Labour’s chocolate box urban utopia is one election

Mooted Edwardian-style new towns are charming, but less than ideal for the disabled – and the images are curiously caucasian

A future Labour government, if we are to believe images released by Angela Rayner and generated by the campaign group Create Streets, will build Edwardian-style new towns. The pictures show leafy streets of charming terrace houses and mansion blocks, furnished with Dutch gables, carved stonework, cast-iron lamp-posts and civic buildings with Gothic spires. This is one election promise that will not be fulfilled, except possibly in the form of unconvincing fakes, because for good and bad reasons builders don’t build like that any more.

One factor, as the rightwing commentator Henry Hill correctly pointed out, is that current regulations rule out many features shown in the images, such as flights of steps up to front doors (to enable wheelchair access) and low balustrades with widely spaced railings (to stop children falling out of windows). Hill takes the predictably libertarian position of blaming the regulations – “less than 2% of the population uses a wheelchair”, he declares, so why ban steps?