PARADISE LOST?

Newton Aycliffe was meant to be a model town for a fairer postwar Britain. But unaffordable rents on a high street amounting to 0.12% of its property tycoon owner's holdings have made it a symbol of decline -and a warning for Labour

- By Josh Halliday

UNDER BLUE SKIES AND BUNTING, the whole of County Durham seemed to turn out for the young Queen Elizabeth II. They lined the streets in their thousands, waving flags and marvelling at the royal procession weaving past their newly built homes.

It was 27 May 1960 and the queen was officially opening the town of Newton Aycliffe on her first provincial tour after the birth of her third child, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, three months earlier.

A 16-page commemorative pamphlet records the local Light Infantry buglers playing to the giddy crowd. The message was clear: Newton Aycliffe, a town in northeast England built from scratch from the rubble of the second world war, heralded a new postwar Great Britain, a country that would give its people a modern, prosperous quality of life, free from the squalor of its bomb-scarred cities.

About 10km north of Darlington, this industrial wasteland was chosen by William Beveridge for his pioneering new town in the late 1940s. Beveridge, the architect of the British welfare state, personally oversaw its creation on the site of a former explosives shed used for experiments in the war. It would, he said, be a town of “hopes and dreams” and a “paradise for housewives”, which would be centred on a high street he named Beveridge Way.

Nearly 80 years later, this single shopping precinct helps tell a different story.

Of the 45 shops on Beveridge Way today, 23 are empty – a vacancy rate nearly four times the national average. Those that are left include a Ladbrokes bookmaker, a Greggs bakery, four charity shops, four discount stores and a pawnbroker. The banks are long gone – the closest now a 90-minute round trip to Darlington by bus – and the faded signs record an exodus of household names: Wilko the general retailer, along with Select and Peacocks clothing shops.