Tag: squeeze

I don’t like venturing into national politics but, having seen that he who has been anointed leader has suggested the building* of five new ‘eco-towns’ there is one thing I feel I must say.

No!

The aspirations may be laudable.

A home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy is what would be in the interests of our country because everybody would have a stake in the country. The problem is that even with the great ambitions of the 1950s or the 1980s, they did not succeed in widening the scope for home ownership to large numbers of people who want it.

But the history of ‘New Towns’ built in the last half of the last century should have taught us that New Towns (even new eco-towns) are not the way to achieve high quality communities. It seems the lesson is unlearnt.

The 5 new eco-towns, each housing between 10,000 and 20,000 new homeowners, will be built primarily on brownfield land. Each new home [will] be built to zero-carbon standards, allowing them to qualify for a zero rate of stamp duty, all the energy and electricity they use will be generated locally from sustainable sources, and they will all be built with strong public transport infrastructure. They will include new state-of-the-art zero carbon schools and health centres.

The first such proposed town will be located on a brownfield site, the abandoned Oakington Barracks in Cambridgeshire, and will include 10,000 new homes, with electricity delivered by solar and wind power.

I’ve lived in a New Town, Harlow. Many of my relatives live in another. I have also lived in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham, an area which is about the size of the proposed eco-towns, was redeveloped in the early 1970s, then redeveloped again in the late 1990s when the planners’ and architects’ bright ideas turned out to be not quite so bright after all. Parts of Harlow and the late-twentieth-century parts of Swindon are meeting similar fates.

Towns evolve over a long period and, with the best will in the world, no town planner can match that evolutionary process when designing a new town from scratch. Concentrating houses with the latest innovative ideas from the architects and developers in one place (or five) is a demonstrable mistake too. Some, possibly many, of the innovative ideas will prove not to be durable, as parts of Harlow and Swindon demonstrate. Today’s innovative house designs may well be the slums of the future. To propose these new eco-towns is to plan in the sort of structural problems that towns like Harlow and Swindon are having to cope with today.

* Note the window title on the page that links to: since when has an archive of press releases been a ‘blog archive’?

I’d not noticed until someone pointed it out to me that, in addition to the Central Area Action Plan, there is also a Core Strategy for future development of Swindon currently out for consultation (deadline for comments is Wednesday 23rd May). Apparently, Swindon has green fingers.

A significant feature of past development in Swindon has been the creation and retention of ‘green fingers’ between areas of development. This provides the opportunity for green infrastructure to be enhanced and increased as the town grows.

Slowly but surely, the planning framework is turning into a green skeleton. Next we need some green arms, to join the green fingers to the Central Action Plan’s green spine.

One bit of advice. If you’re thinking of using the online form to send the council your answers to the almost ninety questions that the Core Strategy contains,… don’t. It doesn’t work. The numbering of the questions doesn’t match the numbering in the consultation document and most of your answers will be lost. ’Tis far safer (and easier) to email your comments to the council.

Only a little over a month since I last passed this way, and a tarmacked road now cuts across half of the Swindon front garden. No sign of new bricks on mortar yet though.

I’ve been reading through the latest version of Swindon Borough Council’s Central Area Action Plan which is now out for consultation. It’s nice to see that, as hoped for, the Green Spine now has a bit more body to it, looking a little like a headless running stickman (though I think I detect a green football and a green sombrero in there too).

The plan includes some masterpieces of thoughtful insight. An observation on page 27 is the epitome of this erudition.

[Crime] hotspots remain and concerns about crime and anti-social behaviour are still evident in Central Swindon, and in particular in the Bridge Street and Fleet Street Area. In this area, the peak times for violent offences, is in the evenings and at weekends, which suggests a strong link with alcohol misuse.

Only suggests? Move on to page 65.

The dominance of drinking establishments in the Fleet Street area has by a large margin given rise to more crime in the area than at any other location in Swindon.

Aah… a little bit of realism at last. More seriously, this unclear thinking goes deeper than just presenting the obvious as thoughtful observations. When considering the not-so-obvious, some of the statements are, with a little thought, just plain wrong. Move on to page 94.

