Drop the architectural hippy dreams - people want homes with a garden

Yes this is our garden

Earlier this year, in the teeth of the pandemic, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors polled its members – pretty much all of the UK’s real estate agents – on likely trends post-coronavirus:

More than four-fifths (81%) of those surveyed across the UK believe there will be an increased desire for properties with gardens or balconies.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) predict an increase in demand for homes near green spaces, such as parks, and just over two-thirds (68%) think properties with more private space and fewer communal areas will be more desirable.

At the other end of the spectrum, 78% think there will be a fall in the appeal of tower blocks and 58% believe properties in urban areas which are very built up will be less appealing.

A clear finding and one that conversations with estate agents will confirm – well-priced, semi-detached properties with gardens are selling like hot cakes. In London a new term, “upsizing” has arrived as buyers look to buy bigger properties even if that means a less exclusive (more suburban) location. It’s obvious to almost anyone thinking about the fall-out from Covid-19 that, for real estate, the pressure will be on delivering more space. Working from home doesn’t just mean having a home office, it also means more time with family around, and this places a premium on that space.

We know that, even before the pandemic, people’s housing preference was for homes with gardens (not everybody, of course, but the majority – over 80% in that New Zealand survey). It should, therefore, come as no surprise to find that the whizzo architects given prizes to “…make the next generation of housing estates greener, healthier, better for elderly people and quicker to build…” have decided that gardens are a terrible idea:

Patrick Usborne, the director of Perpendicular, which oversaw another winning entry using wood panels made from British-only timber, said: “There’s an English perception that owning your castle needs its own land. But if we are to improve community cohesion we need to remove the ubiquitous rear garden and bring together external spaces for the community.”

The proposals contain all sorts of wonderful, gimmicky ideas for shared space that simply don’t reflect the reality of sharing, even in comfortable suburbia. I remember my Russian teacher describing the reality of her ‘sharing’ upbringing with personal things chained to walls and fences to prevent others simply walking off with them. The experience of the communal spaces on 1960s and 1970s council estates wasn’t great – a mixture of ‘No Ball Games’ signs and the appropriation of space by intimidating groups. And, for every communal space that works well (as residents in Spanish complexes will tell you) there’s another one plagued by dispute, debt, and poor upkeep.

The desire to reimagine the suburban, mass-produced home isn’t anything new – I saw a presentation on this by Red or Dead designer, Wayne Hemingway (in a fancy place on the front at Cannes, obviously) nearly 20 years ago. Those three- and four-bedroom detached homes squeezed onto small plots – for American readers, where you get four homes to an acre, we get at least 15 and often 20 – remain the core housing product because they are popular. Only rich people buy architectural gimmick, the rest of folk buy the right amount of space – and this includes a garden.

Usually that garden is a square patch of grass and paving – big enough to sit out in when the sun shines, to fire up the barbecue, to put in a paddling pool or trampoline for the kids, and maybe a fancy shed. For some this becomes a pride and joy planted with flowers and shrubs while, for others, it’s just an outside room, somewhere to thrash about in with more abandon that you’d tolerate in the living room.

The communal spaces proposed by the latest batch of anti-suburb architects will not meet these needs. Regardless of how laissez-faire the initial thinking seems, any communal space will come with a set of rules (remember those ‘No Ball Games’ signs) varying from the times you can use them – the prize-winning architect with a proposal for a bookable garden is having a laugh – through to the activities permissible while you’re using them. If the shared spaced is co-owned, there’s a company to manage, agents to appoint, maintenance contracts to issue and rents or charges to collect.

I’m all in favour of places being greener, healthier, and better for older people but this can be achieved without getting rid of private outside space, with dumping the garden. But there’s little hope from these architects – here’s Chris Brown from Igloo:

“After Covid-19, people will want their towns and cities back, to make beautiful places where home schooling and working from home is designed in – not an afterthought – and where the climate, nature and community are prioritised over profit.”

I know hippies make up a big chunk of the boomer generation but somehow, I doubt we’ll want to live in some rich person’s make-believe little commune even one designed by super-cool architects. And, you know, rich fund managers like Chris Brown won’t be living there either. Nor will anyone be building anything if there's no profit to be made (as I'm sure Aviva, who fund Igloo will explain if Chris needs help).

Homes need outside space – a balcony, a terrace, a veranda, a garden. Shared space is great, but it does not substitute for private space. This latest little indulgence of trendy urban design will, like all those before it, fall before the good sense of developers who will want to impress their potential buyers a long time before they’ll bother with ethical investors and architects with silly, unrealistic ideas about communal living.

.....

We've forgotten, in our rush to densify, that homes need gardens

The urge to make cities more population dense has led to us building homes without gardens - or indeed without any private outdoor space. This process, driven by policy and the transience of housing markets dominated by rented property, denies people's expressed preferences - here's a survey from New Zealand:

Among the respondents, nearly one-half (49 percent) considered a back yard “essential,” while another 42 percent rated the back yard as “nice to have.” Only nine percent considered a back yard to be “not important.” Among first home buyers, there was an even greater larger 55 percent considered a back yard as “essential.”

