For the first time in decades, housing policy is shooting up the political agenda. Gordon Brown is planning ‘eco-towns’ - or Broon’s Toons, as they’d doubtless be known if the thought wasn’t so utterly depressing - with 100,000 new houses on surplus government land, and 250,000 more on top of the 2.75m target of houses to be built by 2020.
Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.
There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.
The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.
One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.
Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.
What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.
Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.
But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.
Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.
Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.
We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.
But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.
Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.
A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.
An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.
It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.
A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.
All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Why Broon's Doomed
Gordon Brown’s first week in power seems to have been received well. He and his new Home Secretary have managed to sound responsible and dignified in the face of the world’s most comically useless terrorist attacks. Labour partisans in the commentariat are overjoyed to witness Brown’s ability to move next door and not tread on any banana skins en route. The opposition is being civilised, partly out of the sense of statesmanship necessary in weeks like this, and partly to keep their powder dry.
But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.
This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.
For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.
In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.
Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.
The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.
Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.
He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.
It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.
The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.
Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.
Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.
For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.
Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.
But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.
This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.
For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.
In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.
Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.
The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.
Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.
He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.
It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.
The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.
Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.
Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.
For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.
Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.
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