Part 5 follows leisure into the New Town period, when planned community centres, recreation grounds and sports facilities replaced much of the informal plotland landscape.
Bluehouse Farm Community Centre at Laindon Link officially opened in September 1972. It was built close to the site of the former Bluehouse Farm as a joint project involving Basildon Council and Basildon Development Corporation.
The centre cost around £92,000 and included a licensed bar, stage facilities and a hall. An adjoining building was used for a children's nursery and for the council's Play Leadership Scheme.
The centre quickly became an important venue for discos, darts, dances, community groups and family activities. Personal recollections from the 1970s describe parents using one hall while children attended discos or borrowed sports equipment through the play scheme.
The recreation ground beside the community centre became a major open leisure space for Laindon. In 1973 it was enlarged when the old farmhouse and adjoining land were absorbed into the grounds after the farmhouse had fallen into ruin and been damaged by fire.
During the 1970s children's play facilities were created near the community centre. The Play Leadership Scheme made equipment such as footballs, cricket bats, stilts and other games available to local children, linking the community centre directly with outdoor recreation.
A dedicated sports centre opened within the recreation ground in 1989. It stood partly on the site of earlier changing facilities and represented the more formal approach to recreation that followed the improvised clubs and fields of old Laindon.
The Markhams Chase Sports Centre remained until 2011, when it was removed. The recreation ground itself continued as public open space.
In February 2014 the nursery building adjoining Bluehouse Farm Community Centre was destroyed in an arson attack. The nursery temporarily relocated before returning after a replacement building and garden were completed.
By the later twentieth century, leisure in Laindon was increasingly organised around community centres, recreation grounds, schools and purpose-built sports facilities. This differed from the earlier pattern of small private clubs, improvised pitches and entertainment in local halls and pubs.
The industrial estates and leisure facilities were both products of the same wider transformation. New Town planning aimed not only to house people but also to provide employment, open space and community facilities within reach of the new neighbourhoods.
Laindon's industrial and leisure landscape has never stood still. Factories have closed or changed use, businesses have moved, sports buildings have come and gone, and community facilities have been rebuilt. Yet the surviving estates, recreation grounds and clubs still reflect the major twentieth-century reshaping of the area.