If we consider our own lives, then we'll quickly appreciate just how important "private outdoor space" - garden, yard, large balcony, veranda - is to people. Even in places that have poor weather, this private outdoors provides a vital space. The garden is less formal than indoors with fewer rules - it's a fun space too the part of our world given over to play, to letting out hair down, to leaning back in a chair and watching the world pass us by.

So, if we're to have more dense cities (because the NIMBYs in the outer suburbs won't let us have new land for housing, even tatty and underused land) then we've to work out how we design private outdoor spaces into the development. Communal gardens are great but they come with the community's rules. The garden out back of your house doesn't have these rules any more than does your living room or your garage.

Even in our screen age (perhaps more so) the ability to get outside is vital and having a small piece of outside that it ours provides an escape from the cabin fever of sharing lives with family and friends, with a space to chill or party or cheer, with somewhere that keeps our connection to soil and place. The public park with its playgrounds and planting is brilliant but when it's lunchtime we can't just walk away from the toys and go indoors, we can't leave the make-believe bus made from packing cases there for us to return to later. Our own outdoors let's us do these things - from putting off cleaning the barbecue all the way through to cutting out toenails or picking our nose.

Now travel to out cities and towns where planning rules make denser development inevitable. Look at the brand new blocks of flats and ask whether they provide that essential outdoor space? I sit at Leeds station sometimes and look around at all the fancy flats built with a fine view of the locomotives. If they've got a balcony it's just about big enough to put out one chair (or more commonly a bike and a few boxes of stuff) - you couldn't have friends round for a sunny meal or a glass of wine, using the terrace would be a solo act.

I'm not picking on Leeds here, London's world of high rise living is still more devoid of outdoor space and all the worse for it. Everywhere you go flats - apartments if you're feeling grand - are built with at best a minimal nod to the need for private outdoors and, more usually, little or none of this space. Yet it's perfectly possible to build high an densely and have gardens - here's the most extreme example, Milan's 'bosco verticale':



....

Imagining the city as a garden (without cars)

Most of us will have paid a visit to one of England's stately homes and wandered round the gardens. Many of these gardens are designed as a set of distinct spaces - 'rooms' - each with a different sort of planting. This allows for (given enough space) everything from formal box hedge gardens though ponds and cottage gardens to the walled kitchen garden or the long vista of a herbaceous border. As you move round these gardens you'll see that each 'room' is designed to give the visitor a tantalising glimpse of the 'room' beyond.



We need to begin thinking of our urban spaces in the same way. Not just to see these spaces as places of leisure and pleasure rather than work and commerce but to play the game of tempting the visitor from space to space using the same design ideas as the gardeners who laid out the attractions of our stately homes. Urban designers have already grasped the importance of water - fountains, pools, river banks - but the idea that city spaces should be intimate but linked is too often drowned in what are seen as essential, pragmatic things like bus access, traffic controls and the panoply of instructions beloved of the urban manager.

Part (but not all) of the problem is the car. We live in a world where people want to drop their child off right next to his school desk, where the prospect of walking 400 yards says "we won't park there", and where swooshing dual carriageways bang in the centre of town are seen as essential features of the civilised city. Now I understand the psychology of all this - we're lazy animals - but I don't see why we should make so much else less pleasant just to indulge this laziness. Especially when that laziness, combined with the mobile phone, is killing the traditional role of the town centre.

Kracow, probably more by luck than judgement, has most of the old city pedestrianised and surrounded by a circular park marking the route of the old walls. Visit Lucca (with walls designed by Leonardo da Vinci that form a strolling park around the city) and, although there's some cars, the bulk of the city is pedestrianised and blessedly free from the need to give over huge spaces to buses. Why do so many cities - like Bradford - persist in the myth that you can't get traffic out from the centre because then people won't visit. If you move the bus stops to the purpose built bus station, all of a sudden folk will stop coming because they've to walk that extra 400 yards?

If you get rid of the roads in a place like Bradford, you create the chance to start thinking of our city as a garden, as a set of rooms each offering a different experience - some formal, some laid back, some for kids, some for the old or cool, all for everyone. Right now - just as with so many other places - the visitor is put off by huge roads filled with buses, taxis, delivery vans and cars all that have to be negotiated. Let's stop all this and make our city and town centres places where people can dwell a little, stroll, meander, smile and relax; a urban version of the gardens at those stately homes.

.....

Gardens on buses...a cracking (if pointless) idea

****

Over at pop-up city they've found buses with gardens on the roof. I love this!

Mad - to see more visit the Pop-up City!

...

The bitter herb in the garden...

There they hang. A remembrance of Kent's heritage, symbolic of beer's favouring. Each flower now dry, delicate, poised almost on the cusp of dust. Just decoration maybe but a decoration redolent with those things now lost and forgotten.

