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This article in The Guardian caught my eye.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/sterile-or-stirring-britains-love-hate-relationship-with-new-towns

In accordance with Dakka's policy on political discussion, this is not a discussion on future housebuilding programmes, or the current state of Britain's housing, or what respective political parties are planning to do.

This is a discussion on the design, aesthetics, memories of living in these places, or working in them, visiting them etc etc with a little bit of history thrown in.

For non-British dakka members, here's a quick 101.

New Towns were built after WW2 to house people who lost their homes in the terrible damage done to British cities by the Luftwaffe. They were supposed to be 'model' towns of the future, bright new utopia, 1950s sci-fi design ethos etc etc you get the idea.

In my experience, they turned out to be an utter car crash!

A horrible mess of bad planning, dodgy angles, and shopping centres that looked like something out of a bad B-Movie.

I grew up on a 'model' council estate, and it was a shambles, and the new school was like a POW camp.

It was like something out of East Germany!

Thank God they knocked it down years later.

and don't get me started on Milton Keynes. Apologies to any dakka members who might live there.

But God almighty, we should rue the day they were ever built. I'm not a fan.

Love the idea or hate it, a permutation of the idea has generally caught on.


In the US, I can drive around my "greater metro area", including suburbs and whatnot, and see carbon copies of the same things on opposite sides of the city. . . The article talks about sterility and sameness in many of these "new cities" . . .and you look at housing developments, apartment complexes, and because profits/bottom-line/shareholders/stockprices are the end all be all for many companies today, you end up with 5 of the "same" apartment in the city. . . Every housing development made by a company in a given year is the same, in another part of town.


Personally, while I understand why these companies do stuff like that, I personally hate it. I much prefer cities like my home town, where neighborhoods still have their own look/identity based on the architecture used when they were built. . . . And, for instance, even if the neighborhood was made in the late 1800s-early 1900s, and all houses are "victorian", each one still looks very different on the outside from the ones around it.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Love the idea or hate it, a permutation of the idea has generally caught on.


In the US, I can drive around my "greater metro area", including suburbs and whatnot, and see carbon copies of the same things on opposite sides of the city. . . The article talks about sterility and sameness in many of these "new cities" . . .and you look at housing developments, apartment complexes, and because profits/bottom-line/shareholders/stockprices are the end all be all for many companies today, you end up with 5 of the "same" apartment in the city. . . Every housing development made by a company in a given year is the same, in another part of town.


Personally, while I understand why these companies do stuff like that, I personally hate it. I much prefer cities like my home town, where neighborhoods still have their own look/identity based on the architecture used when they were built. . . . And, for instance, even if the neighborhood was made in the late 1800s-early 1900s, and all houses are "victorian", each one still looks very different on the outside from the ones around it.

I don't doubt the good intentions of the people who built and designed them - their heart was in the right place, but New Towns are like the French Revolution: great in theory, but difficult in practice.

I don't know if you've ever been to Britain before, but if you haven't and you do visit, stay clear of Milton Keynes. It's not a dangerous place or anything, it's just this soulless, concrete bowl.

I have this childhood memory of being in a new town shopping centre, and dropping a coin, and because of the concrete, it rolled for miles!

Eh. Your architecture is pretty horrible as a rule anyway. When I was in Cardiff for a year, I was stuck in a sea of horrible Victorian...things, chopped up into apartments. I'm honestly surprised that anyone had a sense of 'home town' identity. Building 'sameness' seems a part of the national character, with styles coming and going by era.

I figured that it was based on the idea that if everything is familiar, its comfortable.

Voss wrote:
Eh. Your architecture is pretty horrible as a rule anyway. When I was in Cardiff for a year, I was stuck in a sea of horrible Victorian...things, chopped up into apartments. I'm honestly surprised that anyone had a sense of 'home town' identity. Building 'sameness' seems a part of the national character, with styles coming and going by era.

Cardiff is a city I like, but when in Britain, you need to hit the shires of England. Some beautiful little villages and classic country houses the length and breadth of the nation.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I don't know if you've ever been to Britain before, but if you haven't and you do visit, stay clear of Milton Keynes. It's not a dangerous place or anything, it's just this soulless, concrete bowl.

I have this childhood memory of being in a new town shopping centre, and dropping a coin, and because of the concrete, it rolled for miles!

