Chapter 1, “Horizons,” recovers the vanquished plan that preceded Milton Keynes, North Bucks New City. In the early 1960s, Buckinghamshire county council’s chief architect and planner, Fred Pooley, peered into the future. Like other planners at the time, he foresaw a post-industrial world of affluence, leisure, and new mobilities, if also one still organized around familiar gender roles and urban forms. Pooley designed a city for a quarter-million residents, with a monorail ensuring free and equal access to the city center. This social democratic vision sought to use the powers of the state to distribute the benefits of affluence. Pooley also wanted North Bucks New City to send a message to the world, expressing a nationalist urbanism that promised to secure Britain’s post-imperial status as an urban innovator. While the new town that eventually emerged, in the form of Milton Keynes, rejected Pooley’s monorail, its location – indeed, its existence – resulted from a contested process that cannot be understood without attending to this unrealized vision.

Why, before selling council houses or denationalizing public industries, did Margaret Thatcher’s government begin to privatize Britain’s new towns? Thatcher’s Progress argues that the new towns represented the spatial dimension of the welfare state. Britain’s new towns program developed out of the garden city tradition, an approach to town and country planning that, during the early twentieth century, spread throughout the world. In the New Towns Act of 1946, the Labour government nationalized this dimension of town planning, leading to the designation of thirty-two new towns within a quarter century. This book focuses upon the most ambitious of these projects, Milton Keynes,in order to recast our understandings of social democracy and market liberalism. Rather than depicting social democracy as exhausted by the 1970s, the making of Milton Keynes reveals dynamic social democrats responding creatiely to changing times. And rather than locating the origins of market liberalism ever deeper in postwar history, this project illustrates the non-deterministic, but ultimately decisive, process through which market liberalism triumphed.

The conclusion underscores the many ways that new town planning illustrated a dynamic social democracy. Yet these responses to the 1970s yielded unintended consequences, as strategic accommodations of individualism, markets, and private finance became ends unto themselves. If market liberalism initially figured as but one response to emergent priorities and constraints after 1973, Thatcherism represented the subordination of those more various possibilities to a market logic. By the 1990s, in order to distance itself from left as well as right, New Labour endorsed a reading of postwar history as having been dominated by the state and then the market on either side of 1979. This erasure of social democracy’s more supple history requires its recovery – the recovery of ambitions and innovations that, however imperfectly enacted, remain visible all around us in new towns housing millions. Today, as cities around the world face dramatic housing crises, the history of new town planning attests to precedents and procedures that states recently deployed in their efforts to confront these recurrent urban challenges.