Building New Towns, Letting Old Ones Die: How UK Housing Policy Betrays Finance, Culture, and Community

When the Labour government announced plans to build 12 new towns as the flagship answer to Britain’s housing crisis, the headlines sounded bold. At least 300,000 homes, they promised, delivered in “well-connected, well-designed, sustainable” settlements. Ministers pledged that three of these would even break ground before the next election.

But beneath the headline lies a stark truth: this policy is not housing strategy. It is a financial instrument — one that enriches developers, speculators, and landowners while Britain’s existing towns, rich with history and infrastructure, are left to rot.

The Financial Question: Who Really Benefits?

Labour presents new towns as a route to affordability. Forty per cent of the homes, they say, will be “affordable,” half of those at social rent. Yet anyone familiar with the UK development playbook knows how this ends: viability assessments, rising costs, and developer renegotiations that whittle down social housing until promises are unrecognisable.

The winners are predictable:

• Landowners whose fields soar in value once re-zoned for housing.
• Developers who enjoy large, state-backed contracts with guaranteed returns.
• Financial institutions who finance infrastructure and construction, front-loading profits while risks are carried by the public.

The losers are equally predictable: taxpayers funding the infrastructure, and communities who wait years for basic services while living in half-finished dormitory settlements.

Lewis Mumford saw this pattern clearly a century ago. In The City in History (1961), he warned that modern development risked becoming “a money-making machine, divorced from the needs of life.” Jane Jacobs, writing in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), called such approaches “cataclysmic money”: “Projects that are cataclysmic in scope … inflict damage that is out of all proportion to what they accomplish.”

The Culture of Neglect

While billions are promised for greenfield “towns of the future,” seaside and industrial towns across Britain remain scarred by dereliction.

In Margate, streets of fine Georgian terraces sit vacant, awaiting a policy of reuse that never comes. In Ramsgate, entire seafront hotels decay, their potential for housing or cultural space lost year by year. In Plymouth, post-war clearances left gaps still unhealed, while Victorian stock crumbles in neglect.

Every boarded-up property is not just a wasted house but a piece of cultural and community wealth destroyed. Dereliction is itself a form of demolition, a slow violence that erodes civic pride and resilience.

Jacobs argued that thriving cities depend on “a mingling of old buildings and new buildings, so that a variety of enterprises, old as well as new, can have a place.” (Death and Life, p. 187). In Britain, policy does the opposite: it starves old towns of investment while pouring billions into speculative new ones.

Anna Minton has described this dynamic in Ground Control (2009), where regeneration has too often meant “a transfer of wealth and land to private developers, leaving the public with little more than debt and disillusion.”

The Infrastructure Mirage

Supporters of new towns point to their potential for sustainability: cycling paths, green energy, modern schools. But infrastructure for new settlements is not cheap. Roads, water, power, transport, hospitals, schools — all must be built from scratch.

That burden falls not on developers but on the taxpayer. And history shows the delivery is rarely as promised.

Peter Hall, in Cities of Tomorrow (1988), observed that Britain’s post-war new towns “succeeded only in part, often remaining socially polarised and economically dependent on the larger cities they were supposed to relieve.” Ebbsfleet, heralded as Britain’s model “garden city” in the 2010s, fell far short of its targets. Services lagged, housing numbers disappointed, and the “complete community” never materialised.

By contrast, Britain’s seaside towns already have infrastructure — stations, schools, hospitals, housing — but lack the funds to repair and repopulate them. The rational choice is to channel capital inward, not outward.

The Lost Craft: Skills, Training, and the Value of Historic Fabric

There is another, quieter failure embedded in the government’s housing strategy — a failure to sustain the skills and crafts needed to maintain and revitalise Britain’s existing stock of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings.

Instead of funding training programmes for masons, carpenters, plasterers, and glaziers skilled in traditional techniques, policy rewards the mass delivery of new housing using prefabricated systems, deskilled assembly lines, and cheap imported materials. The result is a widening gap between what Britain has — millions of historic homes — and the skills needed to preserve and adapt them.

This is not a small oversight. As the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) has repeatedly argued, “there are simply not enough craftspeople trained to repair and adapt old buildings using the right materials and methods.” Conservation courses are underfunded, apprenticeships are scarce, and those who do train often struggle to find consistent work because large developers dominate the housing market.

The contrast is stark. Traditional construction — lime plaster, hand-cut joinery, brickwork laid with care — produced buildings of extraordinary longevity. Their material cost and embodied carbon are sunk assets, already paid for by past generations. To demolish or neglect them is to waste both money and carbon, while producing replacements of inferior quality.

