If you want to know the age of a town or city, the biggest clue is not the age of its buildings but its street plan. New York is laid out on a grid while the City of London is a higgledy-piggledy tangle of roads, alleys and thoroughfares. Settlements with long histories grew organically pell-mell, while newer ones were planned, rational and regular.
In south-west France, however, there are hundreds of medieval villages that defy this general rule. The likes of Villeréal, Monpazier, Carcassonne and Villefranche-du-Périgord are all laid out on symmetrical grids around a central town square. These bastides are among Europe’s oldest surviving planned towns, and are certainly the most numerous.
Today, new towns are again high up the UK government’s agenda. Last September it set up The New Towns Taskforce under the leadership of Sir Michael Lyons to “support the government to deliver the next generation of new towns” that “should collectively [provide] hundreds of thousands of new homes by 2050”. Its February interim update said that “the majority of the sites submitted were urban extensions to existing towns or cities, with a smaller number of proposals for new standalone settlements”, but when I spoke to Lyons he told me that “in the end I think it’s a much more mixed set. We’ve got quite a heterogeneous group of places that we’re going to recommend.”
Villeréal, Lot-et-Garonne, one of the original ‘villes neuves’ © Hemis/Alamy
Lyons says that the finished report will be published over the next three months. The task force says it has worked to learn the lessons, positive and negative, from “the post-1945 new towns and more recent ecotowns and garden communities”. But could and should it have looked further back to learn from some of the most successful planned towns in history?
The high middle ages saw the building of many villes neuves, or new towns, across France. In the south-west these were known as bastides; estimates put the total number at around 350. Although the world that gave birth to them was very different from our own (see box), the bastides have certain features that the new town developers of today would be wise to emulate.
All the bastides had at their centre a square, with a weekly market day and an annual fair set by the founding charter. The church, by contrast, was always just off the square, never the focal point. The bastides were in their very conception centres of commerce, allowing their residents to trade with ease in one designated place. Today, those squares remain the beating hearts of their communities and the towns boast of the long, uninterrupted histories of their markets. The one in Castillonnès has been held every Tuesday since 1259, while Villeréal’s has been held every Saturday since 1269.
It’s not just on market days that the squares come to life. Take Monségur and Sauveterre-de-Guyenne, two of the most popular bastides in the Gironde. Both have the covered arcades surrounding the central square that are typical of bastides, and both are still home to a range of businesses, including butchers, bakers, restaurants, bars and pharmacies. Many small French towns have lost some or all of these amenities so, as Carole Picaud, a real estate agent for Immobilier des Bastides in Sauveterre told me, “having everything on site is a real asset” that “allows residents to be independent on foot”. Locals cherish these amenities and in Monpazier I saw posters in shop windows warning “Village en danger”, protesting against a proposed supermarket, accompanied by a poem called “How a village dies” eulogising the small shopkeeper.
In places such as Eymet, in Dordogne, feudal lords had more of a stake in ensuring their new towns were sustainable than most property developers today © Hemis/Alamy
Bastides, with populations originally of around 500 to 1,000, are too small to be exact templates for modern new towns (today only a handful have populations over 20,000). Still, the walkability of a town remains a major attraction. As Nigel Hugill, chair of the urban think-tank Centre for Cities, says, surveys in the UK consistently find that people want “green spaces they can walk through, somewhere where they can buy a pint of milk,” with “good schools that they can walk their children to”.
The contemporary urban planning idea of the “15-minute city”, in which all your basic needs are no more than a quarter of an hour’s walk away, attempts to reinvent this advantage of village life for the urban context. Julia Thrift, director of healthier place-making at the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) says that “Places that are walkable encourage people to be active, to bump into neighbours, to meet people.” Both the physical activity and social connection this fosters are “hugely important for health [and wellbeing]”.
The cohesion and sociability of the bastides is partly a result of their population density, which is higher than many sprawling suburban developments. “We favour higher density,” Lyons says. “Many of the places that are most popular have quite a high density, at least towards the centre. But if you start talking about that in the abstract people start thinking we’re going to have tower blocks and multistorey buildings.” This is not necessary for what he calls “quiet densification” which “strengthens labour availability” and “justifies greater investment in transportation”.
The town square at Villeréal, where a market has been held every Saturday since 1269 © Jeff Gilbert/Alamy
New towns also need equivalents of the medieval market square, attractive “places of congregation” or “agents of socialisation”, as Hugill calls them. Similarly, Lyons talks of the importance of “the serendipity of place and connection”. However, he adds, the “big monolithic shopping centres that have been dropped into many of our cities” are not up to the job.
