A new town vision: thousands of affordable homes in London’s ‘villages’

Mark Twain described London as “50 villages massed solidly together over a vast stretch of territory”. Each of these villages had — and often still has — its own name and its own government. Now in one fell swoop, London is about to get two new “villages”.

After a drought of 55 years, Britain is about to see a wave of 12 new towns coming to some of its green and pleasant lands. More than a year after regaining power in Westminster, the Labour government has published the report produced by the taskforce it appointed to identify suitable locations.

There is symmetry here: the first modern new town programme was instituted by a Labour administration that won power in the wake of World War Two and which led to a first wave of 20 conurbations, mostly in England. None was in London but eight were chosen to form a ring of new towns around the capital to house Londoners and others seeking new homes after the devastation of the Blitz. Subsequent waves under both Tory and Labour governments took that to 32 towns that are now home to some 2.8 million people.

Low productivity and high house prices

September’s announcement marks a major shift. While previous waves focused on self-contained, mainly rural locations, the panel has chosen sites within London and four other English cities. The two within London’s political boundary are: an expanded development bringing together Chase Park and Crews Hill in Enfield on London’s northern boundary; and the creation of a riverside settlement next to the existing new town of Thamesmead in south London’s Greenwich. London is not alone — Leeds, Manchester, Milton Keynes (the final first-generation new town) and Plymouth get “extensions” or “densifications”.

The taskforce makes clear why it is favouring urban extensions. While the first wave of new towns was focused primarily on alleviating overcrowding in major cities, the 21st century equivalents are focused on “high-productivity locations where housing shortages are limiting labour mobility and economic potential”. Thus, London.

Having cycled up and down the hill that passes by Crews Hill railway station several times, I know that the area is, as the taskforce says, low value land made up of commercial nurseries, garden centres, a golf course and “lower quality” greenfield land. In other words, suitable for targeted compulsory purchases and sustainable development of the land to build some 21,000 homes.

But the catch is that it sits in the Green Belt, albeit which the taskforce describes as “poor quality” and thus qualifying for central government plans to make it easier to release “grey belt” land for development. This will put Whitehall in conflict with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as fellow Substacker Dave Hill explains in this recent excellent analysis. But if the government can push this through, it will create a new village in outer north London.

Crews Hill in ‘poor quality’ green belt land. Source: Google Maps

The location is much less of an issue south of the river in Thamesmead as the stretch identified by the taskforce is relatively inaccessible land and was indeed part of the original vision for the post-war development in the 1960s that was never fully realised. There is space for a community of some 15,000 homes.

Inaccessible lands left behind by the 1960s development. Source: Google Maps

The challenge is that the land is indeed inaccessible as it abuts the Thames and is almost an hour's walk to Abbey Wood railway station. The plan is therefore dependent on a decision by the government to approve a plan to extend the Docklands Light Railway across the river, which Transport for London has put out for consultation. As the project sits alongside Old Oak Common as the Mayor’s highest-priority infrastructure ambition for unlocking growth and regeneration, it should get full support from City Hall (unlike Crews Hill).

A DLR extension is key to the plan. Source: Transport for London

The taskforce has put forward strong arguments for creating these new towns — or villages — within London boundaries as part of a new town programme. The taskforce sees both as helping to solve the problem of high house prices that it says are holding back gains in productivity — which is key for driving growth.

It says a new town in Enfield could support London’s economic growth by providing much-needed housing for a workforce that could easily commute into central London, as well as offering new commercial space and employment opportunities. Looking at Thamesmead, it highlights the "acute housing pressures" in the area, citing figures showing the premium needed to buy a home in Greenwich versus the rest of the country.

There will undoubtedly be opposition and a lot of red tape to cut through, as post-war housing minister Lewis Silkin encountered in Stevenage when he was heckled by a crowd of protestors — who had renamed the railway station “Silkingrad” — as he sought to explain how the population would be expanded 10-fold to create the first new town. Critics of the new plans have already found an open ear in some media for a similar critique (although it is fair to say Stevenage is a success story).

The Taskforce believes it is critical the government recaptures this post-war level of ambition to address the challenges of the present. This certainly creates an opportunity to relieve the pressure from high house prices. But that will require ensuring that central government control can prevent the eroding of commitments for affordable houses that habitually occur when developments are led by the private sector.

The taskforce says that by providing a “substantial number of homes in the right locations”, the new towns can play a pivotal role in improving housing affordability over time, particularly by delivering “significant volumes” of homes at social and affordable rent.

In a crucial paragraph, it says new towns must accelerate housing delivery through the provision of new homes that people need, including a mix of housing tenures that support diverse communities, affordable homes and high-quality social housing, all supported by appropriate levels of funding (emphasis added).

It has selected a share of 40 per cent homes as affordable, which can be funded by “capturing” the value created by increases in land value as the town attracts home buyers and investors and reinvesting that in funding more affordable housing as the town continues to grow.

This why the taskforce has again looked back in history and identified the development corporation with powers to assemble the land and coordinate the investment as the best body to deliver the towns, with the government providing significant “up-front” funding. We are just at the beginning of the blueprint stage, but there is hope that London’s new villages will be sustainable both environmentally and in terms of social balance.

Rivers of asphalt and steel: the arteries that connect and divide us city dwellers

While all city dwellers tend to root themselves and thus embed their identity in the street or the block in which they live, the arteries that connect the city with the rest of the country continue to fascinate us.

Perhaps because they appear on the news when they are clogged with traffic, the arterial roads and motorways in and out of London are logged in our mind. Similarly, problems on the fast — and not so fast — rail lines into mainline London stations make us think about past journeys for fun, friendship or work. The river too holds a sway over us despite its replacement by airports as the way into the city from abroad.

Although the city has gone through a series of metamorphoses and reconstructions over the centuries, these inward paths act as ley lines. In the case of the roads, they often follow routes laid down by the Romans and their ancient predecessors and successors. The A1 follows the Roman Ermine Way north, the A2 to the east was a Celtic trackway and the Roman Watling Street, while the A3 to Chichester and the south starts as Stane Street.

Rounding off the compass points is Via Julia from which the A4 and M4 take their routes to and from the west of England. If one is looking for an example about how London is constantly changing but ultimately retains echoes of its past, then this road — also known as the Great West Road and the Bath Road — provides an ideal example. The need for a route for trade and travel between the east and the west of southern England dates back to the history of human habitation in England and has left its traces throughout London.

Nowadays, the A4 now takes a jagged path from its origins just north of Fleet Street, passing through Aldwych — the Saxon old city — before following the Strand, Piccadilly and Knightsbridge as it forms the start of the vehicle route between London and its western neighbours. At Hammersmith, the elevated section rears up, leaving a permanent monument to the road building age that snakes out towards Heathrow.

That modern section of motorway and semi-motorway road, like many similar road schemes, is the result of the congestion that inevitably impacted the Roman road as the population and demand for goods surged over the centuries. As I discussed a few weeks ago, the Westway road that becomes the A40 running all the way to Fishguard in west Wales, is the prime example of the application of modern construction to old routes.

These pathways into and out of London have always captured artists’ imaginations. The road to Kent is an important medium for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while more recently, the road from Bermondsey in south London to Margate, also in Kent, provides the plot device for Graham Swift’s Last Orders.

JMW Turner captured the shift from old to new modes of travel in his dramatic painting Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway. A steam engine comes towards us as it crosses the Maidenhead Railway Bridge in the rain: designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the bridge was completed in 1838. We are looking east towards London as the train heads to the west. He is representing the new way of travel, and whether he is condoning or condemning it is down to the view’s interpretation.

Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, by JMW Turner at the National Gallery, London

It makes sense that a contemporary artist would choose the A4 road as the subject of a series of paintings of that thoroughfare in its all its beauty and ugliness. Rivers and Roads that ran in the Barbican Library until 29 September, featured the work of painter Helena Butler, based in Brentford, west London, who uses an abstract style to capture the changing light and dramatic tension that the local scenery evokes.

She has chosen the M4, but her viewpoint is not of the historic origins of the road in inner London but of the new road that was built to relieve Brentford High Street of congestion, and which manifests itself as it snakes through the suburbs of the much-expanded city. Her works include abstract but industrial views of the elevated section and of the buses and cars travelling on the road underneath. One painting of a man waiting with his dog for a green light at a pedestrian crossing captures the mundane reality of roads, whether in London or elsewhere.

Stay! By Helena Butler. Photo by author

As I drove back into London on Sunday evening — down the M1 from Durham rather than along the M4 — I realised I was part of a large collective but anonymous community of drivers. The sea of red brake lights ahead revealed a large mass of people all travelling in unison for a common purpose. Yet the identity of each driver was invisible to the others, the opposite of the reality centuries ago when travellers and wagon drivers would have greeted each other as they crossed paths.

While few, if any, roads are likely to be built into London and the public transport budget is depleted after the successful Crossrail/Elizabeth and the botched High Speed 2 railways, the paths now occupied by today’s roads and rails will always be the arteries that bring people into a city in which they can swiftly disappear and become invisible.

Tourist invasion: how your holiday choice might be destroying the cities you love

Every year households in Britain take individual decisions on where to take an overseas holiday (if they can afford it). Taking into account the price, ease of travel and the temperature, they will be likely to stay in a beach resort or a historic city in continental Europe. And when they arrive in, say, Barcelona, Prague, Torremolinos, Amsterdam or Dubrovnik they will find that they happen to be one of tens of thousands of other tourists.

This has led to the syndrome known as overtourism. The World Tourism Organization defines it as "the impact of tourism on a destination … that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens … in a negative way". Few tourists want to see themselves as part of a global problem, but the collective weight of their individual decisions delivers just that.

Dubrovnik is one of many cities to host swarms of tourists. With a standing population of just under 42,000, the daily influx of tourists can easily outnumber them. The volume of visitors arriving in one place has led to streets being congested, accommodation being taken up with hotels and wholesale conversions of flats into holiday flats on platforms such as Airbnb and Booking. Then, the prices of drinks and meals are impacted by the increased demand from people with fatter wallets than the residents.

Dubrovnik offers from overtourism. Photo: author

National and urban governments are keen to capture the economic benefits of tourism in the form of spending, taxes and job creation. But these benefits bring offsetting costs: social ones such as price rises and blocking up the city for daily living; and environmental harm via pollution, greenhouses gas emissions and waste production. Academics and policymakers have identified these concepts as the three pillars of urban sustainability: economy, society and environment.

Tensions arise when economic concerns trump the other two. My taxi driver to the airport — who relocated from a village outside the capital Zagreb to work first in kayak tourism and then taxiing — said that in 2024 as many as eight cruise ships would berth at the port each day in July and August, each turning out between 3,000 and 7,500 passengers. Fleets of coaches would line up to take between 24,000 and 60,000 people to the tiny mediaeval Old City.

Each cruise ship can deposit up to 7,500 tourists every day. Photo: author

This year, the driver said, the number had been capped at two ships a day because of the city’s concern over overcrowding and pollution, likely fuelled by anger among residents. One example of this anger was displayed, ironically, as a public art gallery aimed at tourists. The artist, Slaven Tolj, used a map that is ubiquitous around the city showing where Serbian shells fell during the 1991–1992 Homeland War. Instead he replaced, for example, “roof damaged by direct hit” with “facilities intended for catering and tourism services” and “direct hit on the pavement” with “tables and stands on public grounds”. Tourism as a hostile activity is a painful metaphor.

The original map on war damage (top) and the adapted version on tourism development (below). Photos: author

But it is a tricky paradox, as there is little industry in Dubrovnik outside fishing and tourism supports jobs ranging from hotels, restaurants, taxis, events and attractions, to boat tours, kayak adventures and the wider maritime industry. Indeed, many of those jobs only last seven months of the year, at which point the workers go back to elsewhere in Croatia. The Old City might have 800 residents, falling to perhaps just 200 in the autumn and winter, the driver said.

Policymakers can intervene to attempt to stem the tide or find ways to make tourists’ activities less impactful. Dubrovnik may be rewarded for its efforts to date. The city has been named a finalist for the European Green Pioneer of Smart Tourism awards 2026 for acting to reduce negative impacts of overtourism and managing crowds by regulating the number of day trips to the city.

What tourists can do

The question that the millions of tourists from western Europe, North America, and from China, India and the rest of Asia should ask is whether there are steps they themselves can take to reduce their impact. An obvious stratagem is to travel less and holiday more at home. But humans want to explore and to enjoy the benefits of other countries (even if just to be able to lie on a beach and soak up the sun).

It would easy to pick on cruise ships as they are polluting. According to analysis by Statista, although cruise ships make up only 1 per cent of the global fleet, they account for 6 per cent of black carbon emissions. But my own flights into Pula and back from Dubrovnik were both fully sold out taking 180 passengers on one of many planes each day.

But assuming that you do plan to travel to an overtouristed city, there are three easy ways to reduce your impact. First, do some research and discover less frequented attractions rather than joining the herds flocking to the headline venues: you will reduce the pressure, but probably have a more enjoyable time.

Second, your choice of accommodation is important. Seek out options like hotels, bed & breakfasts, or rental properties that focus on eco-friendly practices like using clean energy sources, minimising water usage, cutting down on waste production and supporting nearby communities. You might also want to consider staying at smaller, family-run establishments, that often create less environmental harm compared to big hotel chains while providing more direct economic benefits to the area.

Lastly, be respectful of the places and people you are visiting. Be polite to the people working to make your stay better, avoid littering and behave as you would do at home (or better if you are in a hen or stag do).

A simple message of respect in Dubrovnik. Photo: author

What about London?

And what, if any, are the learning points for London? The UK’s capital city is plainly very different with its 9 million citizens than cities such as Dubrovnik with a resident population in 2025 of fewer than 42,000. Huge numbers of tourists come to London every day but cannot overwhelm the natives in quite the same way. Museums and attractions such as Camden Market, the Tower of London and Oxford Street will be very busy, but Londoners can go elsewhere for the summer.

Big cities need to look to the future. Amsterdam offers a good example where the city authorities have looked at the potential to nudge tourists away from hotspots. It uses its “I AMsterdam City Card” to offer tourists an easy-to-use way to explore transport options to various attractions. Its database keeps track of which museums a visitor is going to, enabling the authorities to tell them the most efficient route.

London’s authorities have introduced several strategies to address the effects of heavy tourist traffic. These measures encompass controlling short-term property rentals, encouraging visits to the city's less popular districts, and increasing public understanding of environmental protection needs.

If London seeks to keep its status as one of “the best cities in the world to visit” as it continues to encourage novel visitor attractions and accommodation facilities — while maintaining the community's special characteristics and conserving its constructed and ecological legacy — it will need to take more measures to regulate this powerful engine.