New Town

A planned mixed-use district begun in 1997 on former farmland west of Williamsburg, and one of the more coherent New Urbanist developments in Virginia — built to a grid with narrow streets, wide sidewalks, shops on the ground floor and apartments above, in a colonial revival idiom borrowed from the town it sits beside.

Courthouse Street and Main Street form the retail core: a multiplex, a bookshop, restaurants with pavement seating, a billiards hall, and a green used for outdoor films and markets. Behind them the residential blocks demonstrate the theory — houses close to the street, garages tucked onto rear lanes, everything walkable.

Of interest mainly if planning and urban form are your thing; as a shopping stop it is pleasant but unremarkable. It works well in the evening when the historic area has closed.