The New Towns Act 1946, steered through Parliament by Lewis Silkin in Attlee's Labour government, empowered the state to designate sites and build a generation of self-contained new towns. It created publicly funded development corporations with the powers to acquire land by compulsory purchase, plan it comprehensively, and build housing, industry and amenities together. The first wave designated fourteen towns, including Stevenage (1946), Crawley, Harlow and others ringing London, with later phases adding Milton Keynes in 1967. Each was intended to draw population and jobs out of congested cities into balanced communities of limited size.
It was the largest state programme of planned town-building in the West and translated Ebenezer Howard's garden-city ideal into national policy. The development-corporation model was widely exported and shaped how postwar governments managed urban overspill and regional growth.