Hook: revisiting the New Town that might have been

by

John R. Gold

Author’s final draft of manuscript published as:

Gold, J.R. (2015) ‘Hook: revisiting the New Town that might have been’, introduction to
London County Council, The Planning of a New Town, (originally published1961),
Studies in International Planning History series, London, Routledge, vii-xxviii.

1
Hook: revisiting the New Town that might have been

John R. Gold

The present-day rail visitor to Hook in the southern English county of Hampshire alights at a
small station, with buildings still identifiable as those opened by the London and South
Western Railway in 1883 (Figure 1). A five-minute walk northwards along the aptly named
Station Road is sufficient to reach what passes for the town centre; a collection of small
shopping parades and some public buildings clustered around the intersection with London
Road (Figure 2). The latter, equally aptly named, is a section of the A30 which, before the
advent of the motorways, was the main trunk route between the capital and South-West
England. While not as busy as in its heyday, London Road retains the scatter of cafés, inns, and
filling stations that serve the refuelling and revictualing needs of passing motorists (Figure 3).
Venturing further afield, one encounters newer, low-density housing developments clustered
around the older core of the town. Their presence reflects Hook’s growth from a village of just
1187 inhabitants in 1951 to 7934 by 2011. Built by private-sector building firms in styles that
are mostly neo-Georgian or pseudo-vernacular, the new estates feature winding roads with
names that bear anodyne reference to a rural past – Quince Tree Way and Wild Herons,
Compass Field and Heathview, Oak Hanger Close and Appletree Mead. A proportion of the
occupants of these new houses live here because of the expansion of local employment
opportunities, most notably on the nearby Bartley Wood Business Park. Rather more,
however, commute to central London, adding ever-increasing numbers to the daily throngs
that animate the station’s platforms during rush hours.

***FIGURES 1-3 about here***

At first glance, this would seem an unpromising raw material for closer attention by
those interested in the history of the built environment. The authors of the first edition of the
Hampshire volume in the authoritative Buildings of England (or ‘Pevsner’) series, for instance,
certainly found little to detain the visitor: a stuccoed Georgian coaching inn, a sixteenth
century mansion and an interwar church designed by the future architect of Guildford
Cathedral being the best on offer. Nevertheless, the same authors rightly asserted that Hook’s
‘permanent, if unseen, importance’1 makes it more than just another commuter settlement.
Their reasoning related to an episode, then recently concluded, in the postwar history of urban
development. Concerned about the growing length of housing lists in the Administrative
County of London, the London County Council (LCC) had decided that it wished to build an
additional New Town somewhere in South-Eastern England to alleviate the pressure. After a
far-ranging search, in 1958 the LCC had announced its intention to build that New Town on a
7,300-acre (2954-hectare) portion of land in the Whitewater River valley (Figure 4). The
existing town of Hook would have been in its south-west corner.

***FIGURE 4 about here***

In the event, the project was abandoned in 1960 long before any construction began,
but the appearance in the following year of a book about the unrealised scheme had
generated enormous interest. Renowned as an important centre of innovatory design in the

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architectural world,2 the LCC’s Architect’s Department had persuaded the Council that the
work of the team that had been preparing an initial plan for Hook should not be wasted since it
could be useful to others ‘who have the good fortune to be called upon to plan further new
towns’.3 Entitled The Planning of a New Town,4 the account of their researches provided a
comprehensive account of the defining principles and putative layout of the new settlement,
along with details of its likely costs and a specimen programming of works. Such was the
popularity of this text that it went through five re-printings up to 1969, with the Greater
London Council (GLC) – the LCC’s successor – commissioning German- and Japanese-language
editions to meet the demands of an international readership. Moreover, its tone was
sufficiently authoritative to convince many readers that what was being described was a real
town. For some years to come coach parties would tour the area searching in vain for the
housing areas, industrial parks and the central megastructure5 of the new settlement
supposedly rising from the green fields of north Hampshire.

The reputation of the book and the project that it described, however, were not
predicated upon such misapprehensions. The authors of the ‘Pevsner’ entry for Hook were in
no doubt that The Planning of a New Town was the ‘most influential urban planning document
of its generation’, in particular because it presented a formula for ‘transforming the dispersed,
low-density poly-nuclear forms of the first New Towns into the concentrated, high-density
linear forms since adopted elsewhere’.6 Contemporary commentators broadly agreed with
their judgment. William Houghton-Evans argued that the Hook study marked ‘a high point in
British planning… [setting] a standard in argument and presentation which each succeeding
new town report has tried to emulate.’7 Maurice Broady praised the report for its pioneering
application of sociological thinking to urban planning.8 Marcial Echenique and his colleagues
considered it to be a sufficiently reliable source of statistical data to allow Hook to be taken as
being representative of the second of three generations of British New Towns even though, as
they casually observed, it ‘was never built’.9 Alison Ravetz positioned the ideas developed in
the Hook study in a sequence of New Town design, extending from 1946-67, that has
considerable importance for understanding the history of planning in general.10 As is often the
way with materials on planning, architecture and city design, the visual dimension was a key
constituent in the document’s appeal. Lionel Esher, for instance, remarked that the Hook plan
had drawn on the LCC’s ‘world famous expertise to produce a most enticing visual image’;11
Reyner Banham extolled the vision of ‘real megastructural boldness and, indeed, bloody-
mindedness’ associated with the design for the town’s Central Area; 12 and Peter Hall
reproduced illustrations from the study as fully encapsulating the principles of pedestrian-
vehicle segregation that were so prevalent in 1960s planning thought.13

Collectively, these comments underline the importance of a scheme that innovatively

combined Garden City traditions with sensitivity to modern design. From the Garden City
movement, Hook took the spirit of town planning and the desirability of having new
community development underpinned by social intent, albeit without embracing the low-
density residential neighbourhoods, cottage-like housing and semi-public open spaces found in
the Mark I New Towns. From the Modern Movement came notions of urban form and building
design. Hook would have embraced a commitment to greater clustering to provide what
would have been effectively a walking-scale city arranged on linear principles, in which urban
development would is arranged in strips around centrally-placed, high-speed route-ways.14 In
addition, it offered the prospect of a central showpiece; a multilevel town centre intended to

3
serve as a genuine focus for the gathering community, featuring shops and amenities placed on
a pedestrian deck with cars and servicing beneath.15 These ideas of combining motor car usage
and town-centre functions within the same space by means of vertical segregation pre-dated
similar ideas found in the influential Buchanan Report.16

So saying, it is important to stress that those who participated in the process never
regarded the plan as a finished product. In her Introduction to the report, Lady Evelyn
Denington, the Chair of the LCC’s New and Expanding Towns Committee, distanced the Council
from concurring with its findings. Referring to the ‘technical studies’ produced by a team
‘charged with the task of producing an initial master plan’, she stressed that her Committee
members had not formally discussed the plan, that it could not be considered to represent the
LCC’s accepted policy and that ‘the work was stopped at the stage when many of the proposals
would have come under intensive examination’.17 Oliver Cox, one of the design team’s
leaders, made a similar point. He insisted that their work ‘had been stopped suddenly at a
time when much of the work was only partly completed, and that the neatly presented report
gave a spurious finality to the state of the team’s minds.’18 Nevertheless, these caveats were
seldom recognised at the time, with commentators often treating the incomplete paper vision
as a dependable landmark when constructing their particular historical narratives.

This preliminary essay is framed by this background, seeking to explore the origins,
anatomy and impact of an unusual document which was neither an executed plan nor a pure
utopian vision. The first of its four main sections provides context by examining the reasons
why the LCC needed a New Town and then charts its prolonged and ultimately fruitless efforts
to develop one at Hook. The next part introduces the interdisciplinary team that created the
plan and surveys its chosen ways of working. The third section outlines the fruits of their
endeavours, reviewing the main features of the report that is reprinted here and offering
commentary on the principles on which its analyses were based. The conclusion comments on
the plan’s contribution and lasting significance.

