned in Dorset.

The latest iteration of the planned settlement is the ‘eco-town’, often led by the private sector, which the Government have seen as an environmentally sustainable way of making large contributions to the national housing shortage, failing to recognise that perhaps the biggest cause of the housing shortage is the fact that Councils do not build new homes as they did in the past.

Many of the eco-town proposals though would appear to be unsustainable, and are simply about building houses. New settlements are far more than that if they are to be truly sustainable. One of the biggest causes of the failure of some of the New Towns was that business and industry did not always follow, and where they did, it was generally down to large Government subsidies. Once these subsidies disappeared, business and industry often did too.