Stonehouse—an obituary for a new town

Abstract

An Obituary for a New TownIn 1973 the Secretary of State for Scotland confirmed the designation order for Stonehouse, the fifth new town to receive Glasgow's overspill population.In May of 1976, after £4,000,000 had been spent, and only two days after the first families had moved in, the newly-appointed Secretary of State, Rt.Hon. Bruce Millan, announced in Parliament that the further development of Stonehouse would no longer proceed.The decisions which led up to the designation of Stonehouse and their subsequent reversals illustrate the transition to what might be termed the emerging post-Barlow philosophy in town and regional planning.An appreciation of the factors responsible for the abandoning of Stonehouse illustrates an important change in town planning attitudes.The planning philosophy (emanating from the 1940 Report on the Distribution of the Industrial Population-the Barlow report) of containing the peripheral expansion of the large industrial cities through green belts and syphoning off congested populations into new and expanded towns exercised a considerable influence on British planning until very recently 1 .Indeed this philosophy was applied with increasing enthusiasm during the 1960's with the designation of the Mark II and Mark III new towns, so much so that the decade might be given a 'neo-Barlow' label.And nowhere-apart perhaps from London-was the Barlow and neo-Barlow philosophy applied with greater vigour than for Glasgow.That story, at least in outline, is well enough known 2 .In 1946 the Clyde Valley Regional Plan argued that in order to ease the congestion of the inner areas of Glasgow, without resorting to peripheral expansion, some 250,000 of the city's million population ought to move away.To assist in this, four new towns were recommended.In 1947 the first of these new towns, East Kilbride, was designated.Nine years later, a second was designated at Cumbernauld 3 .Then in 1960 Glasgow published the first quinquennial review of its development plan in which the city announced that it intended demolishing nearly 100,000 unfit properties 4 .Redevelopment was to be

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