Decaying urban centers were overcrowded and infrastructure was outstripped. England’s best and brightest surveyed a homeland on the brink and enacted a series of policies to physically recreate the social order, clearing slums and packing entire communities into meticulously planned housing developments.

Postwar England was a brave new world with technocrats in ascendancy, and John Richings James stood at the vanguard of a housing revolution. The urban planner had risen to bureaucratic prominence immediately following World War II, fostering the birth of the towns of Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in his native County Durham. These so-called New Towns were an answer to suburban sprawl — self-sufficient communities built far from established cities complete with shops and schools, just like older towns all around the world, except that these had been drafted on paper as a cohesive whole to avoid the ramshackle growth which government planners saw as the heart of urban rot.