For the first time in over half a century, the idea of building a “New Town” in the UK is no longer just a historical footnote. It’s back on the table, and surprisingly, it’s not coming from where you’d expect. The last officially designated generation of British New Towns dates back to the late 1960s, with Milton Keynes often cited as the final flagship. Since then, the state has largely stepped away from directly building cities through Development Corporations. That doesn’t mean urban expansion stopped, rather it simply evolved. In the 2000s, new settlements re-emerged under softer labels: Garden Cities, Garden Towns, and other hybrid models shaped through public-private partnerships or locally led development corporations. The government didn’t disappear; it just changed its role from builder to facilitator.

And now, something different is happening.

Several months ago, businessmen Joe Reeve and Shiv Malik announced their ambition to build an entirely new city east of Cambridge. They call it “Forest City 1.” No formal approvals. No institutional backing. No government mandate. Just an idea, a narrative, and the ambition to grow an audience.

I happened to attend their first “Designathon,” an event branded as a collaborative urban design workshop. In reality, it felt much closer to a live experiment in market testing and coalition-building. About 150 participants gathered who were never planners nor urban designers, but instead professionals from finance, tech, and IT. The target demographic wasn’t subtle. This wasn’t about designing a city for people; it was about designing a city for a specific kind of person: mobile, highly skilled, digitally enabled.

You could almost sense the subtext: build the talent base first, and the city will follow.

The format was energetic, even chaotic. Large maps were spread across tables, though curiously without clear boundaries for the proposed site, an omission that felt symbolic of the project itself. Ambitious, performative, and still largely undefined. The organizers spoke with striking confidence, framing the project less as a question and more as an inevitability. Their strategy seemed straightforward: generate visibility, attract interest, build momentum, and let legitimacy catch up later. Yet behind the looseness of the event, a more concrete vision was quietly outlined.

The ambition of Forest City 1 is not modest. At its core, the project seeks to prompt the government to establish a Development Corporation with the authority to deliver a city of up to one million people, built explicitly in line with the founders’ vision. That vision rests on several key pillars: a Community Land Trust model and cooperative rental housing to reshape land ownership and affordability; the designation of a Special Economic Zone to attract investment and innovation; and the creation of a vast 12,000-acre forest integrated into the urban fabric. All of this, positioned in proximity to Cambridge, suggests an attempt to hybridize ecological urbanism with high-growth, knowledge-economy dynamics.

And to their credit, it’s working, at least in terms of attention. Media coverage is already circulating. Conversations have started.

But what struck me most wasn’t the event itself. It was the contrast with what came immediately after.

The next day, I attended a New Town lecture at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. The atmosphere couldn’t have been more different. Gone was the optimism, replaced by a quiet, almost weary skepticism. Veteran academics reflected on decades of New Town history, often through the lens of failure, compromise, and unintended consequences. The question hanging in the room wasn’t how to build the next New Town—but whether we should even try.

It was a study in opposites.

On one side: two entrepreneurs, unburdened by precedent, convinced that scale and ambition can overcome complexity. On the other: scholars who understand that complexity all too well, and hesitate precisely because they do.

And yet, these two worlds barely speak to each other.

That disconnect feels like the real story here. Not just whether Forest City 1 will be built, but whether its proponents and its critics can find common ground early enough to shape something meaningful. Because the risks run both ways. A city driven purely by private ambition may reduce urban life to an investment strategy. But a system too cautious to engage with new actors may miss the opportunity to evolve altogether.

So where does that leave us?

Somewhere between excitement and skepticism. Between vision and hesitation.

The UK may be witnessing the early stages of a new kind of New Town movement, one that is less planned, more speculative; less top-down, more performative. Whether it becomes a lasting shift or just a momentary flash of enthusiasm remains uncertain.

But one thing is clear: the conversation has restarted.

And this time, it’s louder, messier, and far more interesting.