A New Town and a numbers game: Runcorn, Merseyside, and Liverpool

This paper is skeptical about attributing welfarist motivations to Britain’s second generation of New Tows, initiated in the 1960s. Focusing specifically on the Runcorn New Town in North West England, on the outskirts of Liverpool, the paper examines its designation and development in the context of what scholars have called ‘the numbers game’, referring to the party-political competition that dramatically escalated annual housebuilding targets throughout the early decades of postwar Britain. The first section covers the negotiation of an ‘overspill’ programme for Merseyside in the mid 1950s. The second section covers the sea change that arrived with the ratcheting of the numbers game by Conservative Minister of Housing Keith Joseph in the early 1960s. The third section details the slum clearance programme adopted by Liverpool in 1966. And the final section addresses the consequences of an economic crisis at the end of the decade that brought the numbers game to a close. The paper concludes that Runcorn’s growth was indexed less to a housing emergency than to the coupling of political maneuvering with capitalist logic, and it argues for a revised historiographical perspective in which Runcorn’s decline is read as a consequence of these conditions.