Local people will be urged on Wednesday to use new powers to vote down housebuilding plans if architects continue to propose identikit “Legoland” estates.
In a signal of the coalition’s aesthetic taste, the housing minister, Grant Shapps, will praise a range of developments that use local stone, reflect local architecture and recognise tradition.
Shapps’s taste appears to be similar to that of Prince Charles, as he has given his seal of approval to four exemplar developments that are especially conservative.
One is Rostron Brow, in Stockport, where developers reused existing brick, stone and slate as well as redundant timber beams and stone features. Everything from window details, shop fronts and building facades has been designed to replicate previous houses, drawing on historic photographs.
He also highlights the Russells, Broadway, Worcestershire – a mixed use development of 77 homes that fits in with the surrounding 16th-century Broadway village buildings, built using locally sourced Cotswold sandstone.
Shapps will write to the Design Council, which recently merged with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, encouraging it to help developers think harder about local identity and character. He says too many suburbs are full of identikit homes.
The decision will not necessarily be music to the ears of the business department, which has been urging the Treasury to rip up planning controls as a way of encouraging growth.
The localism bill currently before parliament allows communities to come together to draw up neighbourhood plans to decide what their area should look like. If people vