MIPIM: How to build a New Town
The UK’s renewed focus on new towns is prompting fresh debate about how to create places that thrive for generations. At a panel session hosted by Place North, industry leaders were tasked with a thought experiment: how would they design a settlement from scratch?
Speakers
Stephen Young, chief executive of Salford City Council
Nick Mullins, co-founder of Axis-RE
Jackie Sadek, chair of the UK Innovation Corridor
Bill Price, director of WSP
Phil Mayall, managing director of Muse
Chaired by: Julia Hatmaker, Place North
The tongue-in-cheek name ‘Towny McTownface’ may have raised a laugh, but the discussion revealed serious lessons about vision, infrastructure, housing, identity, and long-term stewardship.
Start with vision
Opening the panel, Jackie Sadek argued that any new settlement must begin with ambition.
“I wanted to put a little bit of a plea out there for a bit of vision in the mission,” she said, pointing to the example of early pioneers such as Ebenezer Howard, whose work on Letchworth Garden City helped shape modern town planning. Visionary projects often seem unrealistic at first, she said, but bold ideas are necessary to tackle the housing crisis.
“You’ve got to break a few eggs on the way to making an omelette,” she said, adding that planners should not allow fears about opposition or infrastructure constraints to dilute ambition.
Think generationally
For WSP’s Bill Price, the first lesson of new towns is patience. Large-scale settlements cannot be treated like typical development projects.
“One of the things we need to remember is that this whole idea of new towns is generational,” he said: “These things are not quick.”
Transport, particularly rail, is fundamental. Price pointed to the transformative potential of East West Rail linking places such as Oxford, Milton Keynes, and Cambridge: “Not only can people get there, but they can get away from there,” he said, stressing the importance of connectivity for jobs and economic exchange.
Utilities and environmental resilience must also be factored in early. “The whole utilities and flood risk question can be overcome,” Price added, but only if infrastructure planning is embedded from the outset.
Put health at the centre
Nick Mullins argued that health should be a core organising principle of communities rather than an afterthought.
Drawing on work in Lancaster, Mullins said planners must address declining health indicators such as obesity, diabetes, and reduced life expectancy. “The need to bring health to the centre of placemaking is really important to us,” he said.
His proposal for the hypothetical new town included a neighbourhood health hub combining GP services, rehabilitation facilities, and community amenities: “Can we bring health, leisure, public services, libraries and everything else into one place to support that kind of health-driven growth centre of the economy,” he asked.
Housing must be integrated
Housing delivery cannot be considered in isolation, said Stephen Young. Before the first brick is laid, he argued, the right development conditions must be in place. That includes strong partnerships between public and private sectors and a clear strategy for infrastructure.
“It’s important that it’s an integrated development,” Young said. “We need to build in infrastructure, open space and placemaking from the start. Retrofitting it later never works.”
Affordability also needs a broader definition: “It needs to be truly affordable, ideally not just in terms of rent costs but also running costs,” he said, linking housing design to energy efficiency and net-zero ambitions.
Young also highlighted the role of housebuilding in supporting skills and employment.
“We’d want the housing offer to lean into the skills and employability of residents,” he said. “Housebuilders can act as a catalyst for jobs and training.”
Root places in fundamentals
For Phil Mayall, successful places are built around clear fundamentals and why the place exists: “Look back at the history of any place and you’ll see there were fundamental reasons why it came into existence,” he said.
Developers should avoid copying successful schemes elsewhere and instead focus on the unique characteristics of a site. “You don’t want what you’ve seen somewhere else, you want what you need.”
Equally important is recognising that places are never finished: “A place is dynamic. When we set a masterplan, the vision will adapt to changing circumstances.” Events such as the pandemic, geopolitical shocks, and shifting working patterns demonstrate how quickly economic conditions can change.
Lessons from earlier new towns
Looking at historic examples, panellists reflected on what went wrong in some developments. Mullins warned that new towns risk becoming dormitory settlements if they lack a clear identity and local opportunities.
“If it’s just a place where you lay your head and commute elsewhere, it won’t work,” he said.
Young agreed, reflecting on past regeneration experience: “I’ve spent many an hour walking around places thinking, ‘Where did it all go wrong’,” he said. “Often it’s because the sense of stewardship wasn’t there.”
Long-term management of green spaces and community assets is essential. Milton Keynes was cited as a positive example, where a dedicated trust maintains parks and landscapes decades after the town’s creation.
Jeremy Hinds, director of Savills, raised the excellent point from the audience that new towns have only recently been associated with a negative connotation, such as Slough. Bath was once a new town, he pointed out – noting that beauty ought to be incorporated into the vision from the outset.
Community, culture, and identity
Beyond infrastructure and housing, panel members emphasised the importance of identity and community.
Sadek said residents must feel a sense of ownership from the start: “If you don’t doff your cap to your history, you’re buggered,” she joked, using the phrase to underline the importance of local heritage.
Audience members added further ingredients: education, culture, green space, ‘third places’ such as parks and community centres, and opportunities for small businesses.
Mullins highlighted the need for spaces that allow independent companies to flourish. “You’ve got to have room for SMEs and independent businesses. They need space to grow and create their own community.”
Rethinking the high street
Traditional high streets based on retail alone are unlikely to succeed in a new town environment.
“I think it’s a diminishing role,” said Young. “Trying to recreate a 1970s or ’80s high street just doesn’t work anymore.”
Instead, centres should become mixed-use hubs combining community facilities, services, workspaces and experiences that cannot be replicated online.
Sadek agreed: “You will always need a heart and a place to meet, but the days of retail-led high streets are gone.”
Partnership is essential
Finally, the panel turned to the balance between public and private sectors.
Mayall stressed that private developers must work with, rather than impose solutions upon, local authorities and communities.
“The worst examples of public-private partnership are where the private sector comes in and says, ‘This is what you need’. You have to understand what the place really wants.”
Price added that issues such as land assembly often require both co-operation and political leadership: “If you can’t get the thing started because landowners want too much, you end up with 100% of nothing,” he warned.
Deliver what you promise
The discussion closed with a reminder that credibility matters when creating new settlements.
“If you’re persuading people to move somewhere and build their careers there, you’ve got to deliver what you say,” Price said. “You can’t build the railway and have it stop two miles short.”
Towny McTownface may be fictional, but the principles emerging from the debate were clear: vision, infrastructure, health, housing, identity, and long-term stewardship must all work together. As Sadek summed up: “Sometimes you’ve just got to go for it.”