Let’s build homes people actually want to live in
The Tories have got the message on housing; now the planning system needs to focus on what’s popular
Walk through the streets of Knightsbridge on a blustery day and you’ll pass by some of London’s most attractive facades. On either side, you’ll see eight-storey edifices of cheerful, red brick with white-painted cornices and balconies, elaborately shaped gables and black, wrought-iron railings. These impressive, Victorian mansion blocks are notable in two other ways: they are among the capital’s most desirable housing and also its densest.
Many of these sought-after west London streets would be difficult to build nowadays. From mid-rise mansion blocks to streets of terraced, family houses extended upwards, appealing developments now easily fall foul of restrictive planning laws. Rather than being guided by popular or local tastes, planning has become obsessed with arbitrary restrictions, Bible-length building codes and architects’ bizarre, post-modern ideas of what makes a street beautiful.
If you want to know why the south of England has a housing crisis, this is a good place to start. Rather than improving our satisfaction with new homes, the growth of the post-war planning system seems to have coincided with record levels of disgruntlement. As a general rule, the longer the list of rules, the more intense the control by local authority planners, the uglier the buildings and the more Nimbyism they generate.
Housing is moving up the Tory agenda. You only had to spend a day traipsing around the Conservatives’ conference in Birmingham this week to realise that. Boris Johnson devoted half of his speech to housing; Jacob Rees-mogg, when asked how the Tories can win over more voters, made it his top issue; and Theresa May’s biggest announcement was to scrap the cap on council borrowing to build more houses. It has taken them long enough, but the Conservatives have finally realised that the longer Britain’s home ownership rate goes on falling, the worse the Tories’ prospects get.
Not every fix to the housing crisis was created equal, however. There is a growing acknowledgement that we need to get better at releasing land and that the faster we can make it available, the greater the pressure will be for private firms to not only build quickly, but nicely. If we could ever get to the point where planning permission wasn’t the primary determinant of land’s value in the south, housebuilders would actually have to start caring about the quality of what they build.
Mrs May’s headline proposal, however, points to another school of thought. One of the dominant narratives about why we don’t have enough houses is that Margaret Thatcher stopped councils building and sold off their stock. Yet if you go back to before the Second World War, the data show private housebuilders picking up the slack – and generally building better quality, longer-lasting houses to boot. What choked off that supply was the highly centralised, statist approach taken after the war.
You had only to walk around the city outside the Conservative conference to notice the difference. What’s left of Victorian Birmingham is an attractive network of red-brick streets and wide squares fringed by Neoclassical or neo-gothic churches and municipal buildings. These islands of older buildings are the exception, however.
Rather than improving or preserving what was left after the wartime bombing, the concrete-loving monster Herbert Manzoni, city engineer for Birmingham between 1935 and 1963, was allowed to take a wrecking ball to the city’s old library, its station, its stone Bull Ring Market Hall, and to replace it all with a grotesque morass of Brutalism. Criss-crossed by ring roads and motorways, studded by grim concrete, the city he built gives pride of place to cars, with people – the irrelevant, mere inhabitants of the place – funnelled along narrow, fume-choked pavements and dingy underpasses. The ideology of this architecture is clear: individuals were to play second fiddle to the ruthless juggernaut of progress.
Thankfully – or not so thankfully for those of us at the conference – the centre of Birmingham is now choc-a-block with building sites that will hopefully make the place more liveable. Manzoni’s ghastly library has been demolished, even if its replacement does look rather like a yellow hatbox on top of a garish Christmas present. There are hundreds of millions of pounds of private investment going into the place, making it one of Britain’s fastest-growing cities.
The danger of Mrs May’s big announcement is that it unleashes a splurge of borrowing that will result in exactly the sort of buildings that have successively turned Britons into Nimbys. As Mr Johnson recounted in his rival keynote speech, the orgy of state construction we saw before the Eighties gave us mouldy, concrete tower blocks and depressing high-rises connected by empty underpasses. These places certainly aren’t bereft of life – I’ve lived in ex-council flats and, like any place humans inhabit, they cultivate their own kinds of community. But extending mass state housing schemes isn’t the way to give people the sense of belonging, ownership and responsibility that a new home ought to create.
What’s needed is a combination of planning overhauls and an expansion of council house sales to help fund the next round of building. Rather than obsessing over petty, prescriptive metrics, like the exact height of a street, the dimensions of the facade, its density, its energy efficiency (which is usually a con anyway), planners should have regard to popularity and general character.
On many an Edwardian terrace, you can see dozens of perfectly attractive extensions or extra floors added over the years to accommodate growing families. Yet such extensions are now almost impossible to build, whereas fashionable, architecturally “creative” carbuncles are popping up all over the place. Making councils additionally responsible for selling on their new housing stock at a price sufficient to cover costs but lower than the absurdly inflated market would also help to concentrate them on building the kinds of houses their voters want to live in.
For too long, the answer to the South’s housing problems has been more rules and more centralisation. If instead the Government refocused councils and the planning system on what’s popular, we’d see the benefits not just in London, but up and down the country as housebuilders changed their approach. Such developments might not win any sophisticated architecture prizes, but they’d achieve something far more important: building homes that people actually want.
Generally, the longer the list of rules and the more intense the control by council planners, the uglier the buildings