Laindon existed centuries before Basildon New Town and expanded dramatically after its railway station opened in 1888. Cheap land sales encouraged extensive plotland development, creating a distinctive community of individually built homes, shops and unmade roads.
The Development Corporation incorporated Laindon into the New Town and replaced large areas of plotland with planned housing. Laindon nevertheless retained a strong identity of its own, reinforced by the railway, High Road and later shopping centre. Subsequent redevelopment has continued to change the centre of Laindon.
Langdon Hills also predates the New Town and retained more of its older landscape than many central neighbourhoods. Its elevated ground, older roads and surviving pre-New Town properties give parts of the area a noticeably different character from the planned estates.
Development connected Langdon Hills more closely to Laindon and Basildon, but the wooded hills and surviving historic routes remain important features of the western side of the town.
Only part of Dunton fell within the New Town designated area. The district had its own plotland development, including weekend properties during the inter-war years. Later, the name became strongly associated with Ford's research and engineering centre, opened in 1967.
Noak Bridge represents a later chapter than the first wave of New Town neighbourhoods. It demonstrates that Basildon's neighbourhood map did not freeze in the 1960s: new residential communities continued to appear as the town and borough expanded.
Basildon's modern identity comes from this mixture of places. Some neighbourhoods were carefully planned after 1949; others are ancient villages or early twentieth-century plotland communities reshaped by the New Town; and still others developed later. The result is a town whose local names often preserve far more history than the modern streets initially suggest.
This section covers the principal early New Town neighbourhoods and the best-known adjoining districts: Basildon, Barstable, Fryerns, Craylands, Ghyllgrove, Kingswood, Lee Chapel North, Lee Chapel South, Pitsea, Vange, Nevendon, Chalvedon, Felmores, Eversley, Burnt Mills, Laindon, Langdon Hills, Dunton and Noak Bridge. Individual sections elsewhere on Basildon.info can go into still greater depth on their shops, schools, roads, estates and landmarks.