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Welcome to Superbia
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Publishing date: 25.10.2006 |
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Who needs the green belt anyway? Britain is so squashed that pressure is mounting to reform the planning laws. The Sunday Times, October 1, 2006
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Behind the floral curtains of suburbia, radicals are plotting a revolution. In a late Victorian villa in Surbiton, Surrey — better known for Tom and Barbara in The Good Life than political extremists — the talk at a conference a week or so ago was of insurrection, class war and concreting over more of Britain’s green and pleasant land.
Experts from KingstonUniversity’s Centre for Suburban Studies were dreaming of dotting the countryside with houses, creating sprawling megacities and ushering in an era of cheap homes for all.
“We will have a city 100 miles in diameter taking in Cambridge and Windsor and Brighton,” declared James Heartfield, author of Let’s Build!, a book launched at the conference that advocates ending the division between town and country and the building of 5m homes in the next decade.
Other speakers espoused the radicals’ manifesto: “Projected household production is grossly inadequate . . . we call on government to abolish the artificial distinction between town and country . . . only by master-planning southern England can we develop the green belt . . . providing high quality, affordable housing for all.”
It is the sound of a new suburban militancy, marching in the name of hardworking families squeezed into ever smaller and more expensive rabbit hutches. The radicals are calling for nothing less than the repeal of planning laws. Their aim, as they see it, is to break the state’s 60-year stranglehold on urban development.
Instead of building in designated urban areas, eating up school playing fields and gardens, they want Britain to spread out across meadow and vale with spacious new houses and rolling gardens. They even want to build housing estates in national parks. The result, they say, will be so good it will be called “Superbia”.
“Less than 10% of this country is built on, yet 89% of us live in densely packed towns and cities where the pressures and prices are becoming intolerable,” says Heartfield. “Who exactly is all that countryside being saved for?”
He is not alone. Right-leaning think tanks including the Adam Smith Institute and the Policy Exchange have criticised the planning system; the latter has likened the government’s power to deny anybody a new home set in suburban sprawl to a right “to dictate what clothes to wear . . . and what cars to drive”.
Nick Hubble, head of the Centre for Suburban Studies, has come to a similar conclusion that policy must be changed. “It is almost a Stalinist act to say you must live this way and not that way,” he says. “A combination of immigration and families wanting to move into more spacious surroundings will create such pressure that greenfield sites have to be developed. It would be better to plan that now.”
This is heresy in the eyes of urban design gods, such as the architect Lord Rogers, and environmental bodies like the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). They fear that once suburban sprawl is unleashed there will be no stopping it. Cities will decline and countryside disappear. The right-wing sprawlers accuse such opponents of “hypocrisy”, “elitism” and “social engineering”.
To Robert Bruegmann, an American professor of urban planning and author of Sprawl: a Compact History, the rise of suburbia has been a war between the haves and have-nots. Aristocrats and other elites have always contained the masses and their houses, he claims.
“Ensconced in their great country estates, suburban villas and spacious London flats, the aristocrats and the intellectuals fulminated against the way ordinary citizens were obliterating age-old distinctions between city and country . . . levelling long-standing class distinctions,” he writes in a foreword to Heartfield’s book.
“The tradition of fulminating aristocrats and the literati has been carried on in contemporary Britain by individuals like the architect Lord Rogers of Riverside.
“The entire system is designed to protect the kind of urban neighbourhoods in which [the advocates of the current planning system] live, and the country houses where they vacation, while the problems fall most heavily on other parts of the population.”
Suburbia took root between the world wars. It was “very lax planning, low interest rates and a burgeoning middle class” that triggered the boom, says Tristram Hunt, the historian. “In place of the dense cities of the Victorian era, a mangled, sprawling suburbia sprouted. Funded first of all by the government’s ‘homes for heroes’ campaign and then private developers buoyed up by strong housing demand, the interwar period saw 4m houses go up.”
The sprawl prompted the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act to control development. Soon afterwards the government set up national parks. In 1955 the Tories introduced the green belts ringing towns and preserving farmland.
