But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost but such innovative plans were rare. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. New Towns were about doing things differently, doing them better Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.
These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. "Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'.
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