Reforming planning and embarking on a large-scale house building plan is one of the great challenges for the new government — but a blueprint is already out there for exactly what they need to do, says Country Life columnist Athena.
The question of how we will build the houses we need has loomed large in the recent election campaign and the promises the new government has made to build at scale will be very challenging to fulfil; the more so if it is to be done properly. That makes the launch last week of a guide by Rural England called Building Tomorrow’s Rural Communities: A Design Guide particularly timely.
Readers who anticipate a dense and technical piece of grey literature on the subject can relax; this is the very reverse. It’s a short, clear and practical introduction to rural planning, aimed primarily at local communities. The intention is that it will help them understand the processes, pitfalls and potentials of planning, as well as the ways in which they can articulate what they want from new housing.
There is a foreword by the patron of the charity, The Princess Royal, and illustrations by an architectural illustrator and writer familiar to readers of Country Life, Matthew Rice.
In a rural context, demographic changes over recent decades have tended to hollow out villages. Where that has happened, the trend has been one of the population growing older and wealthier as families and the young are driven out by high property prices. That, in turn, leads to the erosion of local services of all kinds, including education and care.
As a result, villages and their communities can be forced into a slow spiral of fossilisation and decline, driven — paradoxically — by prosperity.
“Building 10 of the right houses in the right places in each of the 8,000 rural parishes in England would add no pressure on services, and contribute immeasurably to the lives of the villages in question”
To complicate matters further, there is often a natural opposition from NIMBYs (‘Not in my back yard’) in such areas to the creation of affordable housing. That’s partly because there is a stigma attached to social housing; the expectation is that it will be poorly designed, shoddily built and in the wrong place. Scandalously, those expectations are not imagined, but informed by bitter experience.
The irony is that there would be huge advantages for everyone if this ingrained resistance to affordable housing might be overcome by — shockingly — planning properly and building well; in effect, designing houses in which people would be proud to live.
If it were possible, for example, for each of the 8,000 or so rural parishes in England to build 10 of the right houses in the right place, the benefits could be enormous. Such an expansion would neither change the face of these places, nor place an intolerable pressure on existing infrastructure. At the same time, moreover, it could contribute immeasurably to the lives of the villages in question, securing the future of pubs, shops and schools, and diversifying the communities they support.
It would also immediately add 80,000 houses to our building stock, a substantive contribution to the overall target. To discover how you might help get that done, Athena would suggest that Building Tomorrow’s Rural Communities is a good place to start.
