The Isle of Wight’s Newtown is a little-known example of early town planning – the Milton Keynes of its time, writes Jonathan Manser.

Words
Jonathan Manser

 

Funny things, islands. Although each is different, most seem imbued with an ethereal quality and some kind of expectation that by being ‘over the water’ they have accrued special and unusual qualities. Not so the Isle of Wight, which seems to many to be an ill-defined lump loosely attached to the bottom of Hampshire, and known for its formless coastal suburban sprawl.

For myself and many others, however, the island has attractions that are worth the time and effort required to find them: beautiful and unspoilt chalk downland countryside in the centre is sprinkled with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manor houses built in the local sandstone, with massive barns to store the wool on which the island’s relative prosperity was based; to the south and west, the extraordinary geology of the island throws up buildings built using chalk blocks, while the heavy clay on the north coast led to a range of brick villas and terraces following Queen Victoria’s construction of Osborne House. The major buildings are the work of John Nash who lived and worked there.

More recent is an early work by Stirling & Gowan – a house outside Cowes, now with pitched roof and leaded lights, behind which the quality and care of a four-foot grid can still be seen.

The real island treasure is Newtown; mainly because there is no town”

But the real island treasure is Newtown; mainly because there is no town – nothing there now except muddy salt flats, wildfowl and distant views – and because so few people know the history of the place.

Newtown Creek is on the north-west coast of the island facing the New Forest across the sea and is a natural harbour with tidal rivulets stretching up between fields and an ancient hunting forest. Silence is broken only by the sound of oystercatchers and the gentle lapping of water. And yet, this was the Milton Keynes of its time.

In 1256 the Bishop of Winchester sealed the charter for a new town based on an orthogonal grid with quays for ships of up to 500 tons. The town became the capital of the island. The developer’s intention was to establish and encourage economic activity in otherwise relatively unproductive feudal manors. This ‘free town’ allowed people to take up ‘burgages’ for which they paid rent but which were free of manorial dues.

Salt production, oyster farming and wool export all took place, with areas of the harbour also being reclaimed, but the town never really prospered and by the fourteenth century – partly as a result of unwelcome visitations by both French raiders and the plague – it had shrunk from several hundred people to a few dozen. Despite this, a new town hall was built in 1698, at a time when the ‘town’ still returned two MPs.

A useful reminder that planning is often a blunt and short-term instrument used to enable commercial ambition, but not likely to survive the test of time

Apart from a few cottages (Nobbys Cottage being my favourite), the restored church and a twentieth-century faux-Georgian box by Raymond Erith, the only building of note still standing is the town hall which, after Shalford Mill, was the second building presented to the National Trust by the fascinating Ferguson’s Gang. It stands alone on the grassy verge of one of the north-south roads. You can sense that a busy bustling town was there in the past. Most of the major roads are only visible as straight grassed avenues between trees and hedges and, while the whole area seems now to be in National Trust control, the ‘threat’ of an economic revival has never been far away.

Shortly before the second world war, plans were afoot for the then-owners to develop 100 acres of land for yachtsmen’s residences and in 1958 the Central Electricity Generating Board put forward plans to build a nuclear power station on the north-western side of the harbour. Neither scheme got beyond the planning stage and the area remained therefore largely forgotten and half-hidden.

So there it is; a little-known example of early town planning. A useful reminder that planning is so often a blunt and short-term instrument used to enable commercial ambition but not likely to survive the test of time. The resource wasted on the minutiae of planning applications these days may seem laughably pointless one day in the future – as proved to be the case at old Newtown.