Like the bastides’ covered arcades, town centres need to have “built forms that are flexible and adaptable”, says Alina Congreve, manager of the New Jerusalems project, which is cataloguing the collections of 11 postwar UK new towns. This allows the mix of businesses and facilities, such as health centres, gyms, cafés, restaurants and civic spaces, to change. Today, the central squares of bastides house businesses that their original constructors would never have envisaged: estate agents, florists and stationers.
So much of the discussion around new towns focuses on the need to create more housing. But “housing isn’t enough to make a town”, says Hugill. A successful town needs jobs, infrastructure, facilities. Lyons says his task force is “definitely one step ahead there. Even from the point of commissioning, the remit we were given did not prioritise housing. It prioritised economic growth.”
“One of the lessons you can glean from previous new towns is the importance of master planning,” says Lyons. “Most of the bigger-scale developments that we’ve seen of late have been done by housebuilders who are not really town builders. And even where there’s been master planning, it’s been on too small a scale.”
Monpazier’s town square, a place of commerce and congregation that is walkable from anywhere in the town © Tim Moore/Alamy
Villeréal and similar bastides are a medieval version of the ‘15-minute city’ © Christine Widdall/Alamy
The bastides were built with such master plans in mind. But new towns require democratic, accountable versions of the lords and kings who had the power and resources to seize or buy land and put everything in place for their new towns to thrive. In the postwar period these were development corporations, created by government but operating autonomously to acquire land, commission infrastructure and oversee house building.
Lyons says that in his report “we are clear that development corporations are a really important tool. We’re saying unequivocally: new towns will need the support of government and upfront investment.” Lyons has been made much more confident that this can work alongside private enterprise. “Many of the developers that we’ve talked to actually welcome the idea of a development corporation. They see it as binding in government to a long-term commitment, offering a mechanism for acquiring land and securing planning permission at speed.”
Thrift adds that “you can design somewhere with the most fantastic intentions. But unless it’s cared for, things can quite quickly go wrong.” Lyons underlines the importance of “continuing stewardship: these are not places that you just build, and then wander away from.”
Carcassonne, a walled city that is a Unesco World Heritage Site, in Languedoc © Robert Harding/Alamy
Yet it is shocking to realise that the medieval feudal lords had more of a stake in ensuring their new towns were sustainable than most property developers today. “The private sector has no financial interest in the sort of heavyweight placemaking you need to build at scale,” argues Hugh Ellis, director of policy at TCPA. “Even mining companies in the 1920s cared more about providing a decent home for their workforce than modern property development does.” Thrift adds: “If you look at the private sector housebuilding model, their necessity is to get the highest possible price for that house on the day they sell it. If it all goes downhill afterwards, it really doesn’t matter, because they’ve gone somewhere else by then.”
By contrast, the postwar new towns had a strong stewardship model of “owning the shops in the town centre and the business premises in the industrial area, having that money coming back in and being able to reinvest it for the good of the town and its maintenance,” says Congreve. But Ellis adds that the model “was deliberately broken in the 1980s by an ideological decision to basically vandalise the programme by forcing a fire sale of most of their assets to the private sector”. One reason why Milton Keynes — often held up a model new town — still has such good green spaces is that when its development corporation was wound up in 1992, a trust was created with an endowment to continue to manage the parkland.
Some features of the bastides are best left in the middle ages. One is both their most modern and distinctive: the grid layout, a model revived from ancient Rome. Hugill argues that although this was fine for a town designed for 1,000 or so people, it doesn’t work well in large, traffic-ridden towns today.
Milton Keynes, one of the few postwar British new towns that still prioritises green space © Getty Images
Lyons also says of the Bastide’s first residents, “I doubt they got much of a vote in those days.” He talks of the need for citizen engagement “rather than just developing a model that you impose”.
Perhaps most importantly, the bastide template was used time and again with little alteration. But Lyons says: “We are emphasising that all of the places that we are recommending potentially have an identity of their own.” The intention is to “offer a prescription without being too restrictive on local innovation and the creation of distinctive places”.
New towns work best when they offer people not just a good place to live, but a better one. Many of the people who moved into Britain’s postwar new towns had been living in poor-quality houses, some even slums. The first inhabitants of the bastides were offered an even bigger carrot: liberties that were unprecedented for ordinary people in feudal societies. These rights were set out in the charters of each of the bastides. Dick Bogg, a tour guide and local historian in Castillonnès, says that the town’s charter was “vital as far as the residents were concerned, because it put limits on the amount of control they could be given by their old feudal landlords and by the state”.
Labastide-d’Armagnac, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, with the covered arcades surrounding the central square that are typical of bastides © Hemis/Alamy
Today, enhanced citizen engagement, which everyone I spoke to supported, could be a way of giving residents more power and influence than their peers. Lesha Chetty from construction experts Mace says that “some of the new town deals that were proposed over the past few years have had a stewardship model to bring more community groups in”. Greater community ownership is one option. “There are a number of community halls that have moved from being council owned to being community owned and run, and those places are thriving.”
