Suburban revival

Seven years ago NLA organised a competition for New Ideas for Housing. There was a category on suburban densification with ideas about how sprawling suburbia might be encouraged to accommodate more people.

In the intervening period, we have seen a continued shift of tall building development towards outer London with 88 tall buildings in zones 3-4 and 41 in zone 5. These proposals have been met with considerable resistance from local boroughs and residents alike. In Ealing, his support of tall buildings, as well as LTNs, lost Julian Bell his Leader’s role on the local council. Planning inspector Paul Jackson upheld Barnet’s refusal of a Taylor Wimpey scheme in North Finchley where the maximum height was just 9 storeys on grounds of height and local character. At the same time, developers argue that to deliver the Mayor’s requirements on affordable housing they need to include a proportion of taller blocks.

One of the recent shifts in policy on densification is the idea of Street Votes. Proposed only last year in a Policy Exchange paper entitled Strong Suburbs written by Samuel Hughes and Ben Southwood the idea was absorbed into government thinking in record time. The paper put forward the idea of allowing residents on a street to bring forward proposals to extend or redevelop their properties was included in Michael Gove’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, currently at Committee stage. Proposals would be put to a referendum of residents on the street.

Hughes and Southwood suggest that a street of suburban bungalows, for example, could agree on the right to create Georgian-style terraces. Such an adopted ‘street plan’ should increase the value of residents’ homes, giving them strong reasons to agree to it.
These proposals, they said, would foster gentle intensification within half a mile of existing transport and town centres, creating better and greener places with more customers to support struggling local high streets. “More people will be able to live in neighbourhoods that pass the ‘pint of milk test’, living within walking distance of somewhere they can buy a pint of milk, along with other essential social infrastructure.”

Their modelling showed that Street Votes could create a further 110,000 homes each year for the next 15 years above current estimates, all with the consent of the existing residents, and none requiring any greenfield or greenbelt land. The average participating homeowner would make £900,000, while the local authority would get an average of £79,000 for every new property delivered. This would mean an extra £34bn spent on construction each year.

There would be strict rules to minimise impact on neighbouring streets: rules stopping ‘garden grabbing’, rules on height, and rules restricting how much on-street parking new residents could use.

We await to see how the Bill will fare under a new government.
The ideas set out in the Policy Exchange report won the approval of Andrew Beharrell of PTE architects who proposed one of the key schemes in the NLA New Ideas competition: “The suburbs need smart new ideas to help them to modernise and urbanise while retaining or restoring the qualities of greenery and domesticity which made them attractive in the first place. The inevitable shift in travel patterns and car ownership offer a great opportunity to make this happen.”

Beharrell waxed lyrical about semi-detached suburbs at a recent London Society lecture. He talked about how PTEA had recently carried out a detailed study for a south London borough applying the spatial ideas behind semi-permissive to incremental intensification and upgrading of their own stock of inter-war suburban housing. As inner London runs out of development land and politicians of all flavours lack the courage for serious review of the Green Belt, the obligation to deliver new housing in volume falls on the outer boroughs. While the logic of concentrating higher density development on well-connected town centres is hard to fault, the reality is a world of housing units and dormitories – “will they mature into homes and neighbourhoods?” Beharrell wondered.
He called for a slow down in the superdense redevelopment of suburban town centres and for London’s outer suburbs to find their proper place in the 21st Century by encouraging incremental transformation.
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We wait to see whether the levelling up act under the new Tory administration will help deliver the ideas around low-rise densification set out in NLA 2015 report.