New-Town Blues

Take a working-class family living in a grimy, overcrowded urban slum. Move it to a spanking-clean, new garden city, cheerfully designed and well planned, where there are plenty of lawns, light and airy schools, spacious, rainproof shopping centers, no heavy traffic to menace the children. Would the family be happy in its new surroundings? The answer, as published last week in a report by Britain's Ministry of Housing: Not very.

The ministry's report dealt with the twelve elaborate garden cities, integrated with industrial facilities that were built by the Labor government in England and Wales after World War II; each has a population of between 12,000 and 54,000, which will eventually grow to between 20,000 and 100,000. The cities were supposed to be "an essay in civilization, an opportunity to design, evolve, and carry into execution for the benefit of coming generations the means for a happy and gracious way of life." Major complaint against the planned way of life: "Loneliness and lack of neighborliness." Used to the grubby intimacy of city life, transplanted urbanites missed the profusion of corner pubs, neighborhood dance halls, local cinemas, and the ready help of neighbors and friends. Psychiatric cases are significantly higher than in the rest of Britain. "The women in these towns are utterly lost without their mothers, or mothers-in-law, or aunts near them," says one doctor. "A baby's cold that was once dealt with by a word of advice from Granny now becomes a major worry that brings the mother to the doctor."

Husbands complain that only 50 pubs have been built in all twelve of the cities. Teen-agers are bored because private enterprise has shied away from building movie houses, skating rinks and bowling alleys until there is a sufficient teen-age population to support them. The youngsters avoid the archaeological clubs, Young Conservative Clubs, the teen-age branches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. "This town is a dump," says a 17-year-old in Stevenage. "Unless you like walking around looking at new buildings. There's certainly not much else to do." In the U.S., sociologists have found similar disenchantment among city dwellers who have moved from their crowded tenements into spacious public-housing developments or out to the new, mass-produced suburbs. Transplanted British families appreciate the advantages of their new homes when compared with their old quarters, but the ministry's report nevertheless concludes that the spacious garden city is not the answer for relocating refugees from the urban slums. "The new towns of the future," says the report, "may well find it important to aim at a more truly urban design," congested, commercial and happenstance. Apparently, the modern city dweller, in spite of all he puts up with, cannot live without it.

-Crawley, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, Hatfield, Harlow, Basildon, Peterlee, Newton Aycliffe, Corby and Cwmbran.

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