The Village News

by Tom Fort

  It is none of these things. It is an unwanted addition, in spirit and in appearance utterly divorced from the village on to whose side it has been bolted. The houses are, in essence, the same as are found everywhere else. They are warm, comfortable, perfectly pleasant to live in. But they are not part of anything, do not belong – in the true sense of belonging – anywhere.

  It is time to stoke up my bonfire, still glowing a little with the embers of innumerable conservation orders. On to it – and guaranteed to produce a warming blaze – would go local authority guidelines on recommended densities for new housing developments. This is commonly twenty-five dwellings per hectare in rural areas, which frequently represents an appalling waste of space. I suspect that the obsession with low-density housing derives from the Garden City model and its guiding principles of openness and spaciousness and general leafiness. That may have been fine then, but land is simply too precious and valuable in this congested island of ours to be squandered in this way.

  Under my plan – I might even call it a Masterplan – there would be a presumption in favour of building in numerical terms at higher density. At the same time I would wage war on the fixation with the detached and the semi-detached. There would be terraces, mewses and crescents of joined-together houses. They work fine in towns and cities; why not in the new estates? The majority would be of two and three bedrooms – people must get used to the notion of living in smaller houses. Detached homes would be the exception, and five- and six-bedroom excrescences would be banned.

  The requirements of the motor car must be sensitively handled. It is standard for half the overall space in a new estate to be covered by tarmac in the form of roads and parking areas. This is intolerably wasteful. New solutions to parking need to be sought – for instance, in shared open-sided oak-framed barns, rather than the usual integral or detached garage. And why should it not be possible to keep some of the cars out of sight, by putting them underground, as is increasingly the case in towns and cities? The builders will howl about the cost, but they will be getting more houses on their land. Their protests will be ignored.

  With cars and hideously unsightly parking areas out of the way, there will still be plenty of open space on my new high-density estate. There could be allotments or an orchard or even a football pitch created above the hidden car park. There could be a pond for fishing, a communal garden such as they have in smart city squares, a giant communal trampoline – the possibilities for bringing people together are intoxicating.

  After I have amused myself watching the guidelines on densities being reduced to ash and writing new ones more suited to our time, I will turn my attention to another glaring failure of the current system. Because obtaining planning permission for large developments is so laborious, time-consuming and expensive, it follows that only big companies with big resources can do it. Smaller-scale local builders are generally excluded. Worse, so too are individuals who long to buy a single plot and build the house of their dreams. This inbuilt bias towards the volume housebuilders needs to be dismantled. Apart from the malign effect on choice, it has made them far too powerful – so powerful that local authorities who would like to challenge them tremble before them instead.

  What is needed is what I believe happens in Germany, and possibly elsewhere in Europe. One company is responsible for obtaining permission for a site and preparing it and providing power and water. But it does not build the houses. It sells the land in plots so that everyone – big builders, smaller local builders, single self-builders – gets a slice of the cake.

  I will also have to do something about design. Let us all agree that the general run of modern housing estates – built from the 1960s onwards – are boring and bland. Individually there may well be nothing offensive about the dwellings, which are comfortable, well appointed and perfectly pleasant to live in. But en masse and replicated across the country, they have a deadening effect on the localities where they are situated. Does anyone seriously dispute that?

  The problem is that these houses are all born from the same restricted concept of what a house should be. The variations – some cladding here, dormer windows there, a patch of pebble-dash there, rendering here, plain red brick there, a little pattern of different-coloured brick inset here, white-PVC windows there, brown PVC windows here, a spot of mock Victorian here and mock Georgian there – are trivial tweakings of the same dull and repetitive theme. We need houses of wood, houses of glass and steel, houses of straw bales, houses of cob – as well as houses of brick and stone. We need thatched roofs, concrete roofs, slate roofs, tile roofs, regularly pitched roofs, irregularly pitched roofs, flat roofs. We need tall houses and shorter houses and houses dug into the ground and covered in a wildflower meadow.

  Historically the challenge of building places to live has stimulated sharp and creative responses, resulting in dwellings of startling beauty and beguiling charm. But in our time we have lost that knack. We need to readmit into the housebuilding process a wide and eclectic range of tastes and visions. Designing and building the homes of the future is far too important to be left to the nameless employees of building conglomerates twiddling with the controls of their 3-D printers.

