What can Thamesmead – once the ‘Town of the Future’ – teach us about 15-minute cities? Putting everyday amenities within walking distance of where people live was at the heart of the project’s design – until the car took over cycling
When I was seven, we moved to a new community on the edge of London that the GLC ambitiously billed as– a place where, in the initial stage of the development, no-one lived more than a 15-minute or so walk from the local shops, health centre, primary and secondary schools, library, social club and so on, centred on parkland that included a man-made lake.
Of course, my memories were formed as a child and it’s easy, given the passage of time, to romanticise them – though returning there for an afternoon last summer with two of my siblings to visit old haunts before they fall victim to regeneration saw us remember our childhoods with fondness. That latter point reflects one of the reasons why the vision the planners had in the early days never quite translated into reality as subsequent phases of the new town were developed – the Jubilee line station promised in the early 1970s never made it off the drawing board, and the area remains poorly served by public transport.
If you live somewhere that pre-dates World War 2, the likelihood is that your neighbourhood would have had most if not all of the daily amenities you need within walking distance, and in many towns and cities up and down the country, that’s still the case. And the primacy of that one mode of transport, in the past couple of decades, has had a profound effect on planning policy. When I lived outside Oxford, a major housing development comprising hundreds of homes was built on the edge of a village I’d regularly pass through on the bus.
Whatever its opponents may claim, it categorically has nothing to do with some global conspiracy aimed at restricting movement, of forcing people to remain within a mile or so of their home.
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