“In how many estates do you find a Hepworth sculpture outside your front door?” Well, the answer is in fact at least one – that one in question being at Harlow Town.

If you’re British and live in or near London, you likely will have been to Harlow. “Been” is probably pushing it a bit, the time probably spent there being less than a minute as you travelled through on the train to Stansted Airport, or even more fleetingly so on the National Express as you skirted by on the M11.

Conceived in the late 1940s by Sir Frederick Gibberd, Harlow was an ambitious response to Britain’s post-war housing crisis and presented an opportunity to rethink the way people lived, worked, and interacted with their built environment.

At its core, Harlow embodies the optimism of Mid-Century Modernism, with its carefully orchestrated mix of housing, green spaces, and civic infrastructure. It was a town designed for people, not just cars: its neighbourhood units were arranged around walkable centres, each with schools, shops, and community hubs. This was radical at the time, a conscious departure from the “cramped and chaotic*” urban landscapes that many residents were leaving behind. Harlow in fact was built with the explicit aim of rehousing Londoners displaced by the Blitz and by the 1950s it had come to be known as “Pram City” due to the preponderance of young families there.

*“Cramped and chaotic” later being the go-to urban agenda in the post-Jane Jacobs era.

A member of the Modern Architecture Research (MARS) Group from the 1930s, Gibberd was a genuine architectural progressive, but his approach at the time was looked down upon in part because of his New Humanist style which came from Scandinavia. Evidence of this influence can be seen in road names such as Torkildsen Way (Torkildsen being a Norwegian name) and Hammarskjold Road (Hammarskjold being the surname of a Noble Swedish family. The name here is likely a reference to Dag Hammarskjöld, second Secretary-General of the United Nations in the 1950s who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize).

Further evidence can be found in Danish urban proposals of the era. In Copenhagen, a “Finger Plan” (see below) was initiated in 1947 whereby the city developed along five finger-shaped areas, centred around rail lines which extend from the dense urban area of the centre. In-between the fingers, “Green Wedges” were provided for agriculture and recreational purposes. Harlow, too, attempted such an approach with limited success.

But despite its humanist ideals, this is still a fossil fuel town. Speaking to the BBC in 1979, Gibberd described the town as being the marriage of “the art of landscape design, the art of architecture,” and, tellingly, “the art of road design.” (Video linked below). Later, however, he happily described the town centre as being “relatively car-free.” Make no mistake though, despite the fact it does have a station, Harlow is very much a car-dependent place.

Being a fool, I cycled here, but getting anywhere meaningful beyond Harlow in a reasonable time is out of the question through the means of active self-propulsion.

The architecture itself is good: a blend of pragmatism and creativity. Harlow is home to ‘The Lawn’ – the first residential tower block in the UK, climbing to 10 storeys; the block was designed by Gibberd himself.

Gibberd though, ever the supposed humanist, took the view that modernism need not be cold or austere. He infused Harlow with variety and texture, from the elegant simplicity of the first residential areas to the sculptural drama of key civic buildings – namely two churches: Our Lady of Fatima Church (1960) by Gerard Goalen and harlow St Paul (1962) by Humphreys and Hurst – which includes a lovely John Piper mural – as well as the train station (1960) by H. H. Powell, chief architect of the British Railways Eastern Region, working alongside architects Paul Hamilton, John Bicknell and Ian Fraser. Also of note was the now-demolished Gibley’s Gin complex (1963) by Peter Falconer and Associates.

The town’s early housing — often in brick but with clean, modernist lines — was designed with generous green spaces. Gibberd was also keen to produce a town at Harlow – not a Garden City or suburb. This was slightly contradictory to thinking on planning at the time: the 1944 Housing Manual called for low residential densities, of which influenced the first housing schemes at Harlow. Later, Gibberd was able to produce pockets of higher density areas within the large areas of open space at Harlow, however, critics by 1953 would call such an approach a failure.

The criticism, writes architectural historian Christine Hui Lan Manley, “prompted Gibberd and the Harlow Development Corporation (HDC) to take further steps in order to create a sense of what Gibberd and his contemporaries called ‘urbanity’. Gibberd’s early ideas of urbanity included high density compact building, the careful arrangement of groups of buildings and the design of the spaces between them.”

A good example of this approach to marrying building with landscape is the Water Gardens. Rather than plonk down a conventional shopping precinct in an urban centre, Gibberd created a series of elegant, stepped pools and terraces that made the very heart of the town feel open, green, and refreshing.

Then there’s the Gibberd Gallery and the remarkable collection of public sculpture that dots the town. Harlow was conceived as an open-air museum of sorts, with works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Elisabeth Frink integrated into everyday spaces. Today there’s a sculpture trail you can embark on and Harlow is even often referred to as “Sculpture Town” – all of which makes Milton Keynes’ cows seem rather timid in the battle for New Town cultural cache.

Gibberd himself also lived here, which is arguably a testament to how good Harlow really was. Gibberd, to my knowledge at least, was the only New Town architect to live in the town they planned. His house remains and naturally its rather nice. It’s open to the public, albeit only on Sundays between 3pm and 5pm – entrance is only £2! And you can wander around the “Gibberd Garden” which is full of art and sculpture as well.

More recent buildings have fallen short, but a notable success are two plots of housing to the southeast by Alison Brooks and Sheppard Robson (see below).

What to see and where to see it
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