Is it similar ish to parts of Eastern Berlin, especially the parts that were the former East Germany?? I was just in Berlin in March, and there were plenty of "hollow souled" buildings in Berlin.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Voss wrote:
Eh. Your architecture is pretty horrible as a rule anyway. When I was in Cardiff for a year, I was stuck in a sea of horrible Victorian...things, chopped up into apartments. I'm honestly surprised that anyone had a sense of 'home town' identity. Building 'sameness' seems a part of the national character, with styles coming and going by era.

Cardiff is a city I like, but when in Britain, you need to hit the shires of England. Some beautiful little villages and classic country houses the length and breadth of the nation.

I've seen a few, did a drive over to Oxford and to some amusement park (Alton Towers? Something like that). They were... pretty samey.

Granted, small towns in the US are tend to be just ugly little things, with asphalt smeared as close to homes as they can get (in the east) to widen the roads just a smidge more for trucks they were never designed for, and out west you've got the boring rectangular railroad towns, and only an occasional stray cow to block the winds coming down from Canda-land.

I've just recently (in the last few years) moved from one new town to another - we moved from Basingstoke to Telford and having had experience of both, I think that they tend to get a bit of an undeserved 'bad rap'. Yes, there are areas of Basingstoke that are not necessarily appealing but the same can be said of most towns and cities in the UK - there are quite often 'rough' areas of a town that you wouldn't want to live in if you had a choice. What you also find in a lot of these new towns is the old, crappy 60's architecture is slowly giving way to more modern sensibilities. Telford has had significant investment over the last couple of years; they have spent millions on redeveloping the town centre and it's looking great now.

What actually grates on my nerves is the snobbiness that is often shown - for example, in Shropshire, people from Shrewsbury tend to consider themselves 'posh' and look down their nose at people from Telford whereas the reality is that there are a number of areas and estates in Shrewsbury that are every bit as rough as the worst areas in Telford. But it's all relative - my wife and I both agree that Basingstoke, despite being in the South and being perceived as an OK place, was actually worse to live in than Telford, not just in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour but also in terms of facilities and environment. Telford happens to be one of the greenest towns in Britain, by way of lots of parks and open spaces and that is purely as a consequence of it being designed from the start rather than growing organically; it's great for the kids.

The biggest draw for us was the North/South divide - for the price we sold our house in Basingstoke for, we bought a bigger, better house + paid a chunk off the mortgage + had a chunk of money left over for a new car etc.

 filbert wrote:
I've just recently (in the last few years) moved from one new town to another - we moved from Basingstoke to Telford and having had experience of both, I think that they tend to get a bit of an undeserved 'bad rap'. Yes, there are areas of Basingstoke that are not necessarily appealing but the same can be said of most towns and cities in the UK - there are quite often 'rough' areas of a town that you wouldn't want to live in if you had a choice. What you also find in a lot of these new towns is the old, crappy 60's architecture is slowly giving way to more modern sensibilities. Telford has had significant investment over the last couple of years; they have spent millions on redeveloping the town centre and it's looking great now.

What actually grates on my nerves is the snobbiness that is often shown - for example, in Shropshire, people from Shrewsbury tend to consider themselves 'posh' and look down their nose at people from Telford whereas the reality is that there are a number of areas and estates in Shrewsbury that are every bit as rough as the worst areas in Telford. But it's all relative - my wife and I both agree that Basingstoke, despite being in the South and being perceived as an OK place, was actually worse to live in than Telford, not just in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour but also in terms of facilities and environment. Telford happens to be one of the greenest towns in Britain, by way of lots of parks and open spaces and that is purely as a consequence of it being designed from the start rather than growing organically; it's great for the kids.

The biggest draw for us was the North/South divide - for the price we sold our house in Basingstoke for, we bought a bigger, better house + paid a chunk off the mortgage + had a chunk of money left over for a new car etc.

I've never been to Basingstoke, but I have been to Telford, and it's half-decent as new towns go. To be fair, Shrewsbury is a nice place and a good pit stop if you're heading for Wales.

But look at it from my point of view. Like I said, I grew up on a 'model' council estate, the first of its kind. The play park was this concrete monstrosity, with swings and roundabouts, and was supposed to have some experimental rubber/concrete to cushion the fall if you fell over, or came off a swing.

