A new generation of new towns? We visit one to see what it’s like

More than 100 locations in England have already been put before a New Towns Taskforce. In July, the taskforce will select around a dozen sites on which to build at least 10,000 homes, and decide on funding options.
All things going well, construction on the first schemes will begin by the next general election.

Absence of services

So is Cranbrook – which was conceived in 1995, but where construction only began in 2011 – an exemplar of a planned community, or a cautionary tale?

The GEMs are withering in their criticism of some aspects of the design. “90% of people who live here are going to have to drive to work,” says one young woman. “It’s that awkward mid-range – not a nice cottage, but not in the city.”

Another gropes for praise and ends up being even more damning: “You’re close to a big city and the motorways, right by an airport… It’s a great place to get to other places.”

It is instructive in a number of ways to remember that Cranbrook is still a work in progress. It now has around 3,300 homes out of a proposed 7,750.

Shadowing the GEMs, Inside Housing speaks to the town’s residents, its housing officer and local councillor to get an insider’s view of the challenges of building a new community from scratch.

After a morning exploring around the town, the 42 GEMs meet in the tastefully upmarket Cranberry Farm pub to present their findings.

One notes the lack of level-access properties, sheltered bike storage and electric charging. Another GEM praises the mix of tenures, but criticises the lack of dog waste bins and cycle paths. Cranbrook lacks places of worship and places for the community to gather, a third graduate notes. Yet another chanced on a road on which they guessed, from the look of it, cheaper affordable housing had been built to fulfil the developer’s Section 106 agreement.

To get a local’s perspective, Inside Housing speaks to residents Clare Vickery and Jayne Clarke, who moved to the town because they were looking to downsize and were attracted by the green spaces and lower house prices compared with Exeter. The proximity to the train station and buses also appealed.

“The community has bonded really quickly,” says Ms Clarke. At first, the residents were predominantly young families, but older people have started to move in and a skate park now provides entertainment for the children, who are rapidly becoming teenagers. Barring someone called Naked Jeans who apparently used to spit on people going into the Co-op, there is little to no anti-social behaviour.

However, they are notably less complimentary about the absence of services.

“The housing has gone on unabated, while the infrastructure and facilities have not [followed],” says Ms Vickery. Roads lack signage, speed bumps or pedestrian crossings, and there is not enough parking, according to residents.

It is all the more galling because Cranbrook residents pay higher council tax than those in other parts of Devon. In 2024-25, a Band D property here paid £256.03 per month to Cranbrook Town Council. The rate has been frozen for 2025-26.

An East Devon District Council spokesperson says: “In most new developments, residents must pay both council tax and an estate rent charge towards the costs of maintaining public open spaces within that development, because they are maintained by a private company.

“In Cranbrook, the town council decided to take on the responsibility of these spaces and facilities and to pay for this through the precept. This is why the precept at Cranbrook is higher than many other places.

“However, the overall cost to most residents is similar to other new developments in the area.”

Then there is the district heat network, which powers all the homes in the town. It is currently gas-fired, but the council plans to eventually switch it to a low-carbon heat source run by Eon.

Cranbrook was originally pitched as an eco-town, but residents are unhappy that they can’t switch to a different energy provider.

“It’s not regulated so they can charge us what they like,” Ms Clarke says.

An Eon UK spokesperson says pricing for Cranbrook’s heat network is based on Ofgem’s gas standard variable tariff price cap. “This year, an average two-bedroom house can expect to pay 6% less than in April 2024 and 25% less than in 2023,” they add. Eon also offers flexible payment plans and a winter support programme.

Recently, after a malfunction, the heating company had to come in and replace everyone’s interface units, despite their homes only being 10 years old.

Luckily, Naomi Harnett, corporate lead for major projects at East Devon District Council, is also in the pub to provide some context. Delivering the heat network was a unique challenge, she says, since it was on a low-density greenfield site; most of the time these systems power smaller, high-pressure developments.

As for the heat interface units, some tenants aren’t great at getting them serviced, according to Ms Harnett. Take-up has hovered around 30%, despite regular text messages from Eon.