Here on the island few hops are now grown but the memory of them remains - the sunny summers when East End families decamped to the Downs to harvest the female hops ready for their marriage to John Barleycorn. The oast houses - now fine homes for wealthy stockbrokers and successful businessmen - still exist making, with the rolling down and salt marsh, the uniqueness of Kent.

Today Kent feels less like a garden, the fast motorways, the high speed rail make it more an adjunct to London - the Patio of England rather than her garden. A nice patio for sure with block paving, elegantly planted pots and carefully trimmed trees but no longer an orto, no longer a place that feeds the cities.

That growing is still there if you look - at the right time of your there'll be a dozen or more apple varieties for sale in Brambledown Farm Shop plus local cherries, pears and even apricots. And people work hard to preserve the bits of garden that remain - to protect the rare varieties, to beat at the doors of the shopkeepers in the cities reminding them how these fruits are the best.

Things changes, some are lost but the spirit remains in those hops hanging from the pub beams, in the local cider and in the damson hedgerows. Kent may be an ordered, tidy, over-fussed garden but garden it is - the Garden of England.

...

I think they're called gardens?

****

You have to giggle when greens and planners come together:

Green party-controlled Brighton & Hove Council has published draft guidance to encourage developers to include food growing areas in new building schemes.

Clearly important to our green pals is this growing:

"We already have strategies in place aimed at encouraging food growing and releasing more space for people to use.  So it makes sense to see how every new development can contribute to these goals."

I think they're called gardens!

....

Why we garden..

I mean - look at my rhodies! Aren't they brilliant. And all I did was stick them in the ground and make sure they don't get choked by brambles, nettles and ivy!

Wonderful stuff and so easy!

....

The Gardener....

For many years Kathryn and I have been visiting fine gardens up and down the land - a pastime we share with millions of others. And with those others we admire the lovingly created beds, the fine trees, the creativity of the landscaping and the manner in which old and new are blended into that wonderful English thing - a great garden.

But until we visited Hampton Court (the one in Herefordshire) this Summer, we had speculated on whether the gardening was done, not by human hand, but through the agency of fairies, elves and gnomes. In all our visits we struggled to recall ever seeing any gardener actually gardening. There were always employees around - selling teas, manning tills, marshalling car parking, providing information and flogging plants - but nobody digging, hoeing, planting or mowing. No obvious sign of the activities that those of us with more modest gardens know take time and effort.

It may be that Hampton Court is unique - perhaps not yet admitted to the secrets of supernatural gardening - but for the first time (as the picture above testifies) we witnessed a person actually doing some gardening.

Unless of course he's really one of The Gentry and the human form is but an illusion?

....

A little on the glory of the garden....

****

After a day hacking. chopping, digging, mowing and trimming I feel rather better than I did yesterday. For sure most of my body feels like someone's been over it with a meat tenderiser but the garden now looks cared for - able to grow a little, to bud and to flower.

And the garden needs this care. After a week of so of letting it rip and few judicious cuts, a little reality for the burgeoning green stuff and termination for the weeds that get in the way of the garden's glory.

Nature does the good stuff - what I do is make it possible for that to happen.

.....

The Friday Fungus: Fairy Rings

One of the most well known edible mushrooms – and one of the less popular – is Marasmius Oreades the fairy ring mushroom. Some of you may recall a lawn lover regaling you with the terrible trauma of removing the fairy ring from the otherwise pristine lawn (rather than leaving the ring there and eating the lovely little mushrooms every spring).

Elsewhere in Europe the rings or arcs made by this mushroom are the result of witches dancing, the depredations of dragons or the evil work of sorcerers. But in England, the rings were where the fairies and elves came to dance – and with this came risk. Falling asleep within a fairy ring was asking for trouble and for some even stepping inside the ring could result in dire consequences – blindness, miscarriage, disease and even death awaits the foolish.

By far the worst punishment – be warned you lovers of lawns – fell on those who ploughed up or dug up the ring. The wrath and vengeance of the fair folk would be visited on the miscreant and upon his descendants. Madness, loss, despair and other evil consequences befell such ploughmen. Of course, left well alone and allowed to flourish brought the boon of the fairies on the house and those living there with crops growing better, animals thriving and good fortune being a close companion of those good folk who tolerated the fairies.

Like all fresh mushrooms, fairy ring mushrooms are best not overcooked and, because these are springtime mushrooms, they work very well with a salad. But be warned – there are other slightly poisonous mushrooms that grow in rings so be careful. A good description and guide to identification is here on Atomic Shrimp. The Clitocybe dealbata mushrooms (which are very poisonous) grow in a similar ring but are different shapes having a more concave cap.

Nothing to do in Bradford City Centre? Think again!

Had an e-mail from a local resident who asked (amid some comments about the Odeon and Park at the Heart): "Why would anyone come into the city centre?"

This picture provides the answer - because of what's on! This is Garden Magic, a celebration of gardens and summer featuring this awesome sand sculpture of Charles Darwin! Reason enough to go into the City Centre. And this follows earlier successful events such as the Bradford Classic. And later in the year there will be a Christmas market and other activities to mark assorted festivals and the annual yuletide consumption fest!