Inevitably, it went rock hard, and on reflection, I'm amazed I never broke any arms or legs. That was 1970s Britain for you

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
This article in The Guardian caught my eye.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/sterile-or-stirring-britains-love-hate-relationship-with-new-towns

In accordance with Dakka's policy on political discussion, this is not a discussion on future housebuilding programmes, or the current state of Britain's housing, or what respective political parties are planning to do.

This is a discussion on the design, aesthetics, memories of living in these places, or working in them, visiting them etc etc with a little bit of history thrown in.

For non-British dakka members, here's a quick 101.

New Towns were built after WW2 to house people who lost their homes in the terrible damage done to British cities by the Luftwaffe. They were supposed to be 'model' towns of the future, bright new utopia, 1950s sci-fi design ethos etc etc you get the idea.

In my experience, they turned out to be an utter car crash!

A horrible mess of bad planning, dodgy angles, and shopping centres that looked like something out of a bad B-Movie.

I grew up on a 'model' council estate, and it was a shambles, and the new school was like a POW camp.

It was like something out of East Germany!

Thank God they knocked it down years later.

and don't get me started on Milton Keynes. Apologies to any dakka members who might live there.

But God almighty, we should rue the day they were ever built. I'm not a fan.

To an American, especially someone living West of the Big Muddy, a post WWII town would be considered...ancient.

Also, I opened this article up and suddenly had images of Tom Hardy playing the gangster twins walking around and trying to talk to me, and me going "what? English Muth^*^%* DO YOU SPEAK IT?"

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I don't know if you've ever been to Britain before, but if you haven't and you do visit, stay clear of Milton Keynes. It's not a dangerous place or anything, it's just this soulless, concrete bowl.

I have this childhood memory of being in a new town shopping centre, and dropping a coin, and because of the concrete, it rolled for miles!

Is it similar ish to parts of Eastern Berlin, especially the parts that were the former East Germany?? I was just in Berlin in March, and there were plenty of "hollow souled" buildings in Berlin.

These are the so-called "Plattenbau-Siedlungen" (Plate-Building settlements) founded after the war in the 50s,for the very same reasons as in Britain.

Back then, people that got assigned to a flat in one of these large concrete blocks were considered very lucky, as they offered all the comfort that was mostly unaffordable to the majority back then.
It was quite popular all over the socialistic/communist countries back then, they even built 1:1 copies of these in Cuba (including the protective snow shields on the balcony )

After the wall came down and the fall of the iron curtain, a large majority of these flats was left by their inhabitants and if you were looking for cheap living space, you could find it in a "Plattenbau".

Here in the US we had the Levittowns, one in new York and one in Pennsylvania.
They were alright.

I think the issue with the New Towns comes down to the "urban planning" being a little too proscribed. I don't hold to this nonsense about if a town doesn't grow 100% "organically" from some centuries-old and now mostly irrelevant social function(port, church, university etc) then it's some kind of monstrosity, but I think any purposefully designed conurbation needs to have some "room to grow" as part of the design(not just on the outskirts either), and it needs to involve more than one uniform architectural style

Well, that and the rampant cost-cutting mentioned in the article, which is a lot of the reason behind things like playgrounds having "rubbercrete" rather than grass etc.

One of the other big flaws in the original concept of course was the naive idea that work could simply accumulate where people lived, and when that didn't happen, the complete lack of action in most instances to incentivise employers to set up in these places.

Voss wrote:
Eh. Your architecture is pretty horrible as a rule anyway. When I was in Cardiff for a year, I was stuck in a sea of horrible Victorian...things, chopped up into apartments. I'm honestly surprised that anyone had a sense of 'home town' identity. Building 'sameness' seems a part of the national character, with styles coming and going by era.

I figured that it was based on the idea that if everything is familiar, its comfortable.

It's difficult to take this seriously coming from an American, where most of your cities are built to a grid system (just like Milton Keynes here), and your buildings look the same town to town, state to state with only a few exceptions like residential NYC (which I find ugly af).

In comparison Britain has beautiful architecture. You just have to discount the majority of what was built in the past 50 years.

