This film was one of a number commissioned by the Ministry of Information aimed at boosting morale. The Ministry of Information was a central government department, established in 1939, responsible for publicity and propaganda for the war.  This film was scripted by Dylan Thomas, but other major writers, such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and JB Priestley, contributed to other Ministry of Information work in similar ways.  For example, Graham Greene scripted a film...

This film was one of a number commissioned by the Ministry of Information aimed at boosting morale. The Ministry of Information was a central government department, established in 1939, responsible for publicity and propaganda for the war.  This film was scripted by Dylan Thomas, but other major writers, such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and JB Priestley, contributed to other Ministry of Information work in similar ways.  For example, Graham Greene scripted a film commissioned by the Ministry of Information entitled The New Britain in 1940.   Dylan Thomas scripted a number of other films for the Ministry of Information, including These Are the Men, The Battle For Freedom, and A City Reborn.  New Towns for Old was made by Strand Film Productions, produced by Alexander Shaw, directed by John Eldridge, filmed by Jo Jago, with sound by Charles Tatso.  

The principle argument of the film is for separating out housing areas from industrial areas, using the dramatic example of Sheffield to make its point. In the case of Sheffield this led to the Corporation publishing a landmark book, 'Ten years of Housing in Sheffield', in 1962, which elaborated its plans to rebuild the city's housing, replacing the slum areas with multi-storey housing projects built on the slopes of Sheffield’s hills – see the film Park Hill Housing Project and the Context for this, also on YFA Online.  Sheffield was very heavily bombed during the Second World War. This was hardly surprising given its large steel and engineering industry: the only place in Britain that was manufacturing crankshafts for Spitfires, at Vickers, or 18 inch armour piercing shells, at Hadfield’s Steelworks. Yet amazingly only a small proportion of bombs dropped on the city hit industrial targets. (For some interesting titbits on Sheffield during the blitz, and other sources of information, see the Sheffield Forum link in References)

A significant number of documentaries were made specifically on town planning before, during and after the 2nd World War (see the works by Gold and Ward in References). In fact 54 government films were made on urban planning during the war. Although the Ministry of Information was chiefly a propagandist organisation, the idea of social planning was at a height during the war, and so the many radical ideas for town planning around at the time were able to get a limited hearing. The Ministry of Information made other films along similar lines, such as Proud City (1945), focusing on the County of London Plan.

The idea of clearing slums and town planning was not new in 1942. Organisations like the Fabian Society, the National Dwellings Society and the National Reform Movement, all produced proposals for rebuilding slum housing areas towards the end of the nineteenth century. And yet extraordinarily, some free market organisations, such as the Liberty and Property Defence League, in a pamphlet "The State and the Slums" (1884), opposed the very concept of slum clearance.

However, the idea really took off after World War One, with government promises of "homes fit for heroes". In the 1920s and 1930s the Labour Party in particular pursued a policy of social housing. This continued even during the war, when documents were published on the housing policy to be adopted after 1945.  Several significant pamphlets were issued by the Labour Party, including, ‘Your home planned by Labour’ (1943); ‘Post-war Homes’ (1942), by H.V. Lanchester, published by the Cooperative Permanent Building Society; ‘Castles in the Street’, by E. Mannin; ‘The post-war reconstruction of Liverpool’ (1941), by A.E. Shennan and published by the Merseyside Civil Society; and "Reconstruction of Bombed Buildings (1941), by B.S. Townroe.  Pamphlets were issued by the Town and Country Planning Association, Society of Women Housing Managers, National Council of Social Service, National Land and Home League, Cooperative Permanent Building Society and the Labour Research Department.

Another part of this general movement for social change was Mass Observation.  Founded in 1937 by three young men, who aimed to create an 'anthropology of ourselves', it came to an end in the 1950s and was then revived in 1981. During the first years of the war they researched housing needs and published People's Homes, written by Richard Fitter in 1943, based on this research. Some town planners, like Patrick Abercombie, proposed much greater governmental control in order to build new cities – see the film King George And Queen Visit Hull, also on YFA Online.

What is interesting about this, and similar, films – and indeed with the housing pamphlets published during the war – is that they seem to be aimed at a wide working class audience. It might be thought that those who lived in slums hardly needed to be convinced about the need for better housing, and so these films might be seen as a way of presenting arguments, and as a means of exerting political pressure on whoever was in power after the war. The Labour landslide of 1945 might be partly due to the affect of this pressure for change; although the results might be thought to have seriously failed these great aspirations.

References

There are reviews of the film in Documentary Newsletter, III 90, and Monthly Film Bulletin (BFI), IX 92.

Gold, J.R. and Ward, S.V. (1994) '"We're going to do it right this time": cinematic representations of urban planning and the British New Towns, 1939 to 1951', in S.C. Aitken and L. Zonn, eds. Place, power, situation and spectacle: a geography of film, Savage, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 229-58.

Gold, J.R. and Ward, S.V. (1997) 'Of plans and planners: documentary film and the challenge of the urban future, 1935-52', in D.B. Clarke, ed. The Cinematic City, London, Routledge, 59-82.

Enticknap, Leo ‘Postwar Urban Redevelopment, the British Film Industry, and The Way We Live’, in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: film and urban societies in a global context,Blackwell, Oxford, 2001.

Sheffield Forum thread on Sheffield in the blitz

Further Information

Toby Haggith, Castles in the Air: British Films and the Reconstruction of the Built Environment 1939-1951 London: I B Tauris, 2003)


Meller, Helen, Towns, Plans and Society: the history of town planning in twentieth  century Britain for the Economic History Society, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Frances Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay, British Official Films in the Second World War: a descriptive catalogue, Clio Press, Oxford, 1980.