This is the fourth in a series of posts responding to questions and issues raised at my recent Battle of Ideas debate about the housing crisis. These posts will touch on how planning committees work (and whether they are political), why we need council housing, but it won’t solve the housing crisis and the old chestnuts of empty homes, brownfield sites and food supply. I’ll also try to set out why beauty is a good idea but looking good doesn’t stop NIMBYs and how urban sprawl is what people want.
“We do not see beauty as a cost, to be negotiated away once planning permission has been obtained. It is the benchmark that all new developments should meet. It includes everything that promotes a healthy and happy life, everything that makes a collection of buildings into a place, everything that turns anywhere into somewhere, and nowhere into home. So understood beauty should be an essential condition for the grant of planning permission”
These are the opening words of ‘Living with Beauty’, the 2020 final report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission chaired by the later Roger Scruton. And they have become something of a mantra for those who see the failure to meet housing need as a failure of will rather than a systemic problem. If only, we are told, the houses, shops and offices we build were more beautiful there would be fewer objections and the planning system, newly empowered by demanding beauty, would deliver the millions of homes we need.
It is hard to argue against beauty, of course we want the homes for future generations to echo the best in residential architecture down the ages. We want these buildings to use the best materials and to respect the topography of England. The problem is that a few seconds into any discussion about beauty in housing people start talking about Bath, Belgravia, Barcelona or Paris, usually accompanied by disparaging comments about American suburbia and cars. We’re told that beauty is contained in a thing called ‘gentle density’ as its proponents show pictures of gorgeously fenestrated mansion blocks in Kensington or reimagined suburbia free from such trashy and ugly things as private gardens and garages.
I was brought up in suburbia. I’d say I was biased when I say I love suburbs but, truth be told, a lot of people who grew up in suburbia also absorbed the popularised aesthetic that such places are naff, dull places filled with dull people living dull lives. The ‘Living with Beauty’ report is filled with hints, little asides about the poor quality of homes built by the big house-building companies and sly references to how cars spoil everything. The problem for our advocates of beauty is that not only do those terrible ugly homes built by Persimmon or Redrow sell but also the opponents of new homes don’t give a fig about what they look like, they don’t want them built.
The Duchy of Cornwall, previously under the stewardship of our new King now led by his son and heir, has proposals for a major urban extension at Faversham in Kent.
In accordance with the Swale Local Plan Review 2021 allocation, and guided by the local community through public engagement workshops and consultation events, the Duchy is drafting plans to deliver a high quality, sustainable, landscape-led, mixed use community that will become a thriving new urban extension to the town. In broad terms this aspiration can be summarised as a net zero carbon development of around 2,500 homes and 2,500 jobs across a range of commercial and community uses, with approximately one third of the site designated as high quality green space with at least 10% biodiversity net gains.
Drawing on well-regarded developments by the Duchy at Poundbury and Nansledan, the proposals are for a new community that is walkable, mixed use, served by good local transport and designed to reflect the historic vernacular of Faversham. It ticks, except on density, all the boxes that the advocates of beauty advocate. And local NIMBYs are going to fight it tooth and nail.
“While I recognise the need for new homes in and around Faversham I am extremely concerned at the scale of development. The council is proposing an unforgivable scale of development” (Helen Whateley the local MP)
"This isn't simply adding a couple of housing estates; this will change the nature of Faversham…It's hugely significant. It is the largest expansion of the town since the Victorian era.” (Cllr John Irwin, Faversham Town Council)
“The farmland is so rich in biodiversity and this scheme will destroy habitats. So many protected species will be lost - there are bats, lizards, butterflies and wild orchids. It's so sad. I have concerns about losing such good farmland. In the current climate, we need food self-security. Farmland should be kept in operation at all costs.” (local resident, Mark Sewell)
The striking thing about this opposition is that there is no discussion of beauty. The Duchy may have filled the proposals with the language of responsible development, community and environment and the design standards may be high, but the opposition is to the fact of the housing not what it looks like or who will live there.
In my 24 years as a local councillor, the issue of what new housing looked like was seldom a reason to oppose that housing. Residents opposed housing because they thought it would lead to crowded roads, schools and doctors, that it would change the character of the community, and that something important (flowers, animals, heritage) would be harmed by new homes. The ‘Living with Beauty’ report stresses, and this emphasis is present in the Policy Exchange work on housing and planning, that the resolution is to move planning upstream:
Local councils need radically and profoundly to re-invent the ambition, depth and breadth with which they engage with neighbourhoods as they consult on their local plans. More democracy should take place at the local plan phase, expanding from the current focus on consultation in the development control process to one of co-design.
The abandoned white paper on planning reflected these ideas seeking to shift local consultation away from responding to individual applications by having more community consultation at the local plan stage. The problem with both Policy Exchange and the Scruton Commission is that they don’t make this leap of logic and want to retain the existing process for planning applications. And therefore, nothing changes because community consultation never reaches beyond the activist and the objective of those activists is not to get a balance of beautiful new development that will meet community needs but to stop any new development.
If we add a requirement to ask for beauty to the mix of planning requirements, all we do is provide the NIMBYs – the opponents of development – with another barricade to help them prevent new homes getting built, another hurdle for developers and especially smaller developers to clear, and another set of ugly words in turgid policy documents intended to define ‘beauty’ in planning terms.
Like most people I’m with Robert Heinlein when he wrote that “…by cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers…” but I also appreciate that beauty is diverse. The slate roofs of Parkside Terrace in Cullingworth or the half-mile of semi-detached homes that run up Village Way from St Edmund’s Catholic Church in Beckenham are beautiful parts of our built heritage as much as are those mansion blocks on Maida Vale or the Royal Crescent in Bath. And the beauty of a place is as much defined by the people of that place as it is by whether the architects’ profession think it a good aesthetic.
The Knight Foundation, a US charitable organisation that supports research on local communities, media and neighbourhood, did a report entitled “Soul of the Community” which asked individuals and community organisations about what made for a successful place. Over 43,000 responses later the researchers were able to observe that:
We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.
Yes, objective beauty matters but not as much as whether the people think it is beautiful. When people moved out of Glasgow’s decaying tenements into new gentle density in places like Easterhouse, it was exciting and change-making. It didn’t stay that way. Too often broken communities have the same attitude to beauty as the Vogons:
“They brought forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall aspiring trees of breathtaking slenderness and colour which the Vogons cut down and burnt the crab meat with; elegant gazelle-like creatures with silky coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them anyway.”
The argument that we should build more beautiful places is a good one but, sadly, it doesn’t allow us to escape from the reality of planning and housing in England – a system of permits that, at best, provides a slow and inefficient development process and more commonly simply prevents any development at all. If we want communities engaged, we need to start by telling them that their engagement is not a means to stop housing but a way of securing the fullest benefit for the place from much-needed development.
In Cullingworth I stood as the local councillor in front of one hundred or so residents crammed into the old village hall and told them that we couldn’t stop the new housing development so instead we were going to get the biggest benefit possible for the village from those new houses. Not everyone agreed (including the Parish Council) but the houses were built, and we have a great new village hall, café, and pre-school. I call that winning.
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