Perhaps the single most important lesson from the bastides is to build with what Chetty calls “civic intentionality” to “foster community, commerce, protection and participation. Today, if we want to create new towns that are thriving, we’ve got a design for congregation, for belonging and for identity.”
New towns would do well to be as popular in 800 years’ time as the bastides are today — even with the English, whose ancestors once ruled many of them. Picaud reports that there are many British buyers, and that certain villages, such as Eymet and Duras are especially favoured. Far from squeezing out locals, Bogg credits the British with having done much to renovate properties in the old towns that the French considered too expensive. Tourist levels remain manageable, with towns such as Monpazier receiving 300,000 visitors a year, almost all in the short summer season.
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I ran into two Brits, Heather and David, who had moved five years ago to Villefranche-du-Périgord and were enjoying a late morning drink under the shaded arcades of Monpazier’s main square. They didn’t know about the bastides before they started house-hunting, but were soon taken by them. “It’s the history,” says David. “They’re unspoilt, untouched.” This is partly thanks to legal protections such as PSMVs (protection and development plans). Created in 1962, these protect heritage areas from destructive development.
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As Picaud explains, this has implications for homeowners, as listed status does for those in the UK. “During renovations, you are not free to choose materials. Aesthetic cohesion must be maintained to preserve the village and its heritage. These requirements are often more expensive than traditional materials.”
All the bastides I visited felt very much alive and laid-back at the same time. Everywhere I saw advertisements for numerous public concerts, fairs and fetes, such as the potluck dinner in Monpazier, which opened with an aperitif courtesy of the mairie. So when I asked Picaud how she would sell the bastides to potential buyers, it did not seem to be just estate-agent hype when she replied that it was “a wonderful place to live if you enjoy conviviality and interaction, while enjoying the peace and quiet of your own home once you’ve closed your door”. New Town Taskforce, take note.
France at the time of the bastides: the birth of the original new towns
A 1978 postcard of Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, clearly shows the town’s grid layout and central market
“The first question I ask my visitors is, what do you think a bastide is?” says Dick Bogg, a tour guide and local historian in Lot-et-Garonne. “Ninety per cent of people say it’s a fortified medieval village. But that was not the original idea.”
The France that gave birth to the bastides, says Bogg, was a place of “perpetual fighting between the French monarchy, the old barons, the church and, of course, with the English.” In 1137, the Capetian King Louis VII married Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, uniting their lands into a territory very similar to the extent of modern France. However, in 1152 the marriage was annulled and Eleanor of Aquitaine married the English King Henry II, and the vast territory of Aquitaine came under English rule. In 1159, Louis VII decided it was time to kick out the English, marking the start of what is sometimes called the first hundred years’ war, to distinguish if from the subsequent one.
It was also a time of feudalism in which ordinary people were prey to brigands and wild animals, and were vassals of their lords, who were often fighting one another. “The local population caught up in the middle simply couldn’t be protected,” says Bogg. At the same time, with the peasantry spread out across the countryside, the landowners found it hard to control their tenants.
This unstable and unruly state of affairs suited no one. The bastides offered an alternative model that would serve the enlightened self-interest of all. Concentrating the masses in towns made it easier to tax and control them. But granting them rights and giving more guarantees of their safety made this a deal worth accepting.
The first wave of construction was from 1222 to 1249 under the auspices of the Earl of Toulouse, Raymond VII. He built around 20 towns, with seizure by force his favoured method of procuring land. The second period, from 1249 to 1271. was led by the more law-abiding Alphonse de Poitiers, who bought lands or entered into partnership with existing owners to establish around 50 towns.
However, most of the bastides — nearly 350 — were built between 1270 to 1373 by either the Capetian kings, who ruled most of France, or the English, who governed Aquitaine. Each monarch sought to create new settlements, especially around the borders of their territories, to stake their claim to the land and establish bases.
It was only in this period, after the start of the hundred years’ war in 1337, that fortifications were added. The name bastide has nothing to do with fortifications and comes from the old Provençal word bastida, meaning something recently built or undergoing construction. Such was the tumult that many of the bastides changed hands several times. Castillonnès flipped between French and English a dozen or so times (for 27 years from 1272 it was partitioned), although for the citizens the changes of ownership made little to no difference to daily life.
Not all the bastides succeeded in attracting enough inhabitants and some, such as Roquépine and Rayet, near Monpazier, were stillborn. But most survived and many thrived. Within 80 years of its establishment in 1284, Monpazier had become the sixth-largest town in Périgord. Today, many bastides are among the most charming small towns in south-west France. JB
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