Much of the housing here was built for the public sector and originally housed overspill population from London.

General Foods received active political and fiscal co-operation from the council to partly help find jobs for the local London overspill population.

Skelmersdale was designated a New Town in 1961, designed to house overspill population from the north Merseyside conurbation.

Later developments included the Expanded Towns, where existing towns were substantially expanded to accommodate the overspill population from the cities.

Intended to accommodate the overspill population from London - some 50 miles away - it would become Britain's largest new town, with the area's population multiplying during the 1970s and 1980s.

Washington was designated a new town in 1964; it expanded dramatically, by the creation of new villages and the absorption of areas of Chester-le-Street, to house overspill population from surrounding cities.

Wythenshawe is Manchester's largest district, a massive housing estate that was created in the 1920s intended as a "garden city" where an overspill population could be rehoused away from the slums and squalor of industrial Manchester.

Designated a New Town in 1967, Peterborough Development Corporation was formed in partnership with the city and county councils to house London's overspill population in new townships sited around the existing urban area.

In Northern Ireland, the Belfast Regional Survey and Plan (1963), prepared by consultant Robert Matthew, adopted the general redistributive policies over a city-region scale for overspill population to satellite centres; it was updated and revised by Stormont's own Regional physical development strategy (1975).