“The planning system became rigorous and introduced a real belief the urban and rural should have separate spheres,” says Hunt. “A lot of the Labour ministers were keen ramblers and nature lovers, and the Tories continued the conservation in 1955 with the introduction of green belts.
“This was the British settlement — green belts and codified planning would save the countryside.”
The result has been that green belts have ringed towns and farmland has been preserved, but house building has slowed so much that 2001 saw the fewest completed homes since 1946. In 1966 Britain built 400,000 homes. This year we are projected to build less than half that. Yet government figures show 500,000 people live in overcrowded homes and 95,000 households are in temporary accommodation. And the population is rising: according to one forecast another 6.5m people will be living in Britain by 2030.
Sharron Rosling, 29, a post office clerk in Bakewell in the Peak District national park, knows the problems only too well. Along with her husband Tom and two young children she was forced to wait 5½ years for a shared ownership house that had the space they needed. “There are too many young families here that just haven’t got a nest because there is nothing to build on. Even if that means building on some parts of Peak park, they have to free up some land,” says Rosling.
Even farmers, for a long time considered the natural guardians of England’s green and pleasant land, are getting agitated. “We have suffered a double whammy from the planning system,” says Michael Duckett, 46, whose family operates a nursery and a fishery on his father’s old farm in Wedmore, Somerset.
“Twenty years ago we diversified into the nursery business and we also set up a fishery which has been booming. So we decided to go for growth and applied for 12 lakeside chalets so our customers could stay overnight. The planners said no. My brother applied for permission for an agricultural worker’s cottage so he could stay near the nursery and that was turned down, too. It’s all wrong. Country people are trying to keep employment in the countryside and the planners are not allowing it.”
The Surbiton revolutionaries blame a continuing elitist conspiracy. Heartfield is particularly damning of Rogers, whose urban taskforce advocated revitalising inner cities rather than urban sprawl.
“He is a hypocrite,” says Heartfield. “He doesn’t live in high-density conditions himself. He lives in two big Georgian houses in Chelsea that have been knocked through. I’ve no problem with him living in a big house, but why can’t we all live in big houses?”
Opponents of sprawl argue that they are simply out to protect fragile environments that, once gone, would be lost for ever. “We are about good old-fashioned defence of the environment and saving the planet,” says Nick Schoon, a spokesman for the CPRE. “If we could all live in compact cities, close to our work where there is local greenery, parks and gardens and where public transport is more viable, that uses far fewer fossil fuels and is very good for the environment.”
Rogers argues that suburban sprawl would threaten the lifeblood of cities. “Urban centres that have been hit by rioting in recent years are places that have suffered from a significant exodus of the middle classes,” he said in an essay published at the Venice Architecture Biennale last month.
Nor are the bald statistics touted by some of the Surbiton revolutionaries as simple as they might seem. Heartfield and others argue that less than 10% of land in England is urbanised and that Britain is less densely developed than Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands.
This is not the whole story, say opponents. The average population density of the UK is 246 people per square kilometre; but in a swathe running from Dover to Windsor it is up to 500 people per square kilometre. In parts of a band from the Medway towns of Kent to Bracknell, Berkshire, it is 2,500.
Can the competing demands of people and the environment be reconciled? The number of homes being built has risen from its 2001 low and the government has designated areas for large-scale development. More land has become available: about 1.4m hectares of farmland have been retired from agricultural use since 1960.
However, there are still big battles looming. “We can’t just go on eating the countryside up,” says Hunt. “Transport and housing are the biggest carbon dioxide emitters, so to take the libertarian argument that green belt is an imposition on freedom will have major environmental consequences.”
In suburbia the sprawlers are quietly confident that they are about to take the upper hand. “There’s unlikely to be a hands-down victory,” says Heartfield. “But I know the balance will have shifted in our favour. The truth is the whole system is creaking and one way or the other something has got to give.”
See also here excerpts from Lord Roger's Urban Task Force report (f.b.)
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