When London came to Basingstoke

Ask anyone who grew up in Basingstoke before the 1960s about the town centre and you will get a description of somewhere that no longer exists. That is not nostalgia. More than half of the old historic core was knocked down and rebuilt in a single decade.

Why Basingstoke?

After the Second World War, London needed somewhere to rehouse people. Part of the answer, set out in the Greater London Plan of 1944, was to move people and jobs out to towns that could grow.

Basingstoke was one of them. It had been a market town of just over 13,000 people at the start of the war and about 25,000 after it. In 1961 it was designated a London overspill area, under a three-way agreement between the London County Council, Hampshire County Council and the borough council.

Basingstoke was never a New Town in the official sense. There was no development corporation. It was an “expanded town”, grown out from what was already there. According to the architecture writer Owen Hatherley, it was also something of a compromise: the authorities dropped plans for a brand-new town at nearby Hook, and Basingstoke took the growth instead.

Knocking it down

The scale of the change is hard to take in. The council’s own conservation appraisal says more than half of the town’s historic core was redeveloped in the 1960s, along with major new roads. What replaced it was a set of large blocks of shops, offices and car parks with little connection to the old street pattern.

The new shopping centre was built in phases, partly because the money kept running short:

• The Walks, the first phase, was finished by the 1970s and roofed over in the 1980s.
• The Malls, the second phase, followed by the early 1980s.
• The third phase was abandoned. Its site was later used for The Anvil, which opened in the 1990s.

The old canal wharf, which once faced Wote Street, now lies under Festival Place.

Around it all went the Ringway, a 1960s ring road encircling the centre, with main roads radiating from it like spokes. If you have ever wondered why Basingstoke has so many roundabouts, this is where it starts.

The jobs came too

The idea was to move work out of London as well as people, and big companies were tempted with cheap office space. The result was Basing View, the office district built mostly between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. Fanum House, home of the AA, dates from 1973; the stepped “hanging gardens” of Gateway House followed in 1974.

It worked, at least by the numbers. Basingstoke passed 52,000 people by 1971, and the 2021 census estimate was over 107,000.

Then it was rebuilt again

In October 2002 the centre of the 1960s scheme reopened as Festival Place, replacing The Walks and New Market Square. It made the town centre a much nicer place to shop, though whether it did much for the town’s wider reputation is another matter. The Malls declined after it opened.

What survived

The good news is that the old town did not disappear completely. It survives uphill from the shopping centre, in what locals call Top of the Town:

• Market Place, still the heart of the historic town, with the old Town Hall that is now the Willis Museum.
• Winchester Street and London Street, with surviving historic frontages including the old banks and Deane’s Almshouses.
• Church Street, with older buildings grouped near the church.

Walk up from Festival Place to Market Place and you cross the line between the two towns in a few minutes. One was planned on a drawing board for the motor car. The other grew slowly over a few hundred years. Basingstoke is both, and it makes more sense once you have seen where one stops and the other starts.

Further reading

Local historian Robert Brown photographed the changes from 1955 onwards, and his book Basingstoke in the 1960s is the best way to see what was lost. The Willis Museum covers the town’s history up to the modern day.