If you see what housing for the poor used to look like in London, you can see why groups like the Labour Party were desperate to put up a better, if basic alternative en masse. Space to live, to raise families, and grow old in dignity and health. The fact it was done by the government after WW2 and the sheer scale all but guaranteed it had to be done on the cheap, using cheap materials. But it was still far better than what it replaced for most people.

We're all just so used to the luxury of regular hot and cold running water in a bathtub, inside toilets, a kitchen fitted for modern amenities, central heating, and so on; that these things aren't remarkable in the slightest. But ultimately, for the poor working classes, the average council house/new estate build is where these things BECAME the default basic standard of living. Most of the developing world would kill to live somewhere as well fitted out as a council estate in Basingstoke.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
This article in The Guardian caught my eye.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/sterile-or-stirring-britains-love-hate-relationship-with-new-towns

In accordance with Dakka's policy on political discussion, this is not a discussion on future housebuilding programmes, or the current state of Britain's housing, or what respective political parties are planning to do.

This is a discussion on the design, aesthetics, memories of living in these places, or working in them, visiting them etc etc with a little bit of history thrown in.

For non-British dakka members, here's a quick 101.

New Towns were built after WW2 to house people who lost their homes in the terrible damage done to British cities by the Luftwaffe. They were supposed to be 'model' towns of the future, bright new utopia, 1950s sci-fi design ethos etc etc you get the idea.

In my experience, they turned out to be an utter car crash!

A horrible mess of bad planning, dodgy angles, and shopping centres that looked like something out of a bad B-Movie.

I grew up on a 'model' council estate, and it was a shambles, and the new school was like a POW camp.

It was like something out of East Germany!

Thank God they knocked it down years later.

and don't get me started on Milton Keynes. Apologies to any dakka members who might live there.

But God almighty, we should rue the day they were ever built. I'm not a fan.

To an American, especially someone living West of the Big Muddy, a post WWII town would be considered...ancient.

Also, I opened this article up and suddenly had images of Tom Hardy playing the gangster twins walking around and trying to talk to me, and me going "what? English Muth^*^%* DO YOU SPEAK IT?"

Ironically, Frazz, if you know the original Get Carter film, the Michael Caine version, and not that horrible Stallone re-make, a lot of the scenes were shot in new town style car parks that sprung up after WW2. So I suppose some good came from them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Moscha wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I don't know if you've ever been to Britain before, but if you haven't and you do visit, stay clear of Milton Keynes. It's not a dangerous place or anything, it's just this soulless, concrete bowl.

I have this childhood memory of being in a new town shopping centre, and dropping a coin, and because of the concrete, it rolled for miles!

Is it similar ish to parts of Eastern Berlin, especially the parts that were the former East Germany?? I was just in Berlin in March, and there were plenty of "hollow souled" buildings in Berlin.

These are the so-called "Plattenbau-Siedlungen" (Plate-Building settlements) founded after the war in the 50s,for the very same reasons as in Britain.

Back then, people that got assigned to a flat in one of these large concrete blocks were considered very lucky, as they offered all the comfort that was mostly unaffordable to the majority back then.
It was quite popular all over the socialistic/communist countries back then, they even built 1:1 copies of these in Cuba (including the protective snow shields on the balcony )

After the wall came down and the fall of the iron curtain, a large majority of these flats was left by their inhabitants and if you were looking for cheap living space, you could find it in a "Plattenbau".

At least If I lived the East German version, I could have saw some cool Russian tanks.

To any non-British dakka member I say this: imagine being a kid, in the middle of a cold British Autumn, in the 1970s, in one of these play-parks, trying to play football with a cheap plastic ball from the corner shop...God Almighty, it made a man out of you


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:
I think the issue with the New Towns comes down to the "urban planning" being a little too proscribed. I don't hold to this nonsense about if a town doesn't grow 100% "organically" from some centuries-old and now mostly irrelevant social function(port, church, university etc) then it's some kind of monstrosity, but I think any purposefully designed conurbation needs to have some "room to grow" as part of the design(not just on the outskirts either), and it needs to involve more than one uniform architectural style

Well, that and the rampant cost-cutting mentioned in the article, which is a lot of the reason behind things like playgrounds having "rubbercrete" rather than grass etc.

One of the other big flaws in the original concept of course was the naive idea that work could simply accumulate where people lived, and when that didn't happen, the complete lack of action in most instances to incentivise employers to set up in these places.

