27 October 2017
Brave New World – Coming Soon?
The housing crisis: a bottom-up approach.
by J.R.Thomas
Mrs May has many things to worry about in her international agenda, and even more in the domestic realm. But one problem she will be pressed to address, one that has been bubbling away in every Prime Minister’s inbox for fifty years or more, is housing; the UK does not have enough of it, certainly not in the right places and at the right prices.
In the 1950’s Harold MacMillan made his reputation by promising and then delivering 300,000 new houses a year (and soon acquired the use of a very desirable central London terraced home in Downing Street as a reward). We manage to build less than half of that now, in spite of an ever-growing population and an ever greater number of households (more single residents, young people leaving home sooner, longer life spans). In spite of all the angst and worry – and the endless felling of trees for extra newsprint, and the generation of more electronic impulses for more virtual media so that columnists may pontificate ever more, and the commissioning of endless reports and enquiries – the reason for high land prices (which is what drives the high cost of housing) and the failure of either the public sector or the private to build more houses is not hard to find. It is that well known villain, the planning system. Whatever we all may want, the planning system is set up to prevent, or to at least slow down to a crawl, any change in our built environment. That is because we may all want more housing; but most of us don’t want it next to us. And Tory voters in particular do not want it next to them, and for years have influenced Conservative governments to allow local influence in planning so that building is subject to strong anti-development pressure. This creates that drag which keeps housing supply below demand, land prices high, and design focused on economic intensiveness and not amenity.
On Monday night this week, in the rather unlikely surroundings of the decaying classicism of St Leonards, Shoreditch, the distinguished architectural writer and critic Rowan Moore took a step back from architecture and planning battles, his usual subjects, to look at the philosophical underpinnings of how living space is provided in the twenty-first century. He was doing this under an equally unlikely aegis – The East End Preservation Society’s annual CR Ashbee Memorial Lecture. Ashbee was a social polemicist of the late nineteenth century especially interested in the state of the poor and in housing in the East End (he is now perhaps best remembered as the founder of Toynbee Hall). But Ashbee has more relevance than might be obvious at first sight to the housing debate of our times. He was an early exponent of what we might call “power to the people” – he wanted communities to take their futures into their own hands, believing that government was too distant and authoritarian to provide good basic decent housing, and the private sector too focused on profit to provide “homes”.
Moore looked at how that balance works today – and concludes that it doesn’t. The private sector is focused on providing units rather than homes, and is driven by the planning system into building more and more units of smaller and smaller dimensions. And government proposes and presses and fulminates but with precious little result other than voter dissatisfaction.
Moore looked in some detail at one of inner London’s current major redevelopment zones, Vauxhall, and Battersea Power Station. This was a traditional working class and industrial zone, with extensive river frontage. The collapse of inner London industry, the closure of the power station, and the lingering effects of World War Two bombing came together in the early years of this century to provide an opportunity to build a new inner city zone. An opportunity, yes; one missed, as it turned out. Vauxhall has several problems which in most world capitals would have been addressed in a comprehensive planning strategy – a lack of public open space, two major roads which suffer severe congestion, a lack of infrastructure for good living. But all that has been done is the building of a series of large tower blocks – getting higher and pricier as they get nearer those more desirable locations by the river, but most of them adjacent to fumey noisy main roads. There has been no attempt to create any harmony or sense of place, no planning for a community; as Moore said, a classic case of top-down planning by government and of budget-conscious provision by the private sector. Boris Johnson, when Mayor, in a worthy if minor attempt to improve London housing standards, decreed that all new residences were to have outside space – in a flat, a balcony. But on those busy main roads, balconies are not an amenity to be greatly appreciated – so the developers were allowed to glaze them in. Still pretty useless, unless the residents like to watch traffic in a glazed sauna. And a great example of failure to provide what residents might actually like – such as a park with greenery and benches and areas for play and smoking and picnics.
Ashbee said that provision of space should involve three parties (stakeholders you might say, in Blair English): government, which has to deal with the big things such as zoning and communications and safety and fundamental rules such as heights of buildings and room sizes; the private sector, which is usually the best equipped to do the building efficiently and quickly and at a sensible cost; and the community, which are those who are going to live in the new residences, or nearby, know what it is they want or don’t want, and will make the place work, or ensure it doesn’t.
Ironically, the Vauxhall lands sit tight against Bonnington Square. Bonnington Square was an area of intensive but attractive Victorian housing which by the end of the Second World War had become more or less inner-city slums, but largely escaped bombing. In the 1950’s and onwards there were various plans to clear the area for redevelopment but none succeeded and in the early 1980’s all the buildings were squatted. Then something extraordinary happened – instead of the usual battle with the owners (by now the Greater London Council) and despoliation by the squatters, both sides decided to work together and remake it as a London “village”. It has been a major success, the housing now in good repair and lived in by a settled community, the shops and cafes run by cooperatives or locals, the gardens and tiny park used for recreation and well maintained. That, said Moore, is how a new community could work; the sterile towering blocks next door never will succeed in the same way.
His lecture was a call for re-engagement of community in the planning system, of working with people who will live in the new housing to drive what they want, of moving to a bottom-up process instead of a top-down. That way, development becomes more acceptable to local people, and such problematic concepts as greater intensification and the sharing of public realm can be driven by those whom it most affects. Also, architecture might flow from the purpose of the buildings, might start to reflect the humanity of the housing it cloaks, and the architect’s role might not be the “lipstick” (as a questioner from the audience put it) applied to unacceptably high and bulky slab buildings.
It is a persuasive and engaging argument; but whether it can be made to have relevance to building new housing in a country which has not worked in that community tradition (very different to many northern European countries), and especially in a city such as London where the population has become so transient, is a big stretch. But perhaps a stretch Mrs May, anxious to support the marginalised and re-engage the disengaged, may wish to make.
Rowan Moore has a new book out on this subject: “Slow Burn City” published by PanMacmillan and available now.
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