As I alight the Elizabeth Line train, I get the distinct sense that I’m arriving at a place that is not quite London. With a 30-minute train ride on this new-ish commuter railway, I was plucked from Tottenham Court Road in Central London and transported to Romford, all the way in Zone 6.

Romford is a town that was once part of Essex, until it was subsumed into Greater London in 1965, as part of an administrative reorganisation that reflected London’s encroachment into its neighbouring counties. But to this day, it retains traces of its unique, fiercely independent Essex character.

As I leave the station, the many Art Deco buildings dotted on the high street make it clear that Romford’s development boom took place in the 1920s and 30s. As a well-placed satellite suburb of London, its population nearly doubled in during this period and post-war planners recognised its potential for even further growth. In Metropolitan Essex’s 1952 Development Plan, planners earmarked Romford for a sharp uptick in its population by the 1970s.

With the Elizabeth Line having opened here in 2022, the town is set to densify again. At the end of the high street, I can already see two 16-storey skyscrapers shooting up as developers cash in on the uplift in land value with the improved connections to London. Planners today can see the same underlying potential of the place that their post-war predecessors recognised decades earlier.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947, passed by Clement Attlee’s socialist government, was a transformational piece of legislation that served as the foundation of Britain’s modern planning system. While it was not the first piece of legislation to allow local councils to make development plans of their areas, it was the first to give the government the requisite powers to implement these plans.

The most significant measure was to nationalise development rights of all land, which marks the moment ‘planning permission’ was born. Prior to 1947, the right to develop the land (i.e. build) was seen as an intrinsic part of land ownership. Therefore, if development was refused under plans devised under previous Acts, the local authority would have to compensate the landowner for the deprivation of their rights – making planning a costly affair. Development plans back then proposed scant changes and in effect, largely reflected neighbourhoods as they were, rather than what they could become.

 The 1947 Act tried to solve this problem by nationalising all development rights once and for all with a one-off compensation for property owners, to be claimed before a deadline from a ‘Global Fund’ of £300 million, equivalent to approximately £10 billion today. The government, now the rightful owner of these development rights, could henceforth freely grant and refuse permission to implement its plans as it saw fit. With this one-off pot of public money, Parliament essentially redefined property rights for the entire country: owning land no longer came with the right to build on it.