There is no shade in Northstowe. My trip to Britain’s biggest new town since Milton Keynes was originally postponed because a 37°C forecast would have made even a short amble around it too punishing. There are no shops, so no awnings or arcades. No mature trees. No porticos. No chance to shelter in the damp-kissed cool of a medieval stone church.
Planned in 2007, with its first residents moving in ten years later, Northstowe is a 25-minute drive – and everyone drives – from Cambridge. Around 3,000 residents live in the town, where 1,600 of the target 10,000 homes have been built so far. But there is still not a single shop, and no GP surgery, library, pharmacy, dentist, museum or heritage centre. There is one academy that covers all year groups. The only gym is the one at the school.
Since the first reports of this “ghost town” made headlines three years ago, the gods of Northstowe (a combination of councils, quangos, developers and contractors) magicked up a community hub – where rooms are pay-to-hire and the café is open three and a half hours each week. There is an empty expanse of parched soil beside it: the village green. The only spot to have a drink is in a retail-park-type inlet a ten-minute walk along a B-road from the “town centre”: more Novotel than citadel.
I wander past unused bike racks and along destinationless streets with my guide, the architect and critic Jonathan Glancey, whose new history of British housebuilding Where We Live regards England’s cut-and-paste newbuild housing as a “national scandal”. He writes of “anywhere homes” that look as if they’ve been “shaken like cheap toys from outsized packets of breakfast cereal”.
In his Panama hat and tortoiseshell Wayfarers – looking more like he was on the French Riviera than purgatorial Fenland – Glancey points out the tight angles of barely openable windows, dodgy brand-new brickwork, the constant visual hectoring of road signage, and how every design choice is “based on the turning circles of cars”. I notice just one desire path, trampled grass on the verge of a road where a pedestrian crossing from one side of town to the other clearly should be. Occasional shivers of lavender gasp for survival. There is poor phone signal: the ultra-insulated housing apparently blocks its way.
Why are we here? Northstowe has had plenty of bashing in the press, but many residents here love their new homes. And with the housing crisis now so acute, it is deemed by pro-growth voices across the political spectrum as Nimbyism or snobbery to lament the bland design of modern housing estates. Glancey, who writes just as positively about the Bournville model village as he does Georgian terraces, Glasgow tenements and Le Corbusier brutalism, rejects the politics of this debate. “I’m not party political. I’m not interested in the ‘-isms’ and ‘wasms’; places need to have purpose. We need to show people the best we can do – not be totally dependent on private enterprise and in-and-out housebuilders making 30 per cent profits.”
Labour’s target is to build 1.5 million homes. Andy Burnham is now promising the “biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. Government plans are already under way for seven “new towns”. Glancey is worried this agenda will bring car-dependent, soulless settlements with substandard housing to “a horrible crescendo”. New towns, particularly those built by philanthropic industrialists in the 19th century and Lewis Silkin’s concrete dreams of postwar renewal, were “like an industrial religion”, Glancey says. He cites Swindon, with its railway workers’ cottages and Tudor gothic style Mechanics’ Institute “built like a church”. Today, he believes, there is no political philosophy of what a place should be.
Glancey is not alone in thinking this. One civil servant involved in the new-towns policy admitted to me that “most of them aren’t even new towns” – indeed, that list of seven includes places already built in the Sixties, such as Milton Keynes and Thamesmead. “There’s been no imagination,” the official said. “No effort to tap up experts outside government who have worked creatively on new designs.”
Burnham’s whole pitch is for a “place first” politics. This has jarred with what some Manchester-watchers see as the city’s own Nowhereville flavour of development – the glassy results of Emirati and Hong Kong investors creating a generic skyline that is ubiquitous but out of reach to most.
Will new place-making under Burnham follow the growth-first, trickle-down-and-out “Manchesterism” model? And what does that mean for those spaces in-between – the “subtopia” identified by the great architecture critic Ian Nairn in his 1955 work Outrage, in which he travels through Britain’s postwar urban sprawl: “A mean and middle state, neither town nor country” defining a “new Britain… [where] the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton”.
As we walk back to the edge of Northstowe along Pathfinder Way (the town is built on an ex-airbase, so its nomenclature is RAF-themed), we hit a meadow. Some diggers nearby are breaking ground; signs are already in place advertising properties that don’t yet exist. “Build, baby, build”, yes, but houses need a home too. Just as a government needs purpose – as Labour has so brutally learned in the past two years – so does a place.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage doesn’t care about Clacton]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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