The Peterborough Effect

With a history going back to the Bronze Age, Peterborough might have seemed an unlikely place for a New Town. It was designated as such in 1967, one of the last of what were known as the expanded towns. There were lots of modern ideas about how it should be built, including building four new 'townships' connected by a network of fast roads, or 'parkways'. But it's a connection back to Roman Britain that helped most of us picture the new town, when it was promoted on the TV in the 1980s.

Here's Ken McKay from Peterborough Development Corporation explaining how the ads came about: 'We’d never been on TV advertising before. I gave them lots of information about Peterborough’s history and they hit upon the idea of having a Roman Centurion as a messenger. People normally think of New Towns as being all brand new. I wanted to paint a picture of Peterborough being a place that had history. I said to them, "I don’t want to show anything that isn’t truly Peterborough. I don’t want anything set up in a studio - the only thing that will be unreal is a Roman Centurion." We then set about finding someone to be the Roman Centurion, and we found that Roy Kinnear was available. He was a very recognisable actor, with a slightly comic edge to him, and he made our ads. In one of them, he was in a back garden in Castor. We borrowed someone’s back garden in a nice old house and we had a garden party going on, people sitting around drinking in the sunshine, and suddenly Roy Kinnear walks into the scene speaking Latin. So we had the world’s first television commercial in Latin with English subtitles.'


But it wasn't just new towns (even ones with ancient history) that Roy promoted. He was also the face behind this 1979 campaign for house renovation grants – loans to upgrade your toilet and bathroom, for the many people who still had no inside toilet or fixed bath in their houses. The sort of places that new towns like Peterborough were built to remedy.



There's loads of great information on how Peterborough New Town came about in this PDF.