Shiv Malik is the would-be founder of Britain’s first new city in over 50 years. He and Joe Reeve from LFG have identified 45,000 acres east of Cambridge for a million-person city, complete with cross-laminated timber skyscrapers, trams, proper sewerage, and enough infrastructure that NIMBYs might actually be won over by three new hospitals and 300 schools appearing on their doorstep.
In the first of this two-part conversation, Shiv, Tom, and Calum discuss:
The vision: a pedestrianised city centre with wooden skyscrapers reaching 60 storeys, trams running through it, and sewerage done right for once—plus all the ideas that can never be retrofitted into Victorian streets,
Why Milton Keynes is Britain’s secret productivity miracle: it’s the most productive place outside a few London boroughs, and if everyone lived as richly as Milton Keynes residents, we’d be 50% richer as a country—not because of roundabouts, but because recently-built infrastructure is simply more efficient than Victorian stairs,
The stakeholder nightmare: West Suffolk Council met Shiv for 90 minutes, Lord Vestey owns a third of the land, 8,000 current residents need convincing, and the development corporation model that built Milton Keynes in six weeks of public consultation is now viewed as dangerously autocratic,
Why NIMBYs have a point: the houses are terrible, there’s never infrastructure with new developments, Section 106 bargaining is an irrational barter system, and people are right to oppose ugly pylons and Barratt Homes extensions that crater village life without delivering train stations or hospitals,
The intergenerational thesis: Britain created a new leisure class that never existed in human history—retirees with incomes equal to workers but derived from capital, not labour—and they have time to dominate local politics while exhausted workers can’t fill out planning responses at 9:30pm,
The Boriswave outrage: Shiv gets told to “go home” online and understands why people are angry. He agrees with Shabana Mahmood that immigration policy has been a total failure—but why haven’t we built a reservoir in 30 years, and why doesn’t Haverhill have a train station? Immigration didn’t cause those failures,
The cavalry isn’t coming: Baroness Claire Fox asked Shiv if his book was “just a giant whinge,” and she was right—millennials and Gen Z protest about Palestine but don’t organise around material circumstances like housing, which is why Joe Reeve’s “we are the cavalry” moment convinced Shiv to dust off his old city plans,
The economics: community land trusts for housing, special economic zone tax breaks like Canary Wharf for commercial land, 80 acres in the city centre for ACDC (Albion City Development Corporation) to capture uplift, and the precedent of the Docklands Development Corporation proving this model works,
Phase one goals: convince Housing Secretary Steve Rayner to greenlight the development corporation, raise £200 million for master planning and site surveys, get spades in the ground by the end of this Parliament, and prove to Lord Vestey that selling up (or investing) beats getting CPO’d.