“You can’t force entry into people’s homes,” she says. When I ask if the council would go for a heat network next time round, Ms Harnett says “yes”, because of the carbon savings.

Ms Harnett, who has been working on Cranbrook since 2013, points to new development in the town that addresses concerns about the lack of infrastructure. This includes a modular scheme in the centre with shops and offices set to complete in June, followed by a new nursery and pre-school in 2026. A single neighbourhood centre and school have served the population since 2015. “It’s never soon enough,” she concedes. “People want everything.”

Cranbrook had 6,700 residents at the 2021 census. Other English towns with a comparable population include Oundle, Northamptonshire (which has at least four pubs, a farmer’s market, a cinema and a tennis club), and Budleigh Salterton, also in Devon (which has two nurseries, four small supermarkets and a theatre).

Affordability

The biggest challenge for the council, it seems, is managing residents’ expectations. “A supermarket was never going to be delivered before 4,000 occupation,” says Ms Harnett. “You were never going to have a town centre to serve 300-400 residents.

“We should have been more in control of the narrative. House builders are incentivised to promise infrastructure soon… If we’re not in control, then the house builders are,” she laments.

This is a cautionary tale for the current government: if it doesn’t fund the infrastructure, it is reliant on house builders to do so. And “house builders are not town builders”, Ms Harnett says.

Cranbrook is a commercially driven model with no public controlled land. Under the agreement struck between developers and the council, house builders such as Taylor Wimpey are responsible for infrastructure such as roads, but they had to deliver a mere 500 sq m of retail for the centre. In practice, this meant a small parade of shops including a pharmacy, Co-op and fish and chip restaurant.

A different model underpinned the first new towns, such as Basildon, Stevenage and Milton Keynes. Harlow in Essex was entirely comprised of social housing until the 1950s. This was possible because of the way the projects were delivered: state-owned corporations were established with 60-year loans from the Treasury to build the towns. They got the land at close to its existing use value and held it, rather than selling it off in packages to house builders.

“You’re close to a big city and the motorways, right by an airport… It’s a great place to get to other places”

What the current government is proposing, by contrast, is to offer support to large, private sector-led urban extensions or brownfield developments. The result is likely to be a standard new housing development, where councils are reliant on house builders to deliver retail and office space and build at their own pace.

Gemma Smith is a housing officer at LiveWest with responsibility for Cranbrook’s 400 affordable and social homes. She says the majority of her time is spent dealing with parking complaints. She issued just one eviction in 2024 and, like the residents, notes the impressive lack of anti-social behaviour in the town.

However, she has other concerns. Ms Smith receives “a handful” of damp and mould complaints in Cranbrook, which she says is because the new build flats lack space to dry washing, so residents end up stretching their wet clothes out over the bath.

But affordability is the biggest challenge. “I get a lot of people who move in, then say they want to move [out again] because the rents are too expensive,” she says.

Cranbrook’s affordable housing is predominantly shared ownership rather than social rent, because it was funded at a time when the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) prioritised this tenure. An East Devon District Council spokesperson says around 8% of housing in Cranbrook is social rent, 3% is affordable rent and 17% is shared ownership.

“People do struggle,” Ms Smith says.

The government has promised that its next AHP will be geared around social rent.

Walking back to Cranbrook train station, Inside Housing shares the pavement with gleeful speed-demon children on scooters and bikes, before pausing on a bridge in the eerily still green space. The station itself is deathly quiet, save for the buzz of a man flying a small remote control helicopter in the car park.

Building a successful new town is hard, as Milton Keynes can attest. It is now one of the two fastest-growing cities in the UK (Peterborough is the other). People are drawn partly by housebuilding, which has kept homes affordable, as well as good links to London, according to the Centre for Cities thinktank. But this change has taken over 50 years to happen.

Many of the GEMs’ observations seem to ring true. It doesn’t feel like a bad place to live. But infrastructure and community spaces are just as important as housing if a town is to thrive – and that is something for the government to consider as it looks to ease the housing shortage.