Overspill and the Politics of Location

During the interwar period, the LCC had been able to cope with its rehousing requirements
either by using available portions of land within the Administrative County or by building
estates at locations such as Becontree or Morden through collaboration with the Outer London
boroughs.19 The scale of the problems associated with war damage, the deterioration of the
housing stock and a range of new factors that favoured clearance,20 however, made this self-
reliant approach untenable after 1945, especially given the national Government’s
unwillingness to permit use of land in the suburbs for out-estates.21 It was clear, therefore,
that a substantial part of the remedy would rely on ‘overspill’, the process whereby population
and industry would be decanted from the core of the conurbation to receiving authorities
located elsewhere in the region beyond the Green Belt. Notably, this was an approach that
was already favoured by Patrick Abercrombie’s influential Greater London Plan, 1944 with its
support for the idea of ‘[n]ew satellite towns and existing towns planned for industrial
expansion’.22

Opportunities to build both New and Expanding Towns became possible under postwar
legislation. During Clement Attlee’s first Labour administration a total of fourteen New Towns

4
were established, of which eight were in South-East England.23 Although the New Towns
programme as a whole is now hailed as a major achievement in a period of severe financial
austerity, it had proven disappointing to the LCC in terms of addressing its needs for overspill.
Considerable proportions of the South-Eastern New Towns’ migrant populations had come
either from outside London altogether or from suburban areas. In addition, the LCC felt that
the New Towns were developing too slowly to make sufficient impact on the housing problem.
This was confirmed by figures available at the end of the 1950s. Compared with Abercrombie's
estimate that 383,000 people would need to move from London, by December 1958 only
around 140,000 had moved to the New Towns through publicly-sponsored overspill schemes.24
Moreover, progress from arrangements made under the 1952 Town Development Act, the
Conservative Government’s preferred vehicle for tackling overspill, was proving difficult to
achieve. Contingent on the signing of voluntary negotiated agreements between the LCC as
‘exporting authority’ and ‘receiving authorities’ that were mostly small country towns, town
expansion was initially seen as a process that was too protracted and cumbersome to make a
contribution proportionate to overall need.25

It was perhaps scarcely surprising that the LCC should look to other more radical
possibilities as a way out of its predicament, including direct action such as seeking approval to
create its own New Town. The first indication that this strategy was being mooted was
apparent as early as 1952. According to a ‘private and confidential’ joint memorandum
circulated by the LCC’s senior officers, agreement to go ahead with investigating the possibility
of such a project had been given by Harold Macmillan, then Minister of Housing and Local
Government in Winston Churchill’s Conservative administration:

‘In 1952, the Minister of Housing and Local Government agreed to investigations being
made into the possibility of a suitable large site being found which the Council could
develop as principal, but on New Town lines and not as a large estate of a dormitory
nature. Although several areas have been considered it has not yet been found possible
to make any recommendations to the Committee. In view, however, of the apparent
slow rate of progress of expanded towns the Committee may agree that inquiries on
these lines should be continued.’26

The areas under scrutiny were Brandon in West Suffolk and Ringwood in Hampshire. The
former in particular aroused opposition from the Ministry of Agriculture, which expressed
concern that the LCC was ‘scouring the countryside’ and considering areas of good agricultural
land for development.27 In response, the LCC’s officers noted, with a measure of frustration,
that: ‘The Ministry have, however, objected to these proposals but at the same time no
opportunity has been afforded of discussing with the Ministry’s officers the considerations
involved.’28 Ringwood remained in the frame as a possible location, but tellingly a request
from the LCC that Hampshire’s officers might participate in producing a ‘hypothetical scheme’
for a New Town there was firmly rebuffed. The Clerk to the Hampshire County Council noted
that, while such a scheme might be valuable, he ‘did not accept that Hampshire’s officers
should be engaged in doing so’.29 It was indicative of what was to follow.

Despite the resistance encountered from Hampshire and elsewhere, the LCC’s Joint
Development Sub-Committee continued in its search, seeking a location that would supply
sufficient land of low-quality agricultural value for building, afford good communications, and

5
be suitable in terms of drainage and water supply.30 In January 1955, Reginald Stamp, the
chairman of the LCC’s Town Planning Committee had seen the Minister of Housing and Local
Government (Duncan Sandys) to urge for ‘at least one development for the county on New
Town lines.’31 A flurry of deputations and representations in favour of the scheme ensued,
including sympathetic interventions in Parliamentary debates.32 A Memorandum from
September 1955 repeated that ‘the Minister should continue to be pressed to create a new
town under the New Towns Act 1946 specifically planned for receiving overspill from the
County’.33

Little emerged by way of firm Government commitment, leaving the LCC’s senior
officers and politicians continually faced with trying to second guess the Ministry’s position. It
is true that the Conservative administrations of the 1950s were suspicious of New Towns with
their state funding and non-elected Development Corporations, preferring instead to use the
voluntaristic arrangements available under the 1952 Town Development Act.34 However, the
various Ministers of Housing and Local Government – Macmillan (1951-4), Sandys (1954-7) and
Henry Brooke (1957-61) – repeatedly sat on the fence, making sympathetic noises while
withholding full support. This led to increasing impatience on behalf of the LCC. In May 1957
Isaac Hayward, the Leader of the Council, wrote to Brooke appealing for a quick resolution to
seemingly endless wrangles over housing statistics and for early acceptance of the need for a
New Town.35 Brooke consulted with his Permanent Secretary Dame Evelyn Sharp, who gave
guarded support to the scheme:

‘The snag of approving a new town “in principle” is that we shall then have to go on and
approve it, somewhere, in practice. But I think that we must do it. We should, of course,
make it clear that this is subject to a suitable site being found, adding perhaps that that is
going to be no easy matter.’36

Further delay occurred when Brooke decided first to run the proposal past the Cabinet’s Home
Affairs Committee and subsequently past an interdisciplinary group of Ministerial officials. The
latter reported in August 1957 that the proposal could be agreed in principle. That finding was
communicated to the LCC along with the provisos that ‘there would no special exchequer
assistance, that the chosen site was satisfactory from the agricultural and other points of view,
and that progress on a scheme would be dependent upon the economic situation at the
time.’37

Sharp’s assessment of the continuing difficulty of finding a site was perceptive. By the
end of the previous year, no less than 51 sites had already received consideration. Hook was
not among the favoured 14 and appears briefly and somewhat dismissively in a section of a
memorandum about progress which lists: ‘Other sites that have been investigated’. Instead, it
was noted:

‘The site which appears most suitable for a New Town is that of Wotton Underwood in
Buckinghamshire. Other suitable sites include Bicester, Newton, Micheldever (although
there will be strong opposition from the Ministry of Agriculture, Aylesham and Ringwood
and possibly Whitchurch; Didcot might be kept in reserve…’ 38

6
Over a year later, Hook remained a less favoured option. In January 1958, one of the officers
undertaking the field surveys had referred in her handwritten notes to the problems of ‘Hook,
Hartley Row, Hazeley Heath’ in the following terms:

‘Expansion has not been considered here by the Ministry of Housing and Local
Government because, except for Hazeley Heath, a New Town would include medium
class soil. The New Town would also have to straddle the existing trunk road A30 before
the proposed new trunk road comes into existence, in order to get access to the
railway.’39

In the final analysis, it was only after six years of searching, consideration and re-
consideration of 66 different locations40 that Hook finally arrived at the top of the list – a
dilatory process that, arguably, had fatal consequences for the eventual outcome. On 15
September 1958, two options were put to a meeting held at County Hall in London: Hook, near
Basingstoke, and Newtown near Newbury. The Minutes of that Meeting reported that of the
two sites then under consideration: ‘the proximity of the Newtown site to Newbury and the
consequent difficulty of establishing a new town centre was a consideration which outweighed
certain other advantages that it might have over Hook’. It was therefore agreed, on this
ambivalent basis, far short of a ringing endorsement, that ‘negotiations should be opened with
Hampshire County Council on the site at Hook only.’41

