27 January 2025

‘Mirror towns’ can help solve Britain’s housing crisis

By

Winslow, a market town in Buckinghamshire, will be connected to the national rail network for the first time in 57 years when the western stage of East West Rail opens later this year. With easy connections to well-paying jobs in Oxford and Milton Keynes, the new railway will improve the lives of the town’s residents. 

There’s just one issue, which means Winslow won’t make the most of its link on the new £6 billion railway: there are no homes for people to live in to the north of the station.

Map of Winslow

From Creating New Towns Fast and Well written by Create Streets and Britain Remade

Like many towns and villages, Winslow is completely to one side of its railway line. When the railways were first built, it was often too expensive, disruptive or difficult to build a station in the middle of the many towns and villages that they would serve. Instead, the stations were built on the periphery. In some cases, the Victorian or 20th-century town naturally expanded around the station. But in many others it has not; whether due to green belt restrictions, our stifling planning system or local opposition, many stations remain at the periphery.

As a result, instead of serving people who could use the railway to get to a job or see friends and family, the stations are serving empty fields. This is made worse when you consider how severe Britain’s housing shortage is. The Centre for Cities estimates that Britain has a shortage of 4.3 million homes compared to the average European country. With the average house in England costing 8.3 times the average annual full-time wage (rising to 11.9 in London), buying a house is unaffordable for too many.

In our paper Creating New Towns Fast and Well, co-written with Create Streets, we identified dozens of stations like Winslow, which are built on the outskirts of a town. Once you start noticing how many stations have significant land free on one side of the track, it’s easy to see the great potential that building ‘mirror towns’ on that side has.

The Labour Government, in its push to get Britain building again, has also seen the promise of building near these stations. On Sunday, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, announced that the default answer to development in high potential locations near commuter transport hubs will be ‘yes’.

This change could allow for significant building that creates well-connected and sustainable communities. Releasing green belt or agricultural land within a 10-minute walk of any station that is 45 minutes or less from a major city could lead to up to 2.3 million new homes. This avoids touching any national landscapes and would only impact 1.8% of the green belt. Building communities within walking distance of stations makes it easier for people to use transit and live lower-carbon lifestyles. These fast connections to city centres will let more people easily access well-paying jobs in Britain’s most productive areas.

In places where Britain’s housing shortage is most extreme, each new house built can unlock hundreds of thousands of pounds of value. Through community infrastructure levies, community land auctions or development corporations, part of this value can be captured to help improve local infrastructure – and the railway line that the station serves.

Building around Salfords station in Surrey, another potential mirror town like Winslow, could help fund a new junction on the M23 and the Croydon Area Remodelling Scheme, unblocking the most congested and complex part of Britain’s rail network and providing eight extra trains to Central London every hour. Every thousand homes built is potentially a quarter of a billion in additional investment into surrounding infrastructure.

Despite being well-connected to both London and Brighton, Salfords, and other mirror town stations like it, are often in the bottom half of stations by passenger numbers simply because not enough people live near the stations to use them.

The railway stations are already there and there is plenty of land around many of them. Completing these mirror towns is a no-brainer, which will bring growth, alleviate the housing shortage and help fund infrastructure upgrades.

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Ben Hopkinson is Head of Research at Britain Remade.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.