A significant proportion of these private rented properties are Houses in Multiple Occupancy (HMOs). This high proportion of private rented accommodation is to a large extent a by-product of the exodus of families from Central Swindon.

To confuse ‘cause and effect’ with ‘supply and demand’ is a serious mistake in a document whose prime purpose is to regulate the supply of property over the next twenty years.

Swindon Borough Council’s Central Area Action Plan will be out for consultation from the end of this month. Whilst full of big visions that make good headlines, the ‘action’ will be spread over quite a long period… until 2026. Worth a look, if only to see if you can find some green arms and green legs to go with the proposed green spine. A green man amongst the streets of Swindon would be a unique planning concept.

It looks as though the first demolition in preparation for the Swindon Front Garden development is about to take place. What looks like the beginnings of a road now cuts across either side of Westlecott Farm and a brick wall has been converted to a pile of rubble.The first houses are due soon.

I visited Cardiff today. Between the city centre, where there is a lot of regeneration going on, and the rejuvenated Cardiff Bay is Butetown (tho’ you’ll miss it if you follow the signs), an oasis of deprivation.

To walk from the city centre to the bay, the quickest route is down Bute Street, though the signs direct you under the railway embankment to the parallel Lloyd George Avenue through the Atlantic Wharf area. The two roads are separated by less than a hundred yards (in places they are immediately alongside opposite sides of the railway embankment) but are miles apart economically. Atlantic Wharf is surrounded by modern, expensive apartments. Butetown is a former Council Estate (it looks like it was built in the 1970s), with a rundown appearance and several boarded-up houses visible from the main road.

Now admittedly the affluence of Cardiff Bay in places looks wafer thin — many of the new shops behind the Bay front are unlet and Mermaid Quay already has the tawdry look of many Victorian seaside resorts. But the difference in life on either side of the railway line is remarkable an probably not what the planners hoped for. It does rather show that if you build estates for the socially deprived and have policies that continue to concentrate the most deprived in those estates then however much is spent on the surrounding areas they will, not surprisingly, remain deprived.

Having taken my parents for a walk yesterday (which has only a few similarities to the same with a dog), I have noticed some planning applications and building works that are filling in some of the few unused spaces around here. Visible from my front window, two flats are being built at the end of a Victorian terrace. Progress, if  you   can    call     it      that,       is        very         slow. No more than one course of bricks per day.

From my rear window, I can see an old car repair business and bungalow. Both are now vacant with the latter boarded up and the garden wall recently demolished (either the work of vandals or a sign of preparatory work) and the walls of the former smothered with graffiti tags. Not pretty. The planned 22 flats will be, in some ways, an improvement, if they are ever built — it is almost two years since outline planning permission was granted with a string of conditions to mitigate against the risk of flooding. The Environment Agency charts show the risk of flooding to be less than once every 100 years.

At a corner nearby, there’s a planning application for three new houses. Having thought “They won’t fit!” I have checked. They will fit, but only because the gardens of the Victorian terraced houses behind (long since walled off when the houses were converted to flats) have been added to the plot. So three new houses complying with current housing regulations, but only at the expense of ensuring that four older houses never will.

In 2001, a report to Swindon Borough Council concluded that an area near the town centre called North Star should be developed as a university campus as part of Swindon’s regeneration programme. The Swindon Urban Regeneration Company was set-up the following year, with the University of Bath having a seat on it’s board. The plan was for the site to accomodate 1,000 students along with accomodation. Then a change of heart led to the University of Bath wanting a more traditional campus, and a site near one of Swindon’s main leisure areas, Coate Water, was selected. There was much local opposition, as the plans (paid for through major housing development on the site) would encroach on the currently open landscape. As a consequence of a change in government policy (towards more workplace learning) and of the housing developers wanting too much of the site, the university has changed it’s mind, again. Now Swindon College is offering to share their campus at North Star with the University of Bath. So we are back where we were six years ago.