As the recession deepens, and more firms of developers and contractors go into receivership or liquidation, this may not seem to be an appropriate time to discuss where thousands of new homes should be built in Britain.
Yet it was in the darkest days of the second world war that the post-war New Towns programme was conceived. First, Lord Reith’s vision as Minister of Works & Buildings saw the reports of two inquiries in 1942: Mr Justice Uthwatt’s on compensation and betterment, and Lord Justice Scott’s on the use of land in rural areas (complementing Sir Montague Barlow’s royal commission on the distribution of the industrial population, which reported in 1940).
The new Ministry of Town and Country Planning was created in 1943; and the Town and Country Planning Act 1944 enabled blitzed and blighted land to be compulsorily acquired for comprehensive redevelopment.
Lord Reith had also commissioned the County of London Plan by John Forshaw and Sir Patrick Abercrombie in 1943, followed by Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan in 1944. Finally, the New Towns Act of 1946 resulted in 28 new towns being built in the UK, with populations totalling more than 1m people.
Now, as the new towns programme comes to an end, with only two development corporations to be wound up — Telford in 1991 and Milton Keynes in 1992 — we have conflicting proposals for various new settlements or the expansion of existing communities that could result in homes for another 1m people being built over the next decade, without any attempt at a national plan.
Ostensibly, today’s planning is devolved to the local level, with the need for and the location of any new settlements regarded as a matter to be decided by county structure plans, and expansion of existing communities to be provided for in the local plans. In practice, however, conflicting proposals are resolved by public inquiries, and decisions by the Secretary of State may go against local preferences.
Peterborough Southern Township (a subsidiary of Hanson), with Shankland Cox as its planning consultants, made an application in December 1989 to Peterborough council and Huntingdonshire DC to build 5,200 homes, a shopping centre, business park, hotel and leisure facilities on the 3,600-acre site.
This £500m private-enterprise new township will be Peterborough’s fourth, the previous three — Bretton, Orton and Werrington — having been built by the development corporation.
The pressure on central and local government to recognise the need for new settlements has come from Consortium Developments Ltd, an association of 10 major housebuilders: Barratt, Beazer, Bovis, Ideal Homes, Laing, Lovell, McCarthy & Stone, Tarmac, Wilcon and Wimpey.
Set up in 1983 under the direction of Andrew Bennett, former land and planning officer at the House-Builders’ Federation, CDL has attracted much publicity for its planned communities, but so far has not enjoyed any success.
Its proposals for 5,100 homes at Tillingham Hall in Essex, 6,000 at Stone Bassett in Oxfordshire, 4,800 at Foxley Wood in Hampshire, and the 4,600 planned at Castor & Ailsworth in Cambridgeshire were all refused by the DOE.
Now CDL is pinning its hopes on its more modest proposal for 1,500 houses at Westmere. One of three proposed new settlements on the A10 north of Cambridge — the others are at Waterfenton (by Erostin) and at Denny (by a consortium of Galliford Sears, Hillsden and Twigden) — Westmere is the one preferred by the county council.
However, CDL is not competing for a new settlement along the A45 — six proposals are to the west of Cambridge and two to the east:
Allington (E) Rialto Homes
Belham Hill (W) Bryant Homes
Bourn Airfield (W) Beazer, Bovis, Ideal
Great Common Farm (W) Stanhope, University of Manchester
Hare Park (E) Charles Church
Highfields (W) Wates, Twigden, Yelcon and Galliford Sears
Scotland Park (W) Trinity and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge
Swansley Wood (W) Alfred McAlpine
The Cambridgeshire structure plan, approved by the DOE, provides for 63,000 new dwellings to be built in the period 1986-2001, of which the new settlement on the A45 will provide only 2,000 homes. So where will the rest be?
The main growth will be at Huntingdon (3,900 dwellings), St Neots (2,700), Ramsey (1,700), Ely (1,600), Wisbech (1,300), March (1,200), Papworth Everard (1,000) and Chatteris (900).
This is a total of 14,300 dwellings — not far short of the number which CDL proposed in three carefully planned communities — but most of these will be built piecemeal (except at Papworth Everard, where most of the village is owned by the Papworth Trust, which plans to have controlled expansion on 225 acres that will not harm the character of the village).
The trust’s team is led by Bidwells, with Landscape Design Associates as landscape architects and urban designers, Kemal Mehmed as town planners and development consultants, and Posford Duvivier as consulting engineers.
It was Bidwells who conceived the award-winning Martlesham Heath Village on a disused RAF airfield near Ipswich, where 1,200 houses, bungalows and flats have been built in a series of hamlets by Bradford Property Trust during the past 17 years. Designed by Feilden & Mawson, with the Culpin Partnership as planning consultants, Martlesham Heath is a complete community, with a village green, a shopping centre and 500,000 sq ft of industrial buildings, including the British Telecom Research Centre, with its landmark tower.
Conceived before the days of structure plans and local plans, it shows how unified ownership and a good professional team can result in something more than a large housing estate. Yet today, most expansion is in the form of new housing estates with few community facilities, and proposals for balanced communities are more likely to be dismissed out of hand because they do not conform with some preconceived plan.
That has been the fate of Upper Donnington, the classical village of 300 houses planned by landowner James Gladstone on 80 acres of the lowest-grade land on his 500-acre Donnington Grove estate just outside Newbury, Berkshire (which is now for sale through Dreweatt Neate).
Despite the fact that the design of Upper Donnington was considered by the DOE inspector to be “of exceptionally high quality,” the village was refused planning consent because the Secretary of State for the Environment “attaches great importance to maintaining the integrity of approved, up-to-date development plan policies and to local choice in the allocation of housing land”. In fact, the draft local plan was not approved until six weeks after the Secretary of State’s decision to reject the village.
Upper Donnington was designed by John Simpson & Partners, with Barton Willmore as planning consultants. John Simpson later emerged as the architect of Stoke Griffin, a classical village of 750 houses planned for the disused Desborough airfield on Commander Michael Saunders-Watson’s Rockingham Castle estate in Northamptonshire, where Strutt & Parker are the managing agents.
The proposals for Stoke Griffin have been struck as mortal a blow as Upper Donnington’s, for Kettering’s draft local plan, to be ratified by the council on December 19, has dismissed it and four other proposals in favour of a scheme for 700 houses at Cransley Lodge by Stock Land & Estates, a company of which the chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission, Lord St John of Fawsley, is a director. Local architects Michael & Philip Wilkinson are acting with Hancock Associates, the Boyer Design Group and consultant Tim Forecast.
Now Eagle Star has been told that Barton Willmore’s plans for a new market town of 5,000 homes on 840 acres around Micheldever Station on its 14,000-acre Sutton Scotney estate, are contrary to the approved Hampshire structure plan, under which 66,500 homes will be built in the period 1986-2001. How many of these will be as well planned as Eagle Star’s — or by Barton Willmore for CDL at Foxley Wood, 20 miles away?
While individual proposals such as those by CDL and major public and private landowners get bogged down in planning red tape, thousands of new houses have been and are being built all over Britain. At Bradley Stoke, near Bristol, for example, 8,500 homes are being built by 18 major housebuilders on 1,000 acres without any of the fuss — or discussion of aesthetics — that bedevils other schemes, simply because the site was designated in the structure plan.