A closed meeting at County Hall on 22 October 1958 conveyed that decision to

representatives of Hampshire County Council (HCC), who attended purely to hear the news of
the LCC’s proposal rather than enter into discussions or negotiations.42 The public
announcement by the LCC took place a week later. By and large, it was reported in a matter-
of-fact way in the national press, which tended to assume that such a scheme was acceptable
through being based on expert judgment,43 although there were dissenting voices. For
example, The Times reported questions being asked locally about situating such a development
just six miles away from Basingstoke, which was also due to receive overspill of London
population under an Expanding Town scheme.44 London’s Evening News posed the question:
‘Do Londoners want to move out to the new and expanded towns in the countryside or are
they being forced to go to fulfil “a planners’ textbook dream”?’45 For his part, Ian Nairn,
steadfast opponent of suburban sprawl (which he termed ‘subtopia’), laconically observed:
‘One wonders in some alarm what the other 69 (sites) were like that Hook should be chosen as
the handmaiden of the LCC’.46

Perhaps most significant for the future of the project, any hopes that the LCC might
have nurtured that HCC or the local authorities directly affected by the proposal would agree
to the decision about Hook were soon dashed. The announcement of the decision was
immediately met with derision, prompting campaigns of resistance from a loosely-based
coalition of civic groups, landowners, farmers, local dignitaries, parish and rural district councils
and, most significantly, the HCC.47 Around eight months later (June 1959), it was observed
that:

‘London County Council’s decision to send its surveyors to the proposed site of its new
town at Hook, despite Hampshire County Council’s complete refusal to co-operate,

7
 makes it clear that a head-on clash between the two councils is inevitable. The LCC says
it is disappointed but not entirely surprised by Hampshire’s attitude.’48

Although meeting the bare minimum of cooperation required for the LCC to collect
information needed for application for an outline planning agreement, the HCC obdurately
refused to cooperate further. Probably more by luck than judgment, their campaign proved
highly effective. It proceeded in two stages. The first was outright rejection of the New Town
scheme without offering tangible alternatives, which dramatically slowed progress49 and led to
the private expression of doubts about the proposal in Whitehall.50 As part of their defence
strategy, senior HCC officers contacted a number of distinguished figures from the town
planning world in October 1959 who might act as consultants and subsequently expert
witnesses if required. Sir William Holford and T.P. Bennett both declined in light of the
workload involved. Thomas Sharp was sounded out inconclusively on the basis of a qualified
recommendation by the County Planning Officer: ‘I understand that Dr Thomas Sharp is now
very effective as a professional consultant and witness and has matured with passage of years,
so as now to be completely reliable.’51 At the same time, the HCC sought legal counsel about
potential courses of action, partly because they nurtured an inaccurate suspicion that an
official application by the LCC would ‘almost certainly be supported by the Ministry’.52 Advice
forthcoming in a confidential Memorandum in January 1960 recognised political realities as
well as legal responsibilities: ‘The Hampshire County Council were of the opinion, and they
have been so advised, that it was not sufficient for them to maintain a solely negative attitude
towards the London County Council.’53

The second stage, therefore, saw the HCC decide on a package of counter-proposals
that effectively took the initiative away from the LCC. As the HCC were of the opinion that
there was nowhere else in Hampshire suitable for a new town ‘without there being serious
repercussions on adjoining towns and a great disturbance to agricultural interests’,54 the
County Planning Committee sifted through possible alternatives using town development
arrangements.55 Tadley and Andover were selected from a list of five options56 along with
Basingstoke, which had already agreed to large-scale expansion. With respect to Basingstoke,
the County Planning Officer made a tactically astute reference to Patrick Abercrombie’s remark
that ‘Basingstoke is particularly well located for the reception of additional population and
industry’ – a source that even the LCC would have to concede as being authoritative. He also
noted the strategic benefits for Hampshire of creating a settlement, eventually of around
80,000 people, that could strengthen the economy of the northern part of the county.57

The idea also appealed to Government, both as a solution to the problem over Hook
and, more generally, as a timely boost for the Town Development programme.58 Evelyn Sharp
wrote to Brooke, observing that second thoughts were necessary because ‘we have never in
our hearts been convinced that the LCC have a fool-proof case for a new town… We believe
that Hampshire might well make a damning case against it at inquiry.’59 Brookes concurred
and by the end of March 1960 wrote to the Prime Minister stating that, while he accepted the
need for major building projects outside London to accommodate overspill, that there was
now a chance that this could be done through expansion at Basingstoke under the Town
Development Act rather than require a New Town.60 Further advice from Conservative Central
Office candidly pointed out that Expanding Town schemes for Hampshire ‘would be preferable

8
from the political point of view’,61 particularly given the extent of representations being made
by the staunchly Conservative local squirearchy.62

Things now moved decisively against the New Town. The LCC were still in no position
to go to a Planning Inquiry, given that officers from the Valuer’s Department had only started
the time-consuming task of collecting the local information necessary for supporting an outline
planning application in February 1960.63 Having received positive noises from the Ministry, the
HCC submitted its own plan to the LCC on 10 May whereby, instead of development being
concentrated in one place, it would be absorbed in the three locations.64 The LCC recognised
that there was little room for manoeuvre given the lack of any positive steer from central
Government in favour of the New Town and the strength of Hampshire’s opposition. Thus
when Hampshire’s plan was made public on 24 May, W.G. Fiske, the chairman of London’s
New and Expanding Towns Committee, expediently welcomed it as going ‘a great way towards
meeting [London’s] needs.’ Although Evelyn Denington – then the Committee’s vice-chairman
and a strong advocate of the New Town – maintained that the Hook project should be retained
until it was ‘absolutely certain [that] these three towns are the alternatives’,65 the argument
was essentially lost. The unit working on Hook was provisionally reassigned to work on the
three Town Development schemes.66 Finally, realising that there was no real choice but to
cave in, the LCC voted in November 1960 to accept the HCC’s plan. Basingstoke (population
24,000) would grow by taking 18,000 migrants from London, with Tadley (7500) and Andover
(15,000) each taking a further 10,000.67 For at least one critic, the LCC’s decision to choose
expedience was tantamount to having sold ‘its birthright for a mess of cottages.’68

‘Short-term, original and interesting work’

In contrast to the six years that it took the LCC to reach a decision about Hook as the location
for its New Town, the unit charged with developing the initial masterplan existed for less than a
year before the project’s denouement. Formed in the Summer of 1959, the New Town Section
mirrored the multidisciplinary practices of existing New Town Development Corporations by
bringing together planners, architects and other built environment professionals in one unit. It
was a strategy that avoided the interprofessional territorialities commonly encountered in local
authorities when dealing with matters involving the built environment, but it also created
structural difficulties for the LCC. These were only resolved by establishing an ad hoc niche for
the unit within the Clerk’s department in order to satisfy hierarchical niceties:

“Because [the staff] came from many different departments, the Chief Architect Hubert
Bennett could not claim that he could be responsible for a team that included the Chief
Engineer’s men, who was a senior officer to the Chief Architect. So the Clerk of the
Council took over our team and we moved from the Architect’s Department into the
Clerk’s Department.”69

Frank West, the LCC’s Deputy Architect, had overall responsibility for the Section, with John C.
Craig, a chartered surveyor with planning qualifications who worked in the Architect’s
Department, taking the role of the Officer-in-Charge. Craig had been involved in discussions
about London’s overspill throughout the 1950s and had coordinated the search for the New
Town location. He could be seen by the organisation as providing the new unit with continuity
and, arguably, a steadying hand if needed. While Craig retained responsibility for issues

9
involving planning law and building regulations, the main task of determining the New Town
Section’s design strategy and directing its everyday work fell to its two Senior Staff.

The first to be appointed was Oliver Cox, an architect whose early career brought him
into contact with many of the key centres for the propagation of architectural modernism.
Educated at the Architectural Association in London, Cox had been of the team working on the
Hertfordshire County Council’s pioneering schools building programme70 before moving to the
LCC’s newly-formed housing group in 1950. Cox recalled being approached by West to
participate, but only took the job on the understanding that he could have a senior counterpart
with a better grasp of town planning matters than he felt he possessed:

‘(West) came to me and said “look, have got instructions to do a New Town. Would you
be prepared to take it on?” I said: “I’m an architect; this is a planning job. You need a
really able planner.” There was a perfectly amenable planner… (who) was already
appointed, (but) I needed a planner that I could work with on this. I was asked if there
was anyone that I could suggest and I suggested Graeme Shankland, who I knew shared
my views about planning.’

Shankland was a close friend from Architectural Association days, who shared the notion of
planning as architecture-writ-large; an idea that anchored the thinking of most architect-
planners during the heyday of modernism. To some extent, he was a controversial choice.
Although he was an experienced member of the Architect’s Department, having worked at the
LCC since qualifying as an architect in 1949, he had recently received an official reprimand for
participating in a spare time urban regeneration project which had been mistakenly
represented on national television as LCC policy.71 Cox’s insistence of Shankland’s
participation, however, eventually paid off and Shankland became joint leader of the team as
Senior Architect-Planner.

By April 1960, the team that Cox and Shankland drew together comprised 18
individuals (including its senior staff).72 Its core came from within the organisation. Hugh
Morris, for example, had worked in the Housing Division with Cox; Marjorie Raffloer was an
architect-planner who had been participated in the fieldwork that eventually led to the
selection of Hook. Others, like Graham Ashworth and Edwin Schoon, came to the New Town
Section for their first jobs, drawn perhaps by advertisements for Planning Assistants that
promised the successful applicants ‘short-term, original and interesting work’.73 David Hardy,
recruited from Crawley New Town, had experience in social development. The landscape
architect Michael Ellison was appointed on the advice of staff at the recently-designated New
Town of Cumbernauld, who stressed the importance of including landscape architecture within
the design team’s remit. The eventual unwillingness of the LCC’s Engineer to second staff to
the unit led to the private practice Freeman Fox acting as paid consultants on civil engineering
matters, with Professor Ruth Glass providing assistance on population forecasts. In addition,
unpaid advice was willingly contributed by a coterie of interested friends and colleagues that
included Ove Arup, the sociologist Peter Willmott and the educational reformer Henry
Morris.74

The first months of the group’s existence were spent undertaking basic research. Three
sets of considerations had a bearing on their deliberations: population forecasts; the evidence

10
of development from the existing New Towns; and a set of presumptions about what the
group wanted the New Town to be. The role of population projections needs little emphasis
since ‘they served as a framework of reference for the nature, the order and the timing of likely
events to which policy decisions could be related’.75 Forecasting would address not only the
overall levels of provision required – in itself a somewhat controversial matter76 – but also the
question of balance. Predictions showed that, as with other New Towns, Hook could expect
imbalance from several sources: in age range primarily due to initially drawing in families with
young children; and in socio-economic terms due to the tendency to attract skilled manual and
white-collar workers. These trends would have consequences for provision of facilities such as
schools, places of recreation and hospitals. One of the tasks for the team, therefore, was to try
to devise ways, however limited given the constraints of overspill arrangements, whereby the
creation and management of the housing pool might be shaped to address both forms of
imbalance.77

The second source of influence came from the existing New Towns. The Mark I New
Towns were of interest particularly for their social intent, but not for their design:

‘We respected Ebenezer Howard and we respected very much the work of Unwin in the
Garden City movement, although people on the housing side more than those on the
planning side. You could see that these men had an idea which was very much related to
people. It was a sociological thing.’78

Members of the group visited all the existing towns and to some extent The Planning of a New
Town would provide commentary of their design and progress. However, in planning terms
the key inspiration for Hook came from Cumbernauld. Given that it was the only development
designated under New Towns legislation by Conservative Governments during the 1950s, the
experience of Cumbernauld was always given close scrutiny by the LCC. During the early stages
of thinking about a possible London New Town, for instance, correspondence showed interest
in Cumbernauld with regard to ‘(a) Finance; (b) Composition of the Corporation; (c) Broad
aspects of planning, e.g. town density, and land allocated to other uses (d) Measures to ensure
transfer of overspill population’.79 Now, almost four years later, there was much to learn from
the early stages of building the housing areas and from the agreed Master Plan. As Cox
recalled: ‘Hugh Wilson (Chief Architect and Planning Officer of Cumbernauld New Town) called
us “the boys”, Graeme and me, at that time, because we were continually watching what he
had been doing at Cumbernauld and were very much guided by that.’80

For the LCC’s New Town Section, the attraction lay in the design of the new settlement
with its acceptance of the importance of car ownership, and higher population densities when
compared with the Mark I New Towns. Cumbernauld had abandoned the cellular structure of
neighbourhood units, which were decried as emphasising ‘pseudo-village-greens’ and as
encouraging residents ‘to look inwards to the local centre instead of visualising the town as a
whole’. This, it was said, worked ‘to the detriment of the creation of civic pride which should
be one of the advantages of a medium-sized town’.81 ‘Urbanity’ was the key, defined as
representing ‘a way of life in which the concept of the town as a meeting place plays an
important part’.82 Central to the visual expression of that idea was Town Centre. Designed by
a team led by Geoffrey Copcutt, this had crystallised by early 1960 into the form as a giant
proto-megastructure – “one huge multi-storey building, to be built in phases”83 – which would

11
be built on the top of the steep, hogback-shaped Cumbernauld Hill. While its form and
aesthetics had not yet been decided, the intellectual debt to this underlying notion as the
embodiment of urbanity and modernity became readily apparent when the Master Plan for
Hook appeared.84

The third influence, a set of presumptions about what the New Town should be, hints
at a critical tension with regard to city design that was so often encountered with architectural
modernism. Much was made of a return to first principles. Modernism was frequently
associated with a rational approach, whereby design solutions were supposedly arrived at
through careful analysis of the functions that buildings and component parts of the city needed
to serve rather than by reference to a priori models. Such detachment, however, was not easy
to achieve. Anyone entering architectural school in the 1940s and 1950s would quickly have
encountered the works of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Bruno Taut, the MARS Group and
others; all of whom offered innovative holistic models that appeared to encapsulate the
essence of the modern city.85 While these models were seldom if ever translated into the
design of real cities, the associated imagery underpinned critical discourse about urban
construction and renewal and may be credited with influencing architects and planners to
know from the outset what it was they were trying to achieve – at least in visual terms.

Superficially, there are elements in the report that suggest the first approach, with
explicit progress through a series of diagrams to show the development of urban form. Yet
closer scrutiny shows that the argument is grounded in a set of beliefs about the necessary
elements of a town (commercial, residential and industrial areas), ‘some convictions about
proximity and layout’ (central commerce, peripheral industry and in-between residential),86
and presumptions about the importance of maintaining physical self-containment, with the
sharp boundary between town and country maintained by a green girdle. Indeed, when
addressing a symposium about the Hook proposals in 1962, Shankland freely admitted that the
Hook team had from the beginning an integrated concept of what they wanted the town to be:

‘Fundamental…was a strong, busy town centre which would act as the neighbourhood
shopping area in addition to its town and regional functions. To achieve this, the inner
town, tightly ringing the centre contained 60,000 people, all of whom were within ten
minutes walking distance from the centre. Three neighbourhood shopping centres
existed in the outer town for the remaining 40,000 beyond easy walking distance from
the centre, thus providing a different type of environment and accommodation for those
who would prefer it. The centre was to contain the specialist activities, cultural facilities
and schools of further education. ’87

Equally the plans for dealing with transport reflected deep conviction that the car had
become the central parameter of planning of town planning and that the way to handle traffic
flows was to separate them from other forms of mobility and to thereby obviate the conflicts
between motorists and other road users. The plan for Hook looked to resolve this problem
through a functionally organised road system, which embodied assumptions about hierarchy of
flows and the need for pedestrian-vehicle segregation; an arrangement that one observer
suggested ‘carried the integration of the as-yet-unpublished auto traffic planning ideas of
Buchanan and the pedestrian-favouring Radburn plan ideas of Stein to extraordinary heights’.88
In doing so, however, the agenda was rarely confined simply to how to handle traffic flows

12
most efficiently or how to promote road safety. With regard to the provision of footpaths
(‘pedestrian ways’), Shankland continued:

‘From studies and experience the team had learned that neighbourliness seems to be a
local affair. To facilitate this type of casual encounter for those who wanted it,
pedestrian ways leading to the centre were provided in close association with the
housing.’89

Similar intermingling of design and sociological considerations was seen with respect to the
multilevel town centre, which was a prime focus for the traffic system as well as intended to be
a symbolic focus for the gathering community. In the process, provision for efficient transport
and the creation of true centrality become interwoven. As Cox later observed with regard to
this idea:

‘It was very much based on the principles of transportation being developed at
Cumbernauld, later applied at Runcorn by Arthur Ling. … You wind your services through
the place that is its centre as many times as you can, so that the centre really is a
centre.’90

The idea that increasing traffic flows through the heart of the city would enhance its symbolic
centrality in the minds of its citizens was certainly ingenious, but was not unusual given the
prevailing tendency in the 1950s and 1960s to draw simplistic relationships between chosen
innovations in city design and expected positive social response. It was also a salutary
reminder, too, that however much the Hook study might appear to address the future, any
analysis of its contents must proceed on the basis that it was still very much a product of its
own times.

The Planning of a New Town

A first thought that occurs when picking up The Planning of a New Town is that it is not
authored in any conventional sense. The cover and title page merely bear the name of the
organisation that produced and published it – the London County Council – rather than
supplying the names of those that carried out the research and crafted the text. This reflects a
combination of two considerations. The first stems from its particular history. The report had
been ‘knocked into shape’ by Graeme Shankland, who remained at the LCC as Senior Architect
Planner at the renamed New and Expanding Towns Section after the termination of the Hook
project. Oliver Cox, who would have been one of its other main authors, had left the LCC in
1960 immediately after the abandonment of Hook project to join the Development Group then
being established by Cleeve Barr at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Given the
sensitivities of the Ministry’s relationship with the LCC over Hook, it is scarcely credible that he
could have been credited as an author of a report on the aborted project, even though any
knowledge of his distinctive drawing style shows that many of the illustrations were clearly
produced by Cox.91 Secondly, though, the lack of specific authorship might also be said to
mirror the group’s chosen way of working. There was within the Modern Movement a
powerful sense of wishing to inculcate new forms of working practice, in which individuals
became anonymous technicians within teams dedicated to design architecture that might
bring social betterment. That type of ideological stance had been common amongst groups

13
working for the LCC’s Architect’s Department92 and certainly the word ‘team’ is ubiquitous in
all writings by participants in the work of the New Town Section. Anonymity of authorship,
therefore, could be said to resonate with that working methodology.

In terms of format, The Planning of a New Town has a chapter structure that reflects an
argument that begins with site selection and the town’s main aims, proceeds through
presentation of the Master Plan and its implications for the component elements of the New
Town, and ends with discussion of costs and the programming of works. The short description
of site selection (pp. 13-15) skirts around the labyrinthine nature of the process. Indeed, it is
suggested that the search method was to work inwards from the extremities of the area rather
than outwards from London in order to find a suitable site as far from London as practicable
and as far as industrialists might be persuaded to move – an ex post facto rationalisation that is
not readily apparent from the archived field notes and working papers. There is then a
statement of the main aims of the town (pp. 16-17) as seeking: to achieve ‘urbanity’; to meet
the challenge of the motor vehicle; to preserve distinct boundaries between town and
countryside; and to attain population balance in with respect to age, family structure and
employment.

The first and third of these aims favour compactness in urban form; a point reinforced
by the two accompanying diagrams (p. 17) which show the differences between a settlement
arranged around a cellular neighbourhood unit pattern and one arranged in linear and
clustered form. The second aim emphasises the perceived need for pedestrian-vehicle
segregation to make the town safer, to face up to car-ownership that would be at least one
vehicle per household, and to facilitate efficient traffic flow. The fourth aim was partly a
response to social problems encountered in the Mark I New Towns, particularly in Stevenage93
and was backed by the analyses in the following section on ‘The People’ (pp. 18-26). Divided
into component parts dealing respectively with household structure, employment and
community, this particular section ends by questioning an idea central to the theory of new
towns; namely the notion of a ‘balanced community’. Largely dismissing interpretations
centred on social status or the mix of occupational groups, the authors conclude by seeing
social balance primarily in terms of its practical repercussions, such as the possible influence on
future employment structure and opportunities, rather than in more idealistic terms, such as
intermixing of social classes. While expressing confidence that many different social groups
would find Hook attractive, they accepted the implications of social diversity for housing,
especially the need to make the widest range of choice available.

The next section (pp. 27-34) contains the fulcrum of the report, the exposition of the
Master Plan. The plan maps out the design and layout of a clustered, walking-scale city with a
strongly-demarcated centre located in a valley. As noted above, the town has two component
parts: an inner town for 60,000 people clustered around the core and an outer town of 40,000
located on the other side of the form-defining urban motorway box. Not only would it be
differently structured than the polynuclear Mark I New Towns, its overall population size of
100,000 would be considerably in excess of anything previously attempted under New Towns
legislation. The sharp divide between town and country is ensured by provision of recreational
open spaces including lakes and playing fields, effectively producing a green belt. The road
system is fully functionally organised, embodying working assumptions about hierarchy of
flows. There is complete pedestrian-vehicle segregation, with extensive provision of footpaths

14
and the high-capacity roadways that border the core of the town and pass directly under the
linear town centre. Barrier effects from the presence of the major routeways are avoided by
frequent bridges and underpasses. Both the centre and the major road interchanges are
multilevel in order to accommodate motor vehicles and there are extensive car-parks to allow
ease of use. Brief capsule descriptions follow of the major areas of the town, communications
and questions of programming, which act as a prelude to more substantive discussion in the
chapters that follow.

Two features are worth considering further. On the one hand, despite this being a
hypothetical document, care is taken in presenting how this new development might fit into
the local geography – a feature that perhaps contributed to the misapprehension that the
report described a real New Town. Yet, on the other hand, there are also elements that are
more typical of a hypothetical document, particularly where it seeks to address other
discussions that the development team were having. Figure 20 in the report is a good
example. One of the prototypes that had strongly influenced the design for Hook was
Vällingby, a suburban district nine miles west of central Stockholm in which the city authorities
in 1954 had created a New Town with a centre built on a deck over the railway station.94 At
Hook (as shown in the lower diagram in Figure 20), a similar centre would have occupied a
small valley allowing the top deck ‘to be placed like a lid over the valley’. This arrangement
would have used the configuration of the site, saving the need for excavation for roads and car
parks needed at the lower level. This contrasts with the arrangement in the upper diagram, in
which users would have to walk uphill and where car parks and service levels would need
excavation. Such an exposition, of course, is an irrelevance for Hook, where no such hills
existed, but the diagram is presented as part of a private argument about the hilltop location of
Cumbernauld’s Central Area (albeit without actually mentioning it by name); a location that
Cox believed ‘was totally wrong’.95

The ensuing chapter considers the residential areas (pp. 35-52). It outlines the four
categories of housing areas: a residential area for those with special needs (two per cent of
total housing provision); the central residential zone, which is effectively an extension of the
centre (15 per cent); the inner residential zone (45 per cent); and the outer residential zone (38
per cent). Each had its own distinctive dwelling types and layouts, which are represented with
compelling artwork. However, what made this one of the most influential sections of the
entire report was not the exposition of housing types, but the force of its arguments on
densities and its critique of neighbourhood units. With regard to densities, diagrams were
supplied (p. 26) to show not just the different amounts of land needed under different density
measures (3000 acres at 100 p.p.a as against 5100 acres at 40 p.p.a), but also that the town
would work more effectively in traffic terms with greater densities. With regard to
neighbourhood units, the arguments take issue with a planning strategy deeply rooted in
Garden City ideology. At Hook, they are deemed inappropriate for a variety of reasons. These
include that: their core of local shops and amenities is not needed given that the town centre is
only 10 minutes’ walk from the main housing areas; they are associated with unnecessarily low
density development; and they are difficult to serve with public transport. More judgementally
perhaps, they are associated with a monotonous townscape, with attempts to give them
identity through design held only to lead to artificial individuality that does not do justice to the
rich complexity of modern life.

15
 If the residential chapter was widely read for its critique of existing New Towns
practice, the ‘Central Area’ chapter (pp. 65) was equally keenly studied for its striking imagery
of how future town centres might look. The authors are convinced that the town centre
should be a showpiece. In social and architectural terms, the centre should be ‘the culmination
of the whole town’s design’ and the ‘most memorable part of the town’. What appears in the
text is an exemplar of emerging megastructuralism, even though that word had not yet been
coined.96 The upper level comprised a pedestrian deck featuring shops and a market area, with
the blandishment to ‘Read The Scotsman’ making a wry reference to the debt to Cumbernauld
(p. 59). Beneath this came the parking and servicing level, bringing parking within the structure
rather than being scattered around it as with American shopping malls (p. 52). The lower deck
would also offer access to public transport, although a present day view of the related
illustrations (pp. 59-60) might suggest the inadvertent creation of a semi-subterranean and
noisy environment polluted by idling buses in the rolling fields of Hampshire. Perhaps more
than at any other juncture in the report, the writers lapse into an excited futuristic babble
replete with references to ‘complex mechanisms’, ‘generators’ and ‘grids’, ‘networks’ and
‘distributors’. Futuristic ideas seemingly deserved a matching vocabulary.

After the pyrotechnics of the previous sections, succeeding chapters on industry (pp.
66-69) and community services (pp. 70-73) eschew the full-page illustrations and bold line
drawings in favour of a few small maps and tables. The chapter on industry justifies the
location of three peripheral industrial estates in terms of local geography along with smaller
sites closer to the main highways; the community services chapter perfunctorily fits the gamut
of educational institutions, medical and welfare services, churches, meeting places and libraries
into the mix. At this point, there is a possible inconsistency. The emphasis in provision of
community services is on locality. Clinics, welfare services, licensed premises, places of
worship and the rest will be supplied at suitably accessible points within the town rather than
simply in the centre. Primary schools would be situated so that children would not have to
walk more than a quarter-of-a-mile from their homes. As Houghton-Evans remarks, ‘we have,
somewhat surreptitiously, gone at least halfway to bringing back the neighbourhood.’97

The slackening of pace in the narrative is only temporary. The chapter on ‘recreation
and open space’ (pp. 74-7) again deals with material that appealed to the visual imagination of
its architecturally-trained authors. Indeed it opens with an image that has often been
reproduced in other sources – an illustration of a young couple reclining on a gentle grassy
knoll and gazing across the playing yields and lake towards the accidented skyline of Hook’s
Central Area in the middle-distance (figure 73). The appeal of linearity had always been that
the built areas are close to open space, but the open space that they see is not simply a green
girdle intended to restrain the growth of the town. Rather it is living space, intended to
provide room for local community use and to justify a sense of a ‘City in a Park’.98 Open
spaces, however, are not just for the periphery. The footpath networks would provide strips of
space that could be landscaped and provide a foil to the closely knit housing. Those that
wanted them would also have the opportunity to work allotments.

Communications (pp. 78-89), one of the parameters of the New Town’s effectiveness, is
treated at greater length. Demand for car ownership and sources of trip generation are
discussed, along with statistical treatments of demand and flow for the different levels in the
road hierarchy from the national roads down to the pedestrian ways. Despite the emphasis on

16
car ownership, there is full provision of public transport, with bus routes to and from the
centre, around the peripheral roads, and to serve commuters using the new Hook station
(located on the southern borders of the town and roughly halfway between the existing
stations at Hook and Winchfield). A heliport, another ubiquitous element of futuristic
urbanism, would be located south-east of the town.

After another nuts-and-bolts chapter (pp. 90-3) covering engineering services (sewage,
energy supplies, telephones, district heating and refuse collection), the narrative switches to
the manner in which the task might be accomplished. Always likely to have been a major area
of contention if the scheme had been approved for construction, the analysis examines the
likely costs and returns (pp. 94-103). These are primarily calculated with regard to housing,
bearing in mind the different forms of housing planned and the levels of subvention likely to be
forthcoming from the state. By contrast, no detailed analyses were prepared for the industrial
areas in light of the complexities involved. From the partial analysis completed, the authors
reached the desired conclusion, namely, that the models suggest that despite its very different
urban form, Hook New Town would not have been radically different to other New Towns in
terms of cost (and therefore would have presumably been acceptable). The projection was
that it would begin to pay its way by the end of year 15, the final point in the three-stage
schedule of development provided by the final chapter on programming (pp. 106-111).
Impressively, the text is followed by nearly 70 pages of technical Appendices covering
population, employment, housing needs, commerce and manufacturing, transport and
development – in itself, a remarkable degree of supporting information given the status of the
report. A concluding bibliography (pp. 177-82) provides a sense of the state-of-the-art with
regard to New Towns development at the turn of the 1960s.

Conclusion

The Planning of a New Town, as emphasised previously, was already history by the time of its
publication. It represents the first findings of a development group who were never forced to
temper their enthusiasms by having to explain their ideas to sceptical audiences in draughty
village halls. The Master Plan was never tweaked by cost-conscious Committees nor adjusted
to accommodate vested interests. No buildings were ever constructed that tested the ability
of the local construction industry to work with modern methods of building and nothing is
available to see whether the LCC would have been any better at creating a megastructural
town centre than was Cumbernauld Development Corporation. Nevertheless, those most
closely identified with the design for Hook New Town would have blanched at the suggestion
that their scheme was utopian. As Oliver Cox recalled:

‘The collapse of the Hook project was hardly anticipated… [We] had absolute confidence
in the LCC’s authority and standing in the planning and housing world to get the project
through.’99

Arguably, therefore, it is precisely this close connection with a real project being
undertaken with a view to subsequent development that differentiates Hook from the
mainstream of ideal city schemes: a genre that Helen Rosenau defined as being rooted in the
methodology that holds that ‘to reach the possible the impossible has to be attempted’.100 The
Hook study, by contrast, was the outgrowth of a scheme with practical intent that was

17
constrained by the art of the possible. It may, as indicated, have contained exhortatory
statements or even as elements of critical commentary on developments taking place
elsewhere, but it was only latterly produced in circumstances where the authors do not have
to bear the burden of actually having to shape real-world urban environments.

Thus conceived, the Hook study provided a baseline of critical commentary that
resonated with those who would be employed to design the new wave of New Towns that
would be designated in Britain in the 1960s. Moreover, although it would be specious to
suggest direct links, there was much in the thinking about Hook – as related to density,
walking-scale, linearity, accommodating the car and urbanity – that predates the design
principles shortly to emerge in the Master Plans for the Mark II New Towns.101 Use of linearity,
for example, was seen in the planning of Irvine New Town in Scotland, which would also
attempt a central area megastructure. The Central Lancashire New Town embraced linearity
in the shape of a triple-spine approach, with a central public transport route and parallel high-
speed motorways. Intimately involved in the latter, Sir Andrew Derbyshire recalled:

‘These things (innovations) have many roots, but the Hook study was certainly a source
that we knew about and read at the time. … Like Buchanan, it just seemed for a while
only like commonsense’.102

Over time, as Derbyshire implied, reappraisal has occurred from the high regard in
which the Hook study was regarded from the time of its publication through to the early 1980s
(see above). When the ‘Pevsner’ for Hampshire was revised in 2010, the entry for Hook
reiterated the statement about the town’s ‘permanent – if unseen – importance’ in the
architectural history of the late twentieth century, but only because ‘it was the site of the
London County Council’s abortive New Town’.103 By contrast, the comments about the
perceived significance of The Planning of a New Town have been excised. Moreover, while
there is still recognition of Hook in the biographies of those associated with the study, in
accounts of the historical development of the British New Towns, and more generally in the
international diffusion of planning during the 1960s and 1970s,104 few contemporary sources
capture or even give much credence to the enthusiasms that this project once aroused.

In many ways, this is scarcely unexpected. Modernist urbanism has suffered so many
vicissitudes since the early 1960s that it is hard to recognise the transformatory possibilities
that were once associated with megastructures and urban motorways. The overspill
arrangements that were once regarded as de rigueur parts of the management of metropolitan
housing lists have long since been rejected by the cities that were supposed to benefit from
them. The much vaunted and internationally admired British New Towns programme, with its
publicly funded Development Corporations, did not survive the Thatcher era. The domestic
climate of ideas surrounding urban development has steadily changed, particularly given
moves towards injecting greater investment into urban development through private-public
partnerships. The changing intellectual and political climate has now made the researches
carried out for Hook New Town and presented in The Planning of a New Town seem like just
another example of yesterday’s tomorrow.

Yet even if its credibility as a vision of possible development has long faded, there is still
reason to examine the insights that it offers. Re-reading The Planning of a New Town provides

18
insight into the concerns and strategic priorities of a time when urban problems were seen in
regional and national contexts as well as local. In professional terms, it evokes the spirit of a
period in which interdisciplinarity could flourish in the design professions, coupling together
the planner’s grasp of structure and layout with the architect’s visual imagination. The Hook
study did not simply present a hypothetical recipe for programmed action. Rather, its
compelling images, ably rendered in pen-and-crayon, communicate the ‘superiority of
comprehensive planning over piecemeal growth’,105 even though one knows that here, as so
often elsewhere, the vision was not followed through to completion. Moreover, it bears
testimony to the ethos of a period when it was felt, however simplistically or naively, that
bringing about change through design was not only desirable but essential. At a time when
there is little architectural intervention in the built environment other to create signature
buildings and when publicly-funded housing programmes are almost non-existent, the
contents of The Planning of a New Town provide food for thought about how far the pendulum
has swung.

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London: Edward Arnold, 1982.

Notes
1
Pevsner and Lloyd, Hampshire, 296.
2
Gold, The Practice of Modernism, 44-47
3
LCC, The Planning of a New Town, 9. It should be noted that subsequent editions continually
changed the prefatory materials that accompany the report. The page numbers referred to in
these Notes relate to the original edition published in 1961.
4
LCC, The Planning of a New Town.
5
A megastructure is a large multi-functional urban complex containing transient smaller units
adaptable to changing needs. See Banham, Megastructure, 7.
6
Pevsner and Lloyd, Hampshire, 296.
7
Houghton-Evans, Planning Cities, 108.
8
Broady, Planning for People.
9
Echenique et al, “A structural comparison of three generations of New Towns”, 240.
10
Ravetz, Remaking Cities, 37. In relation to this point, see also Creese, The Search for
Environment; Schaffer, The New Town Story; Golany, New-Town Planning and Merlin, The New
Towns movement in Europe.
11
Esher, A Broken Wave, 58.
12
Banham, Megastructure, 74.
13
e.g. see Hall, London 2000, 212.
14
A prototype that often engendered considerable enthusiasm amongst modern architects
interested in urban form, but never saw sustained practical application. For more information,
see Gold, “The MARS Plans for London, 1933-1942”, especially 246-7.
15
With regard to megastructures, which were then experiencing a brief phase of popularity in
thinking about city centres, see Banham, Megastructure.
16
Ministry of Transport, Traffic in Towns.
17
LCC, The Planning of a New Town, 11.

22
18
Ingersoll, “Seminar”, 254.
19
This point, however, is complicated by the ‘isolationist stance’ that the LCC tended to have
taken towards the notion of considering its problems as part of the problems as a whole: see
Garside, “West End, East End”, 249, 255. For an expression of the County’s characteristic
attitudes towards the wider conurbation, see Gibbon and Bell, History of the London County
Council, 1889-1939.
20
Michael Hebbert, for instance, notes: ‘streets were condemned to meet engineers’ rising
requirements of space for public utility vehicles and car-parking; or as part of the great
reordering of the street pattern around the anticipated new urban highways; or to provide the
large sites needed for a mechanised building industry.’ See Hebbert, London, 78.
21
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 289.
22
Abercrombie, Greater London Plan, 1944, 58.
23
These were designated under the New Towns Act, 1946, although Stevenage had been
started in advance of the Act using a ‘previously unused part’ of the 1932 Town and Country
Planning Act: see Ward, Planning and Urban Change, 94.
24
Statistics and analysis from Heraud, “The New Towns and London's Housing Problem”, 12.
25
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 289.
26
Roberts, H., Miles, G., Martin, J.L., Toole, J.E.J. and Allerton, R.J. “London County Council
‘Town Development Act 1952 – Review of Progress”, 4. File LCC/AR/CB/1/155, London
Metropolitan Archives, Clerkenwell, London (henceforth LMA)
27
Young and Garside, Metropolitan London, 291.
28
Roberts, H., Miles, G., Martin, J.L., Toole, J.E.J. and Allerton, R.J. “London County Council
‘Town Development Act 1952 – Review of Progress”, 6. LCC/AR/CB/1/155.
29
Exchange of letters between W.L. Hooper (Assistant Clerk of the LCC) and G.A. Kennedy
(Clerk to the Hampshire County Council), 10 May, 29 July, 2 August 1955. LCC/AR/CB/1/155,
LMA.
30
LCC, “Site for New Town”, Housing Committee, Report by Architect, Valuer and Director of
Housing, 4 July 1957. LCC/AR/CB/1/155, LMA. Over time, too, a further criterion gradually
emerged: namely, that the selected location should also be able to absorb a large new
settlement without seriously disrupting the existing urban hierarchy.
31
LCC, “New Town for London’s overspill”. Item 15 Council Minutes, 22 November 1955.
LCC/AR/CB/1/155, LMA.
32
For example, see the contribution made by Lord Listowel to the debate on ‘Urban
Congestion and Green Belt Areas’. House of Lords, 29 June 1955. Hansard 193, cc348-94.
33
Joint Development Sub-Committee, Memorandum, 28 September 1955. LCC/AR/CB/1/155,
LMA.
34
It may be observed in passim, however, that this steer was more evident in hindsight than
would have been obvious at the time given that the Government had recently (July 1955)
agreed the Designation Order for Cumbernauld New Town.
35
Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 156.
36
Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 157.
37
Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 158.
38
E.G. Sibert ‘Review of Sites considered for a New Town’, December 1956. LCC/AR/CB/1/155,
LMA.
39
M.E. Raffloer, handwritten notes. LCC/ar/cb/01/156, LMA. Acronyms in the original have
been spelled out in full.

23
40
Anon. ‘History of Investigations’, AR/TD/SS/1/. LCC/AR/CB/01/156, LMA
41
London County Council ‘Site for LCC New Town: notes of a meeting in the Leader’s Room on
15 September 1958’. LCC/AR/CB/01/156, LMA.
42
Anon. “Note of a Meeting between Representatives of the London County Council and the
Hampshire County Council held at County Hall, S.E.1 on the 22nd October 1958”. File
H/CL5/1/56, Hampshire County Archives, Winchester, Hampshire (henceforth HCA).
43
For instance, see Ravetz, Remaking Cities, 40.
44
Correspondent, “New Town for Hampshire: LCC favours site near Hook”, The Times, 29
October 1958.
45
Evening News Reporter “Do Londoners want to move? LCC Tory Challenge to Plan”, Evening
News, 28 November 1958.
46
Nairn, “The LCC's new town [Hook]”, 214. For more on Nairn, see Gold and Gold, “Outrage
and righteous indignation”.
47
The Hampshire County Archives hold a large number of items of that overwhelmingly
contain objections to the proposal: e.g. see 59M76/DDC284/2, HCA.
48
A Sunday Times Reporter. “LCC in clash on Hook New Town: Hampshire’s Defiance”, Sunday
Times, 28 June 1959.
49
Officers from the LCC’s Valuer’s Department, for example, had lengthy and often hostile
encounters with residents of the affected area as they toured collecting valuation data
necessary for a potential Public Inquiry.
50
Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 159-60.
51
Letter from J.F. Thomson to G.A. Wheatley, 21 October 1959. H/CL5/PL555, HCA.
52
Minutes, Meeting of Representatives of the Hampshire County Council and Representatives
of the Hartley Wintney Rural Council ‘, 29 May 1959. 59M76/DDC284/1, HCA.
53
Memorandum, ‘Proposed New Town at Hook’, 15 January 1960. H/CL5/1/56, HCA.
54
Memorandum, ‘Proposed New Town at Hook’, 15 January 1960. H/CL5/1/56, HCA.
55
Thomson, T.F. ‘Special Report of the County Planning Officer on Possible Reception Areas in
Hampshire for New Population and Industry’, 27 November 1959. H/CL5/1/56, HCA.
56
The other three being New Arlesford, Whitehill/Bordon and Romsey.
57
Memorandum, ‘Proposed New Town at Hook’, 15 January 1960. H/CL5/1/56, HCA.
58
Memorandum from Henry Brooke to Harold Macmillan, 31 March 1960. File Prem 11/3128,
The National Archives, Kew, London (henceforth TNA).
59
Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 159.
60
Memorandum from Brooke to Macmillan, 31 March 1960. File Prem 11/3128, TNA.
61
Letter from Conservative Party Chairman, R.A. Butler, to Macmillan, 5 April 1960. Prem
11/3128, TNA.
62
Correspondence from the Hartley Wintney Rural Council, for instance, brought together a
Field Marshall, two retired Generals, three Knights of the shire and sundry others to remind the
Minister, Henry Brooke, that the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had once promised
Parliament that: ‘it was his purpose that all arrangements should be reached by friendly
negotiations and not imposed by arbitrary power’. See: Letter to the Minister of Town and
Country, Henry Brooke, from Field Marshall Viscount Alanbrooke, Brigadier H. Charrington, Sir
Herbert Griffin, Sir Nutcombe Hume, R.N. Jodrell, E. Kaye, Major-General Sir Leslie Phillips and
Sir Harold C. Smith. Prem 11/3128, The National Archives (TNA).
63
General letter from J.E.J. Toole to local residents of the Hook area. H/CL5/PL555, HCA.
64
Our Correspondent "Alternative to Hampshire New Town." The Times, 24 May 1960: 8.

24
65
Anon. ‘Hampshire Plan for Londoners: 50,000 involved’, Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1960
66
As in the wording of an advertisement for the LCC’s Architect’s Department, The Times, 27
September 1960: 3.
67
Our Architectural Correspondent, “Expansion of Three Towns: London proposals’.
Manchester Guardian, 4 November 1960: 4.
68
Quoted in Anon, “Hook New Town”, 168.
69
Interview between the author and Oliver Cox, 2 November 2004.
70
Saint, Towards a Social Architecture, 58-111.
71
Shankland had recently participated in putting together a ‘Living Suburb’ project based on
the West London district of Boston Manor, together with the three senior partners in the
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon architectural practice, the artist and designer Fred Millett, and a
colleague from the LCC’s Architects’ Department (David Gregory Jones). The scheme used the
Boston Manor area as a basis for a typically swingeing but hypothetical piece of clearance and
renewal. When featured on the BBC television programme Panorama, the involvement of
members of the LCC had falsely given the impression that this was somehow Council policy; an
eventuality that led to Shankland and Cox being ‘carpeted’ by Isaac Hayward, Leader of the
LCC. Information from interview between the author and Oliver Cox, 2 November 2004; for
more on the Boston Manor project, see Chamberlin et al, “The living suburb”.
72
The full listing was: Head of Section, J.C. Craig; Senior Staff: O.J. Cox and C.G.L Shankland;
Design Team, N.P. Allen, G.W. Ashworth, M.J. Ellison, I. Foster, D.C. Hardy, G.I. Lacey, E.G.
Lenderyou, H.C. Morris, R.C.W. Palairet, A.A. Percival, A.C. Perkins, M.N. Pickering, M.E.
Raffloer; W.J. Scadgell and G.E. Schoon. The list comes from Ritter, Planning for Man and
Motor, 121.
73
London County Council Architect’s Department, “New section for New Town development”.
Advertisement ‘Appointments Section’, Daily Telegraph, 30 December 1959.
74
Information compiled from three sets of interviews given by Cox. These were with Andrew
Saint, 6 October and 3 November 1995. Biographical File, Royal Institute of British Architects;
with Neil Bingham, 1 March 2000. Tape F15579 side A, National Sound Archive, British Library;
and with the author, 2 November 2004.
75
Oliver Cox, quoted in Ingersoll, “Seminar on the planning of the project for Hook New Town”,
254.
76
In part, this was because long-term demographic forecasts from the 1930s and 1940s had
proven wildly inaccurate (e.g. see Joshi, The changing population of Britain). In part, too, there
was concern about the danger of overspill policies contributing to the development of a
‘hollow core’ in London (see Cullingworth, Environmental Policy, 156).
77
See the discussion reported in Ingersoll, “Seminar on the planning of the project for Hook
New Town”, 254-5.
78
Interview between the author and Oliver Cox, 2 November 2004.
79
Letter to Mr H.F.G. Kelly, Department of Health for Scotland, from E. Sibert, Planning Officer,
LCC Architect’s Department, 9 January 1956.
80
Interview between Oliver Cox and Neil Bingham, 1 March 2000. NSA, tape F15579 side A.
81
Wilson, Cumbernauld New Town; see also Houghton-Evans, Planning Cities, 103; Gold, “In
search of new syntheses”.
82
CNTDC, Cumbernauld Technical Brochure; cited in Johnson and Johnson, “Cumbernauld
revisited”, 639.

25
83
CNTDC, “Cumbernauld Town Centre: Preliminary Report”, 4, (emphasis added). See Gold,
“The making of a megastructure”
84
Gold, “Modernity and utopia”.
85
For more on these matters and the associated tensions, see Gold, The Experience of
Modernism, 19-47.
86
Ervin, The Structure and Function of Diagrams in Environmental Design, 51.
87
Quoted in Ingersoll, “Seminar on the planning of the project for Hook New Town”, 255. It
should be noted that the material quoted here is Phyllis Ingersoll’s summary of Shankland’s
presentation rather than a verbatim account.
88
Parsons, “British and American community design”, 261,
89
Quoted in Ingersoll, “Seminar on the planning of the project for Hook New Town”, 255.
90
Interview between the author and Oliver Cox, 2 November 2004.
91
Given the chronology and the stage that the research had reached at the time of
termination, it is almost certain that Cox produced these as a contribution to the book rather
than them being left over from the time that he had been employed at the LCC.
92
Gold, The Practice of Modernism, 44-5.
93
Houghton-Evans, Planning Cities, 108.
94
Pass, Vällingby and Farsta, 97-109.
95
Interview between the author and Oliver Cox, 2 November 2004.
96
Gold, “In search of new syntheses”, 251.
97
Houghton-Evans, Planning Cities, 111.
98
Quoted in Ingersoll, Seminar on the planning of the project for Hook New Town”, 255.
99
Interview between Andrew Saint and Oliver Cox, 6 October and 3 November 1995, 6-7.
100
Rosenau, The Ideal City, 175.
101
Gold, The Practice of Modernism, 250-4.
102
Interview between the author and Sir Andrew Derbyshire, 16 December 2004.
103
Bullen et al, Hampshire, 342.
104
For example, see Jung, “Oswald Nagler”, 598, 591.
105
Hebbert, “London 2000 and 2001”, 88.

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