‘To make us love our country,” wrote Edmund Burke, “our country ought to be lovely.” If that’s so, nobody can wonder that some people are disaffected. They’re the ones who don’t live in the more select parts of London or a pretty village or market town, but in what might be called bog-standard Britain, much of it built in the past 50 years.
As a nation, we’ve been successful in producing top architects who can design striking buildings in prominent places; but our everyday architecture — housing estates, hospitals, public spaces: the sort of places where ordinary people spend most of their lives — has been abysmal.
The government is conscious of the problem, which is being thrashed out by a select committee of the House of Lords. Pity the peers who are on it — they’ve been given until Easter to come up with solutions to an issue as complex as the invasion of Iraq. They will have to concentrate on ways to deliver the hundreds of thousands of extra homes the government says we need — and making them places where people actually want to live.
The planning system in England is gridlocked. Wales and Scotland look at their landmass as a whole and develop strategies. England, by contrast, has what ministers describe as a bottom-up approach — with the proviso that the bottom will be caned should it fail to deliver enough houses. Localism rules — but alas, only in theory; in practice communities are powerless to say no. Ask the residents of Castle Cary in Somerset, who are fighting developments that will expand the town by a staggering 40 per cent.
Whether the select committee will succeed in raising our standard of housing is uncertain. So far, it has only heard evidence from star architects such as Quinlan Terry and Sunand Prasad. I have boundless respect for Terry as a classicist. But like Prasad, he’s a creator of set-piece buildings, not a master planner.
Advertisement
We do have master planners in this country. Robert Adam Architects controls some 33,000 houses in a variety of schemes. Norman Foster and Partners has made a master plan for Folkestone for the philanthropist Roger de Haan. Foster’s Spencer de Grey recently wrote a report into historic towns and cities for English Heritage. It concluded that all the housing erupting from King’s Lynn in a hideous sprawl could be contained within its urban limits, to the benefit of the town. You employ a quality architect, you get a quality solution.
Robert Adam is a traditionalist, de Grey a modernist. I suspect both would agree on principles. We don’t want to ruin yet more countryside. In our crowded islands, land is a precious resource — doubly so in the south. So we need to make better use of that which we’ve already squandered. Take out-of-town shopping centres as an example of land profligacy. They may be necessary (although Tesco is finding that the superstore model no longer works); but they’re atrocious. Not only are they devoid of a flicker of architectural merit, but they’re an appallingly extravagant use of land. Often they occupy what used to be whole farms. This land — scores if not hundreds of acres — is occupied by cheap retail sheds of one or two storeys. Around these tacky structures laps an ocean of Tarmac.
Shopping centres may not strictly speaking be brownfield sites, because they’re still in use; but they should be targeted for redevelopment in the same way. Keep the ground-floor shops, put the cars below ground and raise four or five storeys of housing on top. The owners of the land should be keen to maximise values; no doubt changes to the tax system could be introduced to incentivise them if they’re not. Unlike greenfield sites, shopping centres already have some infrastructure in the form of roads and drainage. If properly designed, the result would be a great deal more appealing than the mega JD Sports and Superdrug stores there at the moment. And it would solve the housing crisis at a stroke.
Modern cities don’t have to be horrible. The 20th-century urbanism in Stockholm is a delight. In Pimlico, west London, I live opposite a council estate built by Darbourne & Darke in the 1960s. The architectural critic Ian Nairn, who also lived in Pimlico, loved it, and so do I.
At present, the push-me, pull-you of planning delivers the worst of all worlds: unhappiness to nimbys, not enough houses for the chancellor, and misery for those on average incomes who aren’t able to find a home they can afford. Unless their lordships use some unparliamentary language in their report, I fear we’ll get more of the same.