Colin Burden owns a beautiful, rambling, semi-detached villa in a suburb of Southampton. He wants more, however. Like many of us, he wants to live in a contemporary home that is efficient and sustainable and healthy. But he can’t find one because so few of them exist.
So Burden, 42, a landscape designer, applied for planning permission to build on the long strip of land behind his Victorian villa, in his own back garden. It is big enough to put a Tesco car park on it, and the back half of it is so distant from any of the surrounding buildings that when I saw it, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a hidden encampment of Polish builders champing at the drill bit.
Yet you can imagine the reaction of the locals. As soon as Burden’s application went in, three groups of neighbours immediately objected and formed a “community action forum”, employing lawyers and lobbying their local MP.
“Their objections were the usual ones,” concedes Burden. “There was a sense of people wanting to keep the character of an area unchanged.”
Which is quite understandable in an area of historic housing where the character and charm of the place can be under all kinds of threats, from overdevelopment to speed bumps to the noise pollution of people shouting down their mobile phones to their lawyers. But we’re talking here about a hidden house, a piece of sensitive architecture designed to sit quietly and unobtrusively in an unused bit of a plot.
In the end — and thanks to an enlightened planning authority — Burden obtained his permission. “The planning authority were very supportive from the outset,” he says. “They were looking for good examples they could then benchmark other applications against.” He plans to start work on his project later this year.
A happy ending? Yes, but with a twist. Once Burden was given permission, the same neighbours who objected then applied to build in their gardens, too, were granted their permissions and — to cap it all — sold their houses on to developers.
It is astonishing how quickly people adapt to circumstances and change their spots: from Nimby (Not in my Back Yard) to Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing at all Never Anywhere) to Gits (Gor Blimey I’ll Take Some) to Imam (I’ll Make a Mint). Across Britain, people are selling their homes to developers who pay over the odds to buy sites with gardens they can build on, in a process that has become known as “garden grabbing”. Any garden within a built-up area counts as a “brownfield” site because it’s classified as having “been residential”.
In most cases, the councils are enthusiastic: the government has stipulated that 60% of new housing should be on brownfield sites. “Garden grabbing” — or “town cramming” as it is also known — relieves the pressure on local authorities to use former industrial brownfield sites, which often come with a host of unpleasant problems such as chemical contamination. It is good for the government, too, which can be seen to be meeting its own target.
The developers are also keen. By building on small-scale plots, they can maximise their profits by avoiding the requirement imposed on larger schemes to provide a certain proportion of “affordable” homes. With a garden- grab project, the street’s already in and so are water, power, sewerage and every-thing else you need.
In south Buckinghamshire, for instance, which includes Gerrards Cross and Beaconsfield, in 2004, 100% of new homes were built on the site of existing houses. Some, of course, will have been cleared or demolished to provide the land. In Camberley, Surrey, the rate is 90%. Nor is the practice confined to the heavily built-up areas of the southeast. Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South, says he has spotted developers flying in helicopters over his constituency on the lookout for suitable sites.
Nobody knows exactly how many new homes are being constructed in people’s gardens, but the Conservatives recently put the figure at 22,000 a year. The Department for Communities and Local Government has admitted just under a quarter of the 72% of new homes built on brownfield sites were on “previously residential land”.
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, is a good example. Government statistics show 47% of new housing is on existing residential sites, but when Greg Clark, the local Conservative MP, investigated, he found the actual percentage of new housing on garden plots closer to 70%.
In February, Clark tabled a 10-minute rule bill in parliament “to remove gardens from the definition of previously developed land and thereby return decisions over proposed garden land developments to the discretion of local planning authorities”. Overturned on first reading, his bill is due for a second reading in October.
“You only have to look around,” Clark says. “You can see hoardings on residential streets and buildings being put up on residential sites that you would never have seen five years ago.”
Being an opposition bill, it is unlikely to pass — which is a disaster when it comes to halting all those crass, small-scale blocks of flats thrown up by developers, but brilliant news for people such as Burden.
And for Bill Bradley, who is building a pair of extraordinary houses in Peckham, southeast London, on true brownfield: a landlocked plot that was home to his own carpentry workshops. He doesn’t have Nimbys, he’s got Bimbys (Build in my Back Yard), and miraculously steered a trouble-free course through planning.
“There was a resistance to it when we first went out to planning,” says Bradley. “We had party-wall agreements and 30 neighbours. But all that boiled down to people not understanding what we wanted to do.” Which was a pair of elegant timber boxes, each with internal courtyards.
Hampson Williams, Bradley’s architects, had the challenge of making the design work for both the new and the existing residents. “The key thing is how you deal with overlooking,” says Martin Williams, his architect. “It’s not possible to design a conventional house given the constraints of garden sites, but we should be doing more of this using small pockets of hidden land.”
It is good news, too, for Neil Hemingway and Jonathan Wood, who applied to Kirklees council in 2003 for planning permission to build a state-of-the-art concrete and steel four-bedroom detached house in a triangular pocket of land at the bottom of a friend’s garden in Huddersfield.
They succeeded, but only after a bizarre 11th-hour objection from the planning department — which objected to their decision to paint the house white, even though the couple argued there were 43 other white-painted houses within a third-of-a-mile radius of their new home.
It was all the more galling for Hemingway because he had told the planners early on of his choice of colour — but the letter went astray, apparently within the department. The couple also faced complaints from a neighbour who claimed their house was positioned higher than indicated by the original drawings.
“We argued every point and won hands down,” says Hemingway. “But the whole process took nearly a year and cost me £12,500 in legal bills.
“The infuriating thing is that none of it was my fault. If the planning committee had bothered to check what we were doing, they would have seen this for themselves, and I wouldn’t have had to go to appeal. The whole thing was a nightmare.”
Now I know there’s an issue in all these cases of “urban green space”. I know residents’ associations are jumping up and down at the idea of losing precious wildlife habitat and amenity across our sweet and tranquil suburbs. But have you seen how much land gets wasted in suburbia? I’ve conducted several unscientific experiments from helicopters and, recently, a telescopic lift on the back of a lorry, and I can tell you most English gardens are not wildlife havens but domestic scrapheaps.
Buddleia is not an endangered plant, and I would sooner look at one astonishing piece of architecture out of my back window than I ever would at a rat-infested, sad patch of scrubland. So I’m all for some exemplary infill — that improves not just the value of the land it sits on, but has the potential to redeem a site and bring a whole area up with it. It’s what Urban Splash does with run-down inner city areas, and it’s what we need to start doing to some of our crummier suburbs.
So it is important we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water and restrict the growth of exciting, proper architecture in residential areas. In fact, despite Clark’s bill, there is already a host of policies and planning guidance documents in place to help us do just that.
As Williams says, the key issues with local residents are those of privacy and overlooking. But government guidance points to four other important issues that should be taken into account: proximity to infrastructure and public transport (so just how near is the nearest bus stop?); safety (will a development threaten safety or promote it?); amenity (does the proposed building improve the quality of the area or diminish it?); and parking.
These are benchmarks against which you can judge any proposed scheme and evaluate your own ideas. In the hands of a strong planning authority, they should even be enough to kill off crass garden grabbing.
I’d add another criterion, though. I’d ask whether a proposed scheme is beautiful. Whether it’s contemporary architecture that is sensitively designed in response to its site. I’d ask if the ideas are brilliant. Infilling existing housing schemes is tricky and involves a lot of delicate design “stitching”, as well as a lot of social smoothing. I’d insist on excellence, because in our built environment we should only ever accept the very best that we can get.
Additional reporting: Heather Dixon
How to be a Bimby
