Had you heard of Simon Stevens before last week? I must confess I hadn’t come across the slimline chief executive of NHS England before, yet this Oxford-educated health manager may be one of the most powerful figures shaping not only the health of our nation, but our housing, too.
Last week, he announced one of the more exciting, radical and life-enhancing visions of the past decade or so: to design and build 10 healthy new towns. Apparently, more than 76,000 new homes, including thousands at Bicester, in Oxfordshire, and Darlington, in Co Durham, will be designed with a layout to help beat obesity and dementia, and boost community cohesion.
At first I wanted to groan; surely this is yet another red-brick and glass scheme doomed to be an expensive, fashionable failure? I hope not. This could be our chance to really try to design wellbeing into our bricks and mortar, which, as we all know, is as much a part of the British DNA as a fish’n’chip supper, or, these days, a bowl of courgette spaghetti with pumpkin seeds, washed down with one’s discounted supermarket plonk.
We all know that where we choose to live, or where we can afford to live, affects us immeasurably, whether we just want to fling open the door, let birdsong in and walk the dog, or batten down the hatches and hope no one disturbs us. If we can find ways to live more healthily, to age well in our homes and communities, then let’s start building now. But who is going to police the people moving in? Will developers charge a health premium? Will you have to fill out a questionnaire and do 10 sit-ups before getting the keys?
Of course, the big ideas were going to come from outside the housebuilding industry. It proves that we need more inspiration from leading thinkers. We also have to reconsider our cities. Tomorrow, Lord Kerslake, chairman of the London Housing Commission, articulates his housing strategy for 2016-2020. Skyscrapers with no lifts to keep owners fit, perhaps?
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If he gets it right then, who knows, perhaps Stevens will earn his own blue plaque to celebrate saving us from our obese decline? The English Heritage scheme has been going for 150 years — though there is now a campaign to boost the number of women honoured with its blue plaques in the capital. Only 13% of the 902 plaques that have survived have been given to females. The artist Danny Coope has been curating and creating English Heritage-style paper or vinyl plaques to commemorate “real”, ordinary former residents since 2011. You can honour the lives of previous occupants of your home from £25 (dannycoope.co.uk/street-of-blue-plaques). Unlikely to grace the scheme is Jeremy Irons’s architect character in the dystopian film High-Rise, with its gleeful and slick collapse of society in one tower block culminating in the residents killing a horse with a cheese knife — though the writer on whose book it is based, JG Ballard, definitely deserves a campaign for a plaque at his former semi in Shepperton.
As well as the eat less, do more, be more, live more optimism that can take over on a Sunday evening (and soon fade to black), I have been a regular maker of boring lists: clean bathroom, do the ironing, etc. It’s fair to say they won’t be making a debut at The Pram in the Hall, an exhibition by Alice Instone of the to-do lists of notable women, from Wednesday at 1 Cathedral Street, in central London (aliceinstone.com).
It’s now just one week until part one of Best Places, and a fortnight before we announce the overall winner. Locations are coming in thick and fast: Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, Louth, in Lincolnshire, and Deal, in Kent are all in the mix. Keep them coming...
Tell me what you think @TheSTHome or helen.davies@sunday-times.co.uk