BBC4 did a good documentary on the new towns a few years ago. The designers basically admitted to getting drunk on power and concrete.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ketara wrote:
If you see what housing for the poor used to look like in London, you can see why groups like the Labour Party were desperate to put up a better, if basic alternative en masse. Space to live, to raise families, and grow old in dignity and health. The fact it was done by the government after WW2 and the sheer scale all but guaranteed it had to be done on the cheap, using cheap materials. But it was still far better than what it replaced for most people.

We're all just so used to the luxury of regular hot and cold running water in a bathtub, inside toilets, a kitchen fitted for modern amenities, central heating, and so on; that these things aren't remarkable in the slightest. But ultimately, for the poor working classes, the average council house/new estate build is where these things BECAME the default basic standard of living. Most of the developing world would kill to live somewhere as well fitted out as a council estate in Basingstoke.

I'm pretty sure that the 1960s style, modern architecture, with its sci-fi utopia look, was used once or twice for a few Doctor Who episodes.

The irony here is that because loads of them have been demolished, the new town, 1960s look, is becoming retro, and people are trying to preserve these buildings for the history books.

Some of them even have listed building status.

BBC4 did a good documentary on the new towns a few years ago. The designers basically admitted to getting drunk on power and concrete.

* looks out of the window at a "stable"

I somehow know what that can turn into.

Not Online!!! wrote:

BBC4 did a good documentary on the new towns a few years ago. The designers basically admitted to getting drunk on power and concrete.

* looks out of the window at a "stable"

I somehow know what that can turn into.

You'll probably know the old saying that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Substitute hammer for concrete.

As I say, some of Britain's slums, the Glasgow slums as an example, were an utter disgrace, and needed replacing post-War. Their hearts were in the right place, they meant well, but as I say, theory and practice are completely different things.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Love the idea or hate it, a permutation of the idea has generally caught on.


In the US, I can drive around my "greater metro area", including suburbs and whatnot, and see carbon copies of the same things on opposite sides of the city. . . The article talks about sterility and sameness in many of these "new cities" . . .and you look at housing developments, apartment complexes, and because profits/bottom-line/shareholders/stockprices are the end all be all for many companies today, you end up with 5 of the "same" apartment in the city. . . Every housing development made by a company in a given year is the same, in another part of town.


Personally, while I understand why these companies do stuff like that, I personally hate it. I much prefer cities like my home town, where neighborhoods still have their own look/identity based on the architecture used when they were built. . . . And, for instance, even if the neighborhood was made in the late 1800s-early 1900s, and all houses are "victorian", each one still looks very different on the outside from the ones around it.

It is like this all over the PNW, and has been, apparently, for a while. My entire neighborhood was all built in the early 70s and there are 4 different house types per cul-de-sac, and each cul-de-sac is the same layout of houses. We still have yards and such so its not like in some areas where, if you were a ninja, running across the roof tops you could go for a mile without barely jumping, but you can tell they are the same homes. The cool thing is, though, is that I have been to neighbor's houses that are the same as mine but they have been around long enough that there are some with major renovations (walls moved or knocked down etc) and I get to steal ideas on future things I can do to my own house, as well as have a wealth of knowledge as most of my neighbors have done their own work.

When I worked for Dish and did installs in the newer Pierce County areas where those huge neighborhoods were going up before the '08 crash, every house was exactly the same... And they all had the most ridiculous HOA requirements.. I could never live in one of those neighborhoods.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

BBC4 did a good documentary on the new towns a few years ago. The designers basically admitted to getting drunk on power and concrete.

* looks out of the window at a "stable"

I somehow know what that can turn into.

You'll probably know the old saying that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Substitute hammer for concrete.

As I say, some of Britain's slums, the Glasgow slums as an example, were an utter disgrace, and needed replacing post-War. Their hearts were in the right place, they meant well, but as I say, theory and practice are completely different things.

Na i am not talking about permanent living quarters, i am talking about the fact that our military form 1914- 1990 literally went in full maginot meets WW1 western front siegfriedline - meets medieval fortress system - meets underground Tunnel systems Mode and Plastered the whole country up and down with "panzersperren" bunkers emplacements and "fortresses".

