This is what Milton Keynes will look like if we have our way (Photo by Hollie Latham/PhotoPlus Magazine/Future via Getty Images)
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Yesterday saw the publication of Living with Beauty, the final report of the Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. Readers of UnHerd will doubtless remember the eventful story of this Commission, from the initial controversy over Sir Roger Scruton’s appointment, through his dismissal and reappointment last summer, to his illness and death earlier this month.
I cannot exactly claim impartiality about these events — Scruton was my friend and mentor for many years, and I was his (and later Nicholas Boys Smith’s) research assistant on the Commission. But rather than retelling this story, I want to develop the case for one of the Commission’s proposals, one to which Scruton attached particular importance as a potential solution to our housing crisis.
Throughout his career, Scruton had been a champion of what is often called “traditional urbanism”, the urban form of the old cities of the world. Traditional urbanism is immediately recognisable, and contrasts sharply with the high-rise and suburbia of the twentieth century. It consists of terraced streets of about five storeys, made up either of tall, narrow houses, or of shops below and apartments above.
The most familiar British illustration of this is the Georgian or early Victorian terrace, but we find the same basic urban form recurring across an immense variety of climates, landscapes and architectural styles, from Lisbon to Istanbul, Aleppo to Stockholm. Cities built this way are now beloved by residents and visitors alike. And a wealth of empirical evidence shows that there is no way of building that makes us healthier and happier.
At least in its European variants, traditional urbanism was normally created by fairly simple planning systems. Property owners were allowed to build up to a height of five or six storeys, provided they respected codes governing the appearance and safety of the building The fact that people had to walk everywhere constrained the outward spread of cities, so when the population grew, it became economical to build up to those heights.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of mechanised transport removed this constraint on building outwards, and cities spread out massively. The transition was effectively complete by the 1930s: the Georgian five-storey terrace had given way to the two-storey semi, which has remained the norm for private housebuilding ever since.
There are many downsides to this kind of development, such as the car-dependency and the sense of placelessness it engenders. But while space is abundant, it has one great argument in its favour: it allows everyone to have a spacious house and garden, which is genuinely popular.
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SubscribePattern Book Planning in the hands of Freeholders is most sensible, though the advocates of meddling with other people’s property will squeal this is “undemocratic”.
Urban Taskforce 1999
Intent:
Super-densification
Preventing suburban “sprawl”
Results:
Land price inflation and the unaffordable housing market
A “Housing Crisis” with calls for more planning intervention
Financial Crisis after mortgage speculation
Bank Bailout by the State as “Too Big to Fail”
Housing Association financialisaton to buy up Stock
Housebuilder subsidy schemes to support Sales
Rhetoric about “Garden Cities”
Estate clearances through “City Villages” 2015
https://www.ippr.org/public…
Suburban Taskforce 2020
Intent:
Urbanising existing suburbs
Preventing suburban “sprawl”
Results…
https://suburban-taskforce….
https://suburban-taskforce….
I think this is a wonderful idea and would bring back some architectural culture to England because far too many architects are trying to “make it big” by being just like every other architect out there by creating boxes with no personality that no one wants to live in. Beauty needs to be at the forefront of architecture and that has unfortunately been replaced with utilitarianism. Also, arches. Bring back arches!