The County of London Plan (prepared 1943) proposed a “Green Belt” around London, to stop further urban sprawl, and the building of “New Towns” beyond the Green Belt to re-house workers from London. The legal basis for the implementation of these poposals was provided in the New Town Act 1946. The first of the New Towns was to be Stevenage, a sleepy little place half way between London and Cambridge.At a town hall meeting called to reassure the outraged inhabitants of Stevenage, Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning, declared that:
Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous. People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we here in this country are building for the new way of life.Silkin left the meeting to find that the tyres of his car had been let down, sand poured into his fuel tank, and that the sign for Stevenage railway station had been changed to read "Silkingrad".
In effect (as can be seen from the picture of council housing and council flats in Stevenage), this "new way of life" was often one of living close together in buildings with communal stairwells, halls and corridors, and relaxing together in communal parks and gardens. It is not what most of those rehoused would have chosen for themselves, but it was a vast improvement on bombed-out slums.
Further New Towns or "satellite towns" outside London were designated in 1947-1950 at Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield (both just south of Stevenage), Basildon, and Bracknell.
There was a further new town in the East Midlands, at Corby (near Leicester), and two in the coal-mining and ship-building North East, at Newton Aycliffe and at Peterlee.
