Where would you like to live? If you’ve just left home having grown up in the sticks, chances are you’ll opt for the alcohol-centric nightlife of Birmingham or Manchester. So that’ll be a high-rise urban shag-pad, please. If you’ve got a family and are now through the alcohol/shagging phase, you’ll go for somewhere further out with a garden. If you’re brave, you might even forsake the city altogether for a knock-through live/work cottage in the village of Broadband-on-Demand, where you can grow your own soft fruit and check your Blackberry.
These are the time-honoured categories of home: urban, suburban and rural. And yet, as far as I can see, none of them fits easily into the government’s masterplan for how we should live in the 21st century.
According to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, we should be moving towards an age not of towns or cities, but of “communities”. These will be big agglomerations of village-sized neighbourhoods, gooily connected and entirely sustainable, like a sort of half-cooked scrambled egg. Free range.
The hard fact is, though, there’s precious little to show for nearly 10 years of office, and in reality most new initiatives turn out as half-baked, scrambled housing. For two months I’ve been touring Britain to sample some of them.
A handful are wonderful, small-scale projects run by devoted housing associations; on a bigger scale, though, there is nothing much that points to how housing design might begin to respond to contemporary needs and desires, or the environmental demands of this century. Which is frustrating, given the huge amounts of cash being poured into government initiatives such as the Pathfinders scheme, dedicated to the “urban renewal and regeneration” of nine areas in the north of England. The last time I looked it had turned into a wholesale demolition programme of 200,000 existing houses (which doesn’t sound the least bit sustainable). So much so that the ODPM’s own select committee raised “serious concerns” about the scheme earlier this year. Mind you, whoever called it Pathfinder did so with a grim prescience. The last plan with that name was one that involved the wholesale demolition of German cities by the RAF in 1942.
Then there are the Millennium Villages. I’m looking forward to seeing the promised 6,000 new homes by 2010, but as yet there’s not much sign. Greenwich Millennium Village is half done, and to be fair there are some exciting flats there, but it has been criticised for not having half the critical mass of dwellings required to be truly sustainable. And then there’s the biggest initiative of all, to build 1.1m homes in the southeast by next week. Where are they supposed to go? And what are they going to look like? Not good, according to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe). In its survey this year of new housing, only 17% of homes qualified as “good”. The rest were poor or average and Richard Simmons, Cabe’s chief exec, described most new homes as “not very nice places to be”.
So, how are we going to stop the onward march of the crappy little noddy house? In the absence of any real examples of how we build suburban and rural housing, I’ve come up with my own brilliant scheme. First, abolish planning. Then completely scrap the green belt. And finally, offer every able-bodied man, woman and child in the country a free bicycle.
Like all my brilliant plans, it is not entirely my own and I have to thank Paul Finch, editor of Architectural Review, for the essential germ of it, offered during a car journey across London. His idea was radical and crystalline: let people build what they like, where they like. The only restriction would be that they would have to use an architect. This would be a Grand Design for everybody.
I think this is foolproof, with one or two refinements. First, about half of the sale cost of any new home in Britain is attributable to land cost, because building land is so scarce. We live in the second most densely populated country in Europe after Holland, and our planning system is entirely predicated on the principle of saying “no” (some local authorities still, outrageously, call their planning departments “development control”). So it’s hardly surprising that getting planning permission in Britain is as easy as getting a licence to print money or distil your own vodka.
So my solution is to make more land available, and to solve the crisis in farming at the same time, by scrapping the common agricultural policy and instead let farmers sell or lease their land for construction. This would allow them to grow houses on fields that could provide a one-off yield of, say, £30,000 an acre, way above agricultural rates but negligible to the construction industry, and in so doing relieve European governments of their heavy subsidy obligations. It’s got to be better than the EU’s new Single Payment Scheme, where farmers are going to be paid to do nothing to vast tracts of British countryside except gently caress it and watch the weeds grow.
Of course, this means a radical departure from current planning processes. For a start, planners would be employed to facilitate and engage with the architectural process. But then, in my Britain most planners would retrain as electricians or plumbers. The finest of them — and some of the best are employed on only £25,000 a year — would have their salaries doubled and their ranks swelled by enthusiastic amateurs. In other words, we should forget our local authority planning committees made up of unskilled local councillors and replace them with groups of local building historians, an architect or two and the odd building engineer — people who really know their subject and who care passionately.
And while we’re scrapping the planning system, we might as well junk the green belt. Why? Because it’s another outdated concept designed to trammel development and to preserve the distinction between “town” and “country” as enshrined in the 1949 Town and Country Planning Act, which still forms the basis of planning policy. The concept of the green belt as a green lung or an accessible amenity for a city is patronising given that so much green belt land is inaccessible, and that what many people want is a house with a bit of land, some chickens and local facilities.
There are, of course, obvious flaws to my plan. First, we'd all have to work from home, grow our own vegetables and compost our own poo to make it truly sustainable. And we’d need the bicycles. Then there’s my fear that it would all end up like rural Portugal: an Eden now trashed by a free-for-all housing spree, thanks to EU money.
But I think that with the right controls, an internet-driven economic revolution, and a bit of social engineering, we could get there. And although it doesn’t come anywhere near to meeting the government’s vision for housing’s future, it does seem to be what most people want. It’s just that it might take 50 years. What are the chances of getting there before the government? Let me know your views at kevin.mccloud@sunday-times.co.uk. The housing debate starts here.
Kevin McCloud presents the new series of Grand Designs on Channel 4 starting next month
