This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
For all the imagery of England as a garden, the country’s patterns of culture, education, invention, innovation, manufacturing and trade have been primarily urban for centuries. As early as the 1th century, around ten per cent of the population probably lived in towns.
This is why the collapse of so many towns in recent decades is catastrophic, not just economically but for our very being. Symptoms are brutal: empty shops, failed shopping centres, collapsed manufacturing, weak public transport reducing towns’ “effective size” and shrinking labour markets. Many towns and smaller cities have unhappier citizens and below-average productivity.
In 1933, J.B. Priestley journeyed through England to review the damage wrought by the Great Depression. To read English Journey today, for all the squalor Priestley unearths, is to visit towns which are vital and energetic compared to today’s empty husks: mills and grill rooms, oyster bars and smoking rooms, knife-grinders and letter-makers, packed whist drives and over-brimming Methodist services. Each town enjoyed a rich social ecosystem not just of millhands and shop assistants but of wholesalers, shop owners and local bank managers.
Thriving towns mingle pleasure and purpose. Priestley understood this, calling Southampton “a real town” because “you could buy and sell and bring up children”.
Economists call this “energised crowding”. We come together to specialise, and we benefit from doing so. A doubling of population density is associated with a two-to-five per cent productivity increase. Once a nation’s urban population rises above about ten per cent, productivity growth accelerates.
Chatham Dockyards, for example, used to be the world’s best and most specialist warship builder. People and firms earn more, learn faster and are more productive thanks to competition and mutual learning. The average urban worker earns 30 per cent more and is 50 per cent more productive than their rural counterpart.
Over the last century too many British towns have lost their vitality: demoded, sliced and diced by fast roads; zoned into physically disparate areas for living, shopping and working; failing to keep up with foreign efficiencies; victimised by traffic-focused international modernist architecture which has ripped out beautiful civic centres and replaced them with brutalist car parks or elevated roundabouts. Local management and middle classes are infantilised and sidelined by data flows and technology.
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Nowhere tells the story better than Coventry, home to Britain’s nascent bicycle and motor industries. In the 1930s, Coventry was the world’s second-largest car manufacturing centre, a Silicon Valley grown from a medieval cloth town. J.B. Priestley found it so attractive that, even though it had “the trick of keeping up with the times”, he wrote that “it might have been transported to Italy”.
It did not last. First Coventry was bombed. Then it was regenerated. Coventry’s city architect, Donald Gibson, shamelessly delighted in the blitz: “a blessing in disguise. The Jerries cleared out the core of the city, a chaotic mess, and now we can start anew.” Surviving historic buildings were demolished. The quilt of medieval streets was unstitched. Factories were segregated and banished from the city. Walking to work became impossible. A local newspaper in 1945 reported a popular plea: “Give us back Coventry as we knew it.”
But Gibson would not. Coventry was unseamed and re-zoned. It has not thrived. Production revived, but then collapsed as agglomerative advantages vanished. The city’s population fell until the 1990s. Wages are 25 per cent below average. Coventry, once wealthy, now has some of the nation’s most deprived and least healthy neighbourhoods. Is Coventry like Siena now?
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The same pattern plays out nationwide. Towns, particularly those most victimised post-war are relatively poorer and less productive. The public transport infrastructure that they need, and which was created over a century, was ripped out by the state which had just nationalised it. Modern Britain has fewer than half the trains and railway stations it once enjoyed. It has few trams, despite the productivity-boosting tram renaissance taking place worldwide.
Elegant town centre post offices, civic offices, magistrates’ courts and hospitals have been shuttered and replaced with loveless boxes on the ring road. Councils are stripped of fundraising and decision-making powers. Tax, parking policy and Britain’s uniquely discretionary planning system either prevent development or encourage growth which is centrifugal (spinning out) not centripetal (spinning in).
Over the last generation, the public and private sectors have been locked in a disastrous dance of “regeneration” in which huge taxpayer bungs are thrown at shareholders who proceed to rip down ugly old post-war buildings and replace them with even larger ugly new ones. It has failed. “Regenerated” cities are pathetic besides the prosperity of their own past. Manchester is only at 85 per cent of British average productivity. This is no Cottonopolis.
Much more successful have been the towns and neighbourhoods which were not sliced up post-war or which have permitted a wider range of actors to recreate good and attractive places to live and work through improving high streets, planting street trees or permitting attractive plot-by-plot investment.
Todmorden’s focus on heritage and community-planting street trees has brought the town to life and halved vacant plots. Altrincham transformed its town centre by part-pedestrianising it, creating a tree-lined boulevard, restoring a covered market, extending modest loans to independent stores, recreating homes above shops.
This is the path to follow. If we want our towns to revive, we need to rediscover and unleash the dense pattern of small businesses, innovation and investment that grew them in the first place. And we need to dare to let them be beautiful as “the men of business” did in the 18th or 19th centuries. Compare any standard Victorian warehouse or Halifax’s sublime Piece Hall, which was a mere trading exchange, to any modern business park for a lesson in business’s lost romance.
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No town will revive if it is unsafe. Once this is under control, six ideas normally work. Firstly, foster pride. Have an ambitious vision. Aspire for your town to be the most beautiful you can make it. Aesthetics are not subjective. We know what places most people prefer most of the time and where most of us wish to be. Seek middle-class residents. Use, don’t lose, your heritage.
Second, create good schools and colleges. These are great ten-year leading prosperity indicators. Third, make it easy to intensify. Grow centripetally not centrifugally. Towns need vitality. Re-legalise development that follows clear and viable local rules. Any modest homeowner, business, community group, civic society, investor or landowner should be able to make things happen by following simple rules that align to popular preferences. Stop relying on ludicrous public sector funding to subsidise demand in a supply-constrained market.
Fourth, catalyse town centre living. This is crucial. Encourage urban “gentle density” (terraced houses or mansion blocks), not the extremes of detached homes or towers. Don’t worry, as most planners do, about what buildings are used for. Let buildings evolve between homes, pubs, offices and shops as the market and chance demands. Don’t micromanage.
Fifth, not everyone in the centre needs to drive everywhere. Too much parking kills towns. Make it safe and enjoyable to walk and cycle. (Look at what the French or Dutch are doing in their towns). Restitch your towns. Create streets not roads, Lego urbanism not Duplo town. Invest in trams and buses using land value uplift to pay, though this is hard in over-centralised Britain. Coventry’s new trams show a way to side-step HM Treasury. If there’s a city nearby, be as well connected to it as possible.
Finally, plant street trees and let residents do so. The data on improved air, health and “place-attraction” is unarguable.
This is not easy. But the good news is that a regenerative and intensifying renaissance does not always need much investment if you are prepared to give away power for plot-by-plot improving development. Parking and planning policy can be changed. Mechanisms exist to re-legalise housing without case-by-case state approval.
One of Priestley’s travel-writing predecessors was Daniel Defoe. His A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain was clear that Britain’s towns were bounteous and beautiful and that new developments improved them:
Even whilst the sheets are in the press, new beauties appear in several places, and almost to every part we are oblig’d to add appendixes … of fine houses, new undertakings, buildings and thus posterity will be continually adding; every age will find an increase of glory.
Make it so. No laws of physics or economics prevent us.
