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In this blog, Alice Millard explores the background and early history of Crawley New Town during the 1940s and 1950s. Alice is the Project Archivist who has recently catalogued the archive of Crawley New Town, which is held at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), as part of the Wellcome funded New Jerusalems Project. To find out more about the project, visit the website. You can also follow the project and view some of its records on its Instagram page.

I should make a confession up-front that, as perhaps quite a few of my generation (being millennials) tend to do, when I thought of the British New Town era, I conjured visions of concrete towers and stylish mid-century interiors. My understanding before this cataloguing project therefore wasn’t particularly nuanced. In fact, the essence of the New Town movement began before any of the retro images I had conjured. Through the garden cities of Welwyn and Letchworth, urban planner Ebenezer Howard pioneered proportionate and balanced communities that would promote housing reform in Britain. The garden city era developed at the turn of the 20th century and developments were planned around existing small settlements.

Figure 1: 6 inch Ordnance Survey map of Crawley

In a similar fashion, and prior to its era as New Town, Crawley was ostensibly an organic ribbon development built up around the London to Brighton road (now the A23), which had become a major highway by the mid-1700s. Smaller satellite parishes of Ifield and Worth were situated to the East and West of Crawley. In 1841, the Brighton Main Line Railway came to the town, and a station was built at Three Bridges (which was known as East Crawley). Then, in 1848 the London Brighton South Coast Railway was opened, and this stimulated further development in the town, including an area known as ‘new town’, though unrelated to the one we’re discussing. Fast forward to 1947, Crawley was designated a New Town and was one of the first generation of designations.

The New Town Act of 1946 marked the beginning of a distinctive era of British social housing. Post war London had suffered considerably during the Second World War; the Blitz having decimated thousands of homes. All this exacerbated the pre-existing strain on the housing stock in the city, a problem which had been escalating ever since the industrial revolution. The Act was the culmination of decades of campaigning for satellite towns in order to lessen the burden upon London. But it wasn’t just London that stood to benefit from new housing. Some of the dwellings in Crawley were similarly not fit for purpose and the town was also bombed during the 1940s, destroying several homes. Amid the buzz of the designation, locals were generally enthusiastic, but not without pockets of criticism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal critics were farmers who were set to lose parts, if not all, of their land under compulsory purchase orders – an activity which had been increasing since the First World War. Others complained that the land was too waterlogged for development. Also, concerns were raised about the proximity of Gatwick and London and their effect on future local economy. One of the more unusual issues raised came from Colonel RS Clarke, MP for nearby West Grinstead, who was worried that this location would be ‘hard to defend in war’. Then again, it had been just a few years since the end of a devastating period of warfare. Complaints rumbled on and two years after its designation there were still calls being published in the Crawley and District Observer to ‘shelve the New Town plan’.

Despite this, the government powered ahead and formed an advisory committee for Crawley New Town, several members of which later joined the board of Crawley Development Corporation. Each member brought knowledge of a particular profession to the table, be it town planning, engineering, business acumen, or experience in social housing. Early members included Sir Thomas Penberthy Bennett, Lawrence Neal, Alwyn Sheppard Fidler, Dame Caroline Haslett, Ivy Molly Bolton, Sir Edward Gillett, Eric Walter Pasold and Alderman James Marshall. Together they contributed ideas towards the formation of the master plan, which was eventually published in 1949 by Sir Anthony Minoprio.

Figure 2: Section of the Master Plan (map), 1949, CNT 4/1/1/12

Sir Anthony Minoprio was a celebrated architect and town planner, and it was his master plan which set out the design of the New Town much of which is still recognisable in modern Crawley. I’ve selected a few significant excerpts, as the Master Plan can speak for itself:

‘Since Crawley is to be a socially balanced town there will be a mixture of types of dwellings in each neighbourhood and no neighbourhood will have large areas of one-class housing.‘

‘The character of the individual neighbourhood centres will vary, and the design will spring from the natural features of the area… [and] local place names have been retained.’

‘It is a fundamental principle of Britain’s new towns that they shall be self-contained and provide full and varied employment in the town for workers of both sexes and in all income groups.‘

I think these extracts also provide us with a good foundational understanding of the ethos of the New Town movement, and how that translated to the planning of Crawley. What we also learn is that the planners intended to keep a sense of individuality to the town whilst also engineering an ‘ideal’ combination of socioeconomic concepts.

Housing was, of course, what many incoming New Towners were most preoccupied with. The Corporation’s Housing Manager was in charge of interviewing and integrating migrants from London and explaining the options and ethos of the development. As a social housing authority, the Corporation rented out properties to tenants; this was not a radical idea and the public were used to it, but further down the line tenants did raise concerns about the rising cost of rent, and as early as 1953 local groups were formally expressing their discontent. The Corporation were careful to justify increasing rents by stressing a better quality of life in the town than in London where – at that time – rents could be comparatively lower.

Figure 3: West Green neighbourhood architect’s model, PP/WSL/N058819

The first housing to be constructed was in the neighbourhood of West Green, to the northwest of the high street. West Green enveloped what was previously a small area of the town of the same name, resulting in a semi-familiar layout and existing buildings peppered amongst the new housing. The types of dwellings that the Corporation built were fairly standard affair of 1950s public housing; many of them were houses in red brick with pitched tiled roofs in detached or semi-detached formation. In later neighbourhoods such as Furnace Green, architects began experimenting with other forms such as skillion or lean-to roofs (similar to the memorable saw-tooth roofs of the town’s factories), white rendering, and multi-storey flat developments. And whilst the Corporation initially vetoed large tower blocks of flats, lower-storey flat developments were popular for their low cost and economic use of land.

Figure 4. Shrublands estate, Furnace Green, Crawley, AM/967/9/44

Dwellings were planned for a variety of occupancies, including families, single people, and the elderly. These homes were then arranged in layouts with a mix of families from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The Master Plan set out that each neighbourhood also had to include a centre, where shops and smaller amenities were located, primary schools, and cycle paths, so that residents needn’t travel into town for essentials but could do so without having to catch public transport or use a car. Ultimately, the Development Corporation hoped that this ‘formula’ would create several vibrant and comfortable communities, which in turn would nestle under the shared umbrella of Crawley New Town.

Figure 5: Excerpt from guidebook published by Crawley Development Corporation, c1955

The scope and impact of the new town movement upon the once small town of Crawley can be clearly seen, and it is a topic so large and expansive that it could cover several books. From education to industry, social integration schemes to healthcare, the Crawley New Town archive reveals the planning and decision making that went into this engineered community. Consequently, this blog is just a brief introduction to the genesis of Crawley New Town and its archive held at West Sussex Record Office. To read more about the New Town and the archive, visit WSRO’s blog.