  In the past a crucial wellspring of diversity and character came from the necessary use of local building materials. Where there was stone – pale Cotswold stone, honey-coloured Hamstone, light-coloured Yorkstone and darker Lakeland stone, rarer iron-rich Bargate stone and Old Red Sandstone – they cut it in the quarries and built with that. Where there was no available stone they built in cob, unless there was clay, in which case some bright spark would open a local brickworks. Each brickworks provided a signature for the district, just as local builders gave the houses they built their own imprint with decorative flourishes and stylistic quirks.

  Most of the local quarries and almost all the local brickworks have gone. In strict conservation areas – the Cotswolds, for example – new building has to be done in what the conservators deem to be the appropriate stone, imposing another kind of monotony. Generally, though, the brick rules. In the first age of estate building the palette of colours encompassed everything from sickly-yellow to a dozen variants on shit-brown. But increasingly the orthodoxy in rural areas has come to favour a small range of red brick, machine cut in unvarying sizes, smooth textured, laid in dead straight lines, dull as ditchwater.

  In the exercise of my power, I would offer incentives for the reopening of abandoned quarries and the re-establishment of brickworks using local clay. In an area such as the Chilterns there would be schemes to train a new generation of flint-knappers and revive the beautiful brick-and-flint tradition. I would look with extreme disfavour on house designs which combined excrement-brown brick with excrement-brown window frames and excrement-brown concrete roof tiles. But I would welcome the pioneer in glass and steel. I would embrace the craftsmen and craftswomen in wood. I would glory in dwellings of turf and straw. And to those who cried out that people wouldn’t want such homes and wouldn’t buy them, I would say: you haven’t asked them yet.

  I should perhaps admit here that I am not a designer. Nor am I an architect. I know very little about either discipline (although more than I did). I acknowledge that, visually, I am something of a philistine. But it would be crucial to my strategy for sustaining our villages to achieve better and more interesting design. I would need to recruit into the process designers and architects who are properly trained, have good taste and are bold in their thinking. But how to find them? And how to use them?

  I am open to ideas. One of my own is to require each and every planning authority in rural England to employ an architect/designer to oversee all new-build applications, to promote new and different approaches to building homes, and to find and encourage a new breed of builders, developers, suppliers and craftsmen and women who are united in a passion to provide places for people to live that compare in charm and distinctiveness with those of the past. Where will my passionate overseers come from? I have no idea, but
surely someone from the Royal Institute of British Architects would have?

  *

  I am a dreamer but I am not stupid. Will any of this come to pass? Of course it won’t. I am not so dim as to imagine that whichever minister is given charge of local government will see my manifesto and send for me to offer me the job of keeping our villages alive and kicking.

  No, we will bumble along wasting space, time, money and opportunity as we always have done. There are no votes to be gained from reforming our hopelessly sclerotic planning system. The notion of a minister summoning the bosses of Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley, Bellway, Galliford Try, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson to tell them that their houses are boring and their influence on the housing market is malign is fanciful. More villages will be squeezed and suffocated by housing estates pushed through the planning system by the power of the volume builders. Local authority planning officers will continue to be half-buried in speculative applications from developers entirely free of any concern as to whether the village in question lives or dies. The whole incredibly laborious, time-consuming, incomprehensible monster that is our way of meeting the need of ordinary people for somewhere decent to live will just lumber on, regardless of the fact that anyone who has anything to do with it knows that it is unfit for purpose.

  The only hope I can see lies, paradoxically, in the developing crisis in local government finances resulting from the vice-like squeeze brought about by cuts in central government support and the inexorable rise in demand for social services. This crisis is real. Ten years ago my own county council, Oxfordshire, was still happily splashing out on fatuous fripperies such as arty signs bearing the words ‘Quiet Lane’ which they put up beside quiet lanes all over the place to tell people who might not have noticed that these were quiet lanes. Now Oxfordshire County Council is staring into a chasm. Half of its budget currently goes on social care, a legally binding obligation which cannot be cut and will only rise in cost as the population ages. At the same time OCC’s grant from Whitehall has been slashed. Into the chasm are sliding the services it can cut: schools, libraries, roads and the rest.

