A few 'new towns' were founded in the twentieth century as an experiment in creating a new social environment. One of the most distinctive is Milton Keynes which was built in the early 1970s, and which now has a population of about 240,000 people. It was constructed on a grid pattern, with innovations such as little centres of population inside each of the grid roads which are linked by small roads and cycle-paths under the main roads. It is an unfamiliar and intriguing sight in Britain, reminding us that we are most familiar with the 'star-shape' of our traditional towns and cities.
One other notable difference between your towns and ours is the variety of architecture which you will observe in English cities. The geological complexity of our small island means that we have many different kinds of stone - and many places with no suitable stone, so that we use brick. Local materials predominate; we have no remaining large oak forests, so wood is not a material to be used except in very expensive houses. We do not have pine forests so we cannot build your wooden houses.
For reasons discussed in the next chapter, we do not build many high-rise, multi-storey blocks of flats, so our residential areas consist of rows of two- or three-storey houses neatly arranged along roads. The English visitor to an unfamiliar area can easily find the house he wants if he has the house number; he does not have to plunge into land away from the road where large blocks of flats stand at odd angles to each other, often confusingly numbered and not clearly related to the nearest road. Our suburban roads may be neat but they are rarely straight. Town planners designed them so that they curve elegantly in S-shapes or contour round hills, or end in a little cluster of half-moon terraces. We like these patterns, particularly those which mean that the houses are hidden from the main road and noisy traffic. Wherever we can, we use the shadowy map of old lanes and alleys which curved and twisted along the boundaries of old properties.
Perhaps the most serious damage to these traditional towns and even to our big cities was the enthusiasm during the 1960s and early 1970s for radical redevelopment, using large-scale concrete and glass rather than traditional brick in traditional classical styles for our municipal buildings. The old centres of many cities were pulled down and new concrete buildings erected. Most of them are now considered ugly and soulless; many have been pulled down in their turn. Birmingham suffered particularly badly although it has now done its best to create an exciting super-modern centre.
Another debate was about the development in the 1980s of the 'out-of-town' shopping centre. These huge supermarkets built on the edge of the town so that people could drive to them and collect all their shopping in one visit were and are very convenient. But their existence meant that something was destroyed in the middle of town where people traditionally walk up and down, enjoy meeting friends, visit the library, the park, the cinema, the cafe, the pub, and take pleasure in the variety and beauty of the local architecture. The centres of small towns used to have lots of little shops selling different things, with individual shop-keepers to serve their customers and know their stock. Many of those shops closed because of competition from the supermarkets. So people no longer came to shop in old streets around the centre, and then the other shops which provided goods not to be found in the supermarkets, also suffered. Some town centres seemed to die. Even the enthusiastic shoppers at supermarkets began to regret the consequences. Now it is much more difficult to get planning permission to build out-of-centre supermarkets, but the inhabitants of some towns believe it is too late to save their town centres as places of lively activity. On the other hand, as supporters of big supermarkets point out, ultimately this is a matter of the people's choice. If shoppers had continued to use small shops they would have saved their town centres. Instead they chose to shop at the cheapest places.
In the nineteenth century Britain was famous as the first industrial power. Its factories and mills covered great areas of central and northern England, central Scotland and southern Wales. We had a dense network of roads, canals and railways. We produced vast quantities of coal and iron, and built the heavy engineering works which could develop because of our supply of these basic materials. Our ship yards turned out huge metal ships; at the other end of the scale, individual cities were devoted to creating the finest quality steel for domestic and military purposes. In Yorkshire we had huge woollen mills; in Lancashire huge cotton mills; and in Staffordshire in the area called 'the Potteries' we turned out the simplest earthenware plates and the finest china to satisfy the needs of an Empire.
Almost all of that world of industrial activity has disappeared along with our Empire. As world trade became more globalised it was obvious that people in poorer parts of the world could and would work for lower wages to produce these essentials. Britain, with its increasing population and changing expectations of what a decent life meant could no longer compete. Since the end of the Second World War we have been steadily losing our heavy industry. So - except in rare places -you will no longer see the pithead wheels of the coal mines, the tall chimneys of industrial factories, the warehouses, the huge single-industry communities which Russians call 'settlements'.
Instead we have turned to high-quality technological industries requiring specialised and highly trained labour; for example, in the pharmaceuticals industry, in food processing, and in specialised engineering (including arms). Our car factories have been sold to foreign firms although British workers still make the cars. Much of our ingenuity has gone into small inventions requiring skilled workmen not so many material resources. Computers have taken over from manual labour; buildings are no longer vast but are often inconspicuous two-storey 'workshops'.
The great and grand northern industrial cities suffered badly when our heavy industry declined rapidly and disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s. These cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, for example - suddenly became places where tens of thousands were unemployed and where poverty returned to the streets. (Several fine British films explored the predicament of northerners in the 1980s.) During the last fifteen years much money has been directed by the government into 'regenerating' them, especially by developing new specialist industries and big, colourful cultural centres. Not all the schemes have been successful, but multiple efforts to clean these cities fundamentally - cleaning the slums, the streets, the rivers, the canals, the parks, the wasteland, the ruins of industrial collapse - has stimulated much more enthusiasm and employment within them.
What I have described here will be difficult for Russians who have not travelled to other countries to visualise. Your cities look very much the same as each other from the furthest west to the furthest east. This is partly a matter of climate and materials, partly the fact that many cities are almost wholly new constructions, and partly Soviet policy.