In fact I live near the first line of the "reduit" and when you know how to look you can find hidden bunkers all over the place.
I actually doubt we even know all of them anymore.

There was a documentary on the 1969 storm in Scotland which caused massive damage across Glasgow, and ironically may have prevented the remaining tenements being torn down.

As built, they were horrible slums - families in a single room, one toilet per floor and they'd not had any maintenance since they were built before WW1 (or before the Boer War, in some cases). So, Glasgow City council looked at the miserable dump what was the "second city of the Empire" after the war and thought, "that'll need to go!". The redevelopment plan was radical - the entire city centre would be demolished and rebuilt as a gleaming modern city. The planners looked all over the world for inspiration - French Brutalist designs, American freeways (the M8 through the middle of the city is inspired by a visit to Houston, TX) and a general thought that the past wasn't worth keeping. They decided to start with the slums - bulldozing the tenements and moving the inhabitants out to new housing estates on the fringes of the city (Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse - all later bywords for deprivation). They got a nice new council flat out of it - years ahead of what they'd had before - but there was ]only housing - no shops, no jobs, no pubs, cinemas, schools, playgrounds, etc. In addition, old communities were dispersed, with people being left to their own devices surrounded by strangers. They ended up going back to their old home areas to socialise, leading to the famous "lone pubs". You'd have acres of empty cleared land, with pubs scattered about as the only thing remaining. Eventually, the mania for rebuilding (and the money) ran out, and they decided to renovate the tenements instead - knocking two tiny flats together into one, installing indoor bathrooms and generally making the whole thing nicer - including sandblasting pretty much the whole city. Glasgow went from being basically black to gleaming "blond" and red sandstone nearly overnight. Now, sandstone tenements in several areas are desirable (and expensive) homes. I got a semi-detached 3-bedroom house in a nearby town for less than a 2-bed tenement goes for in Glasgow

The New towns in Scotland were similar ideas; Cumbernauld , East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Irvine and Livingston. They at least had amenities and were planned to offer employment too, although they mostly became "commuter towns" feeding Edinburgh and Glasgow. Livingston and East Kildbride are as roundabout-y as Milton Keynes, and there are several empty areas which were laid out for planned development that never occurred - roundabouts with one or two "dead" exits or roads with massive wide verges that were planned to be dual carriageways. Livingston is large enough to have a games shop (and East Kilbride used to have a GW), so I guess that's good progress.

 filbert wrote:
I've just recently (in the last few years) moved from one new town to another - we moved from Basingstoke to Telford and having had experience of both, I think that they tend to get a bit of an undeserved 'bad rap'. Yes, there are areas of Basingstoke that are not necessarily appealing but the same can be said of most towns and cities in the UK - there are quite often 'rough' areas of a town that you wouldn't want to live in if you had a choice. What you also find in a lot of these new towns is the old, crappy 60's architecture is slowly giving way to more modern sensibilities. Telford has had significant investment over the last couple of years; they have spent millions on redeveloping the town centre and it's looking great now.

What actually grates on my nerves is the snobbiness that is often shown - for example, in Shropshire, people from Shrewsbury tend to consider themselves 'posh' and look down their nose at people from Telford whereas the reality is that there are a number of areas and estates in Shrewsbury that are every bit as rough as the worst areas in Telford. But it's all relative - my wife and I both agree that Basingstoke, despite being in the South and being perceived as an OK place, was actually worse to live in than Telford, not just in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour but also in terms of facilities and environment. Telford happens to be one of the greenest towns in Britain, by way of lots of parks and open spaces and that is purely as a consequence of it being designed from the start rather than growing organically; it's great for the kids.

The biggest draw for us was the North/South divide - for the price we sold our house in Basingstoke for, we bought a bigger, better house + paid a chunk off the mortgage + had a chunk of money left over for a new car etc.

Shropshire lad here!

Telford is decent, and it has a lot of amenities and facilities there nowadays. Still a bit of a roundabout maze mind, navigating the place can be a pain. It also helps put Shropshire on the map, as it came with the M54 and is more populous than Shrewsbury now. The biggest issue is the hospital situation, which is just a clusterfeth draining the county dry. I go to Telford fairly often for things like the ice rink. There are 150,000 people living there, and the investment in creating employment is definitely there nowadays.

I know what you mean about the Shrewsbury-Telford rivalry- I am a Shrewsbury lad myself (sorta- I grew up in the deep countryside, Shrewsbury being the nearest town) and most of it is a sort of friendly rivalry. However, there is definitely real snobbery around, although I find it is more common from those who say Shrohsbury than those who say Shrewsbury Shrewsbury definitely has rough areas, like around Harlescott and Sundorne. Honestly, the two towns are close enough together that they function as one big urban area in many ways (especially with how the hospitals are moving), and I wouldn't be surprised if the urban area was contiguous in 50 years along the old A5. Personally, I prefer Shrewsbury, but that is because I grew up going there often, and I'm a medieval history nut- Shrewsbury has oodles of medieval stuff to look at, Telford not-so-much

My uncle is not a fan of Telford at all, but that is because his dad owned a farm in the middle of what is now Telford, which was compulsorily purchased basically just before the housing boom. His family lost out quite a lot in that situation.

I can't really comment on other new towns, but Telford seems to be thriving. Maybe I just like concrete, I even go to a plate-glass university and stayed in original 60's halls in my first year

In my experiences (Reading, Slough, Milton Keynes) they're [Expletive Deleted]ing horrible little [Expletive Deleted]-holes that remind me greatly of the ambling spread of bland subdivisions, retail parks and strip malls that seemingly comprise 99% of all construction here in Southern Ontario.

I grew up in and around South Bank, York. Lived near the Rowntree's factory for years. Give me a row of labourer's cottages any day of the week.

Reading isn't really a new town. It's actually over 1,000 years old.

It has a Victorian core which could be fabulous if used properly by pedestrianising it and making it a vibrant mix of retail, entertainment and residential flats above.

But in the 1970s they built a ghastly ring road which astonishingly manages to combine underpasses and overpasses in the space of a couple of miles and is still nearly always jammed with traffic.,

Next came a horrid shopping centre (The Broadway?) which squats like a cancerous toad as the west end of the Victorian town centre.

Then they built a load of cheaptastic edge of town retail and business parks to ensure lots and lots of traffic and the hollowing out of the real town centre. This process is still going on.

I'm not sure it is redeemable now.

Reading even has a canal through the middle and a river and lakes on the north edge.

Of all the places in Britain, Reading is the one that annoys the hell out of me the most. Why? Because the way it is pronounced, used to confuse the hell out of me.

For years, I took Reading at face value and pronounced it Reed-ing. In practice, it's obviously pronounced Red-ing.

Same with Hertfordshire. I pronounced it at face value, but in reality, it's pronounced Hart-Ford-Shire.

Get a grip, England.


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 Excommunicatus wrote:
In my experiences (Reading, Slough, Milton Keynes) they're [Expletive Deleted]ing horrible little [Expletive Deleted]-holes that remind me greatly of the ambling spread of bland subdivisions, retail parks and strip malls that seemingly comprise 99% of all construction here in Southern Ontario.

I grew up in and around South Bank, York. Lived near the Rowntree's factory for years. Give me a row of labourer's cottages any day of the week.

Well said.

There are some brilliant examples of model towns/villages all over Britain, with some excellent workers' houses. God knows why they didn't just copy them. Instead, we got this horrible mess of concrete and angles.

Kansas / Arkansas

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

Get a grip, England.

Worcester (and the same with -shire on the end), Leicester, Gloucester all fit the bill. . .


Also, looking at football, why is a town/team spelled DERBY always pronounced "Darby" ???

Because that’s how you pronounce it. Same with the hat.

Why is 'Slaithwaite' pronounced 'Slough-att'?

Why is 'Featherstone-Haigh' pronounced 'fan-shaw'?

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Why is 'Slaithwaite' pronounced 'Slough-att'?

Why is 'Featherstone-Haigh' pronounced 'fan-shaw'?

Short version: English is a bastard language.

Long version: England was at a point a massive melting pot Germanic, Nordic, Celtic (in like a dozen different variations) and French peoples who all spoke different languages but wrote in the same eclectic mix of French and proto-English so there's like no consistency in how places were named or how those particular names were pronounced. Now add 1500 years of language evolution, and you end up with lots of places maintaining their proto/old English names, Middle English spellings, but being pronounced in more modern English.