  There is now a real chance that one of the two layers of local government in Oxfordshire – either the county council or the district councils (plus Oxford City Council) – will be abolished in an effort to make better use of the resources. Under the existing arrangements, the county council is responsible for social care and the district councils for planning. Whichever comes out on top will have to take charge of both, plus all the other services that we expect (but increasingly do not get) in return for our council tax.

  Parish councils, such as my own in Sonning Common, have been able to make up some of the shortfall in the provision of services. For instance, when the county council threatened to pull the plug on our library, we stepped in with an offer of financial support and a group of volunteers was recruited to keep it open.

  Across the shires there is a reserve army of grandads and grannies and retirees ready to be mobilised. We live longer, we stay fitter, we have time and energy to spare. As well as running libraries, villages could organise the cutting of grass, the repair of roads, the feeding of elderly residents, the maintenance of schools, the lopping of branches off dangerous trees, the clearing of blocked drainage holes, the provision of grit for freezing weather. And more. In fact most of the everyday tasks at present done expensively, incompetently or not at all by the local authority could be done by the village. Why should parish councils not be given the power to raise the money they need from their residents to do the things those residents want done, and face being booted out at the next election if they fail to deliver?

  I am not suggesting that parish councils could deal with the challenge of providing housing. That kind of planning requires – even if it does not get – strategic thinking on a wider scale. But villages can make a vital contribution. In fact they already do – witness our own Sonning Common Neighbourhood Development Plan, and the several other NDPs-in-the-making in our area. Somewhat late in the day, the officers of our own South Oxfordshire District Council have realised that a good deal of the tedious and burdensome background work on planning applications previously done (or not done) by them can be shovelled off on to the volunteers. Having previously been distinctly sniffy about NDPs – they didn’t care for the idea of their domain being invaded by well-meaning amateurs – they are now relying upon them to head off the frontal assaults of the land predators and find the desperately needed sites for the houses.

  So that is the hope: that the limp and uninspiring label of Localism can, over time, be made to mean something. The Big Society, in David Cameron’s infinitely condescending slogan, has always been there, even before he was toasting crumpets at Eton. It has grown in size and importance, not because of inane government ‘initiatives’, but because of us; because we are here in greater numbers than before, more active for longer than before, ready and able to do what people have always done, which is to serve our communities. The prime minister who has the gumption to enlist that reserve will have achieved something truly remarkable.

  POSTSCRIPT

  There are some nice lines in a poem called ‘The Norman Church’ by A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh:

  Between the woods in folded hands

  My accidental village stands,

  Untidily, and with an air

  Of wondering who left it there . . .

  I very much like the phrase ‘accidental village’. It crystallises what is precious and special about the village – its unexpectedness, its capacity to surprise and suddenly delight. Every village is different, not just from other villages, but within itself: different houses, different gardens, different colours and textures, different heights, different angles, different people. To stroll around the village – any village – with ears and eyes on the alert is to open yourself to a rich and subtle composition of sights and sounds and impressions. It is a lesson in the most absorbing subject of them all, which is how we have lived and how we live now.

  At the outset of the 1939–45 War a prolific and now forgotten writer on countryside matters, C. Henry Warren, produced a book called England is a Village. Warren was one of the lesser lights in a group known as Kinship in Husbandry, the back-to-the-earth precursor of the Soil Association that included H. J. Massingham, Rolf Gardiner, Edmund Blunden and Arthur Bryant. Warren’s little book is a standard chronicle of village life, forgettable stuff redeemed somewhat by Denys Watkins-Pitchford’s superb scraperboard illustrations. It was obviously intended as a memorial to a way of life that at that time seemed imperilled as never before.

  In the foreword Warren wrote: ‘England’s might is in her fields and villages, and though the whole weight of mechanised armies roll over them to crush them, in the end they will triumph.’

  And triumph they have, after a fashion. They are still here, and it is up to us who love and cherish them to make sure they survive and thrive. ‘The best of England is a village,’ Warren reflected. There is truth in that.

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