(RE):New Towns

Washington, Sunderland was designated a New Town in 1964. It absorbed 18 existing villages into a car-dependent supergrid. It is the fourth-largest UK town without a railway station. 34.3% of its population lives within the most deprived areas nationally.

The 1.5-million-homes target has returned New Towns to policy. Washington received £20 million through the Plan for Neighbourhoods. The conditions for reinvention are present. The spatial logic has not changed. The research asks whether participatory design can build a more equitable model.

Four lenses frame the research: energy, labour, materials, ecology. Washington's roads were designed around cheap fossil energy. The proposed reopening of the 21-mile Leamside Line reframes transport as energy strategy. The corridor links Gateshead, Washington and Durham.

Post-war zoning severed labour from care and informal economies. Green retrofitting jobs and local production can rebuild a place-based identity. Stanley Bonnar's concrete crocodiles became landmarks through encounter, not prescription. Ecology, treated as a spatial system over time, can reconnect fragmented open land into a structuring network.

The study judges feasibility by whether a proposal can work within known constraints, and asks for that rather than proof of certainty. A City Toolkit of six guidelines shifts the frame from completion to capacity.

Spaces stay accountable to those already living there. Safer streets come from sightlines. Uses are layered rather than zoned. Green spaces are designed for use. The primary proposal is the Leamside Railway expansion. Three phases: routes, flexible structures, and one left open.

The exhibition at the Farrell Centre is the research method. Designed as an Urban Room after the Terry Farrell Review, visitors move through three spaces. Understand offers five thematic panels with direct prompts.

Create is the Tile Model. Visitors build on 160×160mm MDF tiles etched with abstracted road geometries. Together they form a collective speculative New Town. Discuss uses a physical model where residents mark concerns with movable flags. Disagreement is treated as data.