Policing through planning: constructing coercive community in British New Towns, 1964-75

Histories of British policing in the 1970s focus on the 'inner-city'. These accounts develop a compelling narrative: as economic crisis undermined the authority of the state, it sought to rebuild legitimacy through the production of racialized categories of crime, developing authoritarian methods-often drawn from colonial police playbooks-to coerce and contain working-class residents. Many of these accounts articulate policing to urban policy, revealing how policing was intensified in pockets of abandonment created by deindustrialization and suburbanization. But while urban historians have emphasized the relationality between city and suburb in this period, accounts of suburban policing are few. This article links the policing of cities to British new towns, analysing new police methods which sought greater control over the composition of social class through urban planning. It argues that new towns-developed as quiescent, orderly environments by the state-were later positioned as test sites for new models of 'community policing'. Attention to a hitherto overlooked corpus of archives highlights the unexplored early significance of planning to policing, revealing how the interventionist administration of urban space became increasingly central to the extension of the coercive functions of the state. Through comparative analysis of the policing of new towns designated under the 1946 New Towns Act and the violent administration of an unofficial 'new town' in Kirkby, Merseyside, I show how conceptions of planned suburban order were centred on hierarchical concepts of social class, emphasizing the increasingly authoritarian impulses of the welfare state.