New towns, old mistakes and why Starmer must think before building our future

With his promises of building 1.5 million homes and entire new towns, Keir Starmer is now a card-carrying, hard hat-wearing ‘yimby’. So what will Labour’s brave new world look like, asks Jonathan Glancey, and will it avoid the mistakes of the past?

Milton Keynes was one of the new towns established under Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government (Getty Images)

We are the builders!” exclaimed Keir Starmer to the applause of Labour Party conference delegates. Well, good luck me old China, although it is not yet quite clear what hard hat, hi-vis jacket, hod-shouldering Starmer wants us to build.

“Britain will get its future back,” he says, and going back to the future – at the wheel of a Morris Minor perhaps – the Labour leader talks of a new wave of “new towns” built by state-backed companies served with an urban side dish of Georgian-style townhouses.

Starmer, we learned this week, is a self-professed “yimby” – yes in my backyard – although, short of commissioning a fashionable skinny New York-style apartment skyscraper in his back garden in Camden, he is unlikely to open the curtains of his bedroom window and be faced by some politically willed new housing development, affordable or not.