Leonard Vincent about the choice of building New Towns as opposed to rebuilding derelict areas

Transcript:

With hindsight I suppose it would be easy to say why did we have so many new towns, why didn’t we get moving onto the derelict areas in the existing towns. But that is easier said than done. We had an enormous problem after the last war. And to get reconstruction going on a large scale it was a matter that couldn’t be tinkered with it had to be done on a large scale. So the obvious way out and the easy way out was to designate new towns to take this overspill population from the badly devastated areas during the war and I venture to say it has worked, it’s worked. But with hindsight one would say well perhaps we should have taken the new town thing a bit slower and done more work on the existing towns where there has been devastation. Split the problem in other words to make rehabilitation of existing towns a possibility and an early possibility not as we are now thinking forty years later.

Leonard Vincent