As conservation architect Philip Venning once observed: “We could not afford to build the Georgian terraces of Bath, the Victorian warehouses of Liverpool, or the Edwardian schools of London today. The craftsmanship, the stone, the timber — all are beyond reach.” Yet these treasures still exist, waiting for care, adaptation, and reuse.

Lewis Mumford understood this when he wrote that “the city is a product of time … the city is a collective memory” (The Culture of Cities, 1938). To lose traditional skills is to lose the capacity to maintain that memory. Jane Jacobs, in turn, stressed that old buildings are essential not just for their beauty but for their affordability: “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” (Death and Life, p. 188). Without the crafts to keep those buildings viable, communities lose both heritage and opportunity.

By contrast, prefabricated methods promise speed but rarely durability. Walls of plasterboard, synthetic cladding, and foam insulation degrade within decades, locking communities into cycles of replacement and waste. These are not homes for generations; they are assets for developers’ balance sheets.

The failure to invest in skilled craft training also undermines Labour’s own climate commitments. Reusing and retrofitting historic housing stock is far less carbon-intensive than demolishing and building anew. Each Georgian terrace or Victorian villa already contains thousands of tonnes of embodied carbon. To waste this in favour of quick-build prefab towns is to deepen the climate crisis under the banner of solving the housing crisis.

The alternative is clear: Britain should treat its immense heritage housing stock as a national treasure and invest in the people who can keep it alive. Training programmes in lime, timber, ironwork, and stone should be expanded and funded at scale. Local colleges, craft guilds, and universities must be resourced to pass on skills that once defined Britain’s global reputation for building.

This is not about nostalgia. It is about economics, sustainability, and identity. A skilled craft workforce supports small and medium-sized firms rooted in communities, rather than multinational developers chasing speculative margins. It creates jobs with dignity and permanence. It ensures that Britain’s built environment remains not only habitable but distinctive.

To fail here is to consign the country to a double loss: the loss of cultural memory embodied in its buildings, and the loss of human skill embodied in its crafts.

A Political Gamble

Labour’s wager is that new towns will demonstrate ambition on housing. But this gamble carries political danger.

Communities watching their own streets crumble while hearing about billions for speculative greenfield projects will not be convinced. Coastal and northern constituencies — places Labour must hold to remain in power — will see neglect turned into betrayal.

Danny Dorling, in All That Is Solid (2014), argues bluntly: “Britain has more bedrooms than it has people to fill them … the crisis is not one of scarcity but of distribution and use.” By ignoring vacant homes and derelict towns, Labour risks appearing captured by developer interests rather than serving the public.

The risk is clear: Labour may solve neither the housing crisis nor its own credibility crisis. Instead, it risks being remembered as the party that once again aligned itself with developer interests while culture, heritage, and community life slipped further away.

The Alternative: Build Inwards, Not Outwards

The UK does not lack buildings. Action on Empty Homes estimates over 250,000 long-term vacant homes in England alone, many in areas crying out for regeneration. The challenge is not supply but the political will to redirect investment.

A rational housing strategy would:

• Catalogue and prioritise vacant and derelict properties for reuse.
• Fund retrofitting and adaptive reuse of heritage housing stock.
• Reinforce local infrastructure where it already exists.
• Create incentives for small builders and community groups, not just mega-developers.
• Make regeneration — not expansion — the core of housing delivery.
• Invest in a skilled craft workforce to repair and adapt Britain’s historic homes.

This is not nostalgia. It is financial prudence and cultural stewardship. Restoring Britain’s seaside and historic towns delivers homes faster, cheaper, and with deeper community roots than any speculative “instant town” could hope to.

Conclusion

The housing crisis is real. But the government’s answer — 12 new towns — is an illusion. It is a policy that mistakes land supply for community life, speculation for strategy, and financial churn for civic renewal.

Mumford warned against cities as “machines for living” detached from human life. Jacobs showed how authentic vitality comes from the messy, incremental reuse of what we already have. Anna Minton exposed how developer-led regeneration extracts wealth from the public, while Danny Dorling reminds us that Britain’s crisis is one of distribution, not scarcity.

All would recognise in today’s policy a catastrophic error.

Britain cannot afford to build outwards while its heart decays inwards. If Labour wants to keep faith with the people — and any hope of re-election — it must stop feeding developers and start rebuilding communities.

To be bold is not to build new towns. To be bold is to bring old towns back to life — with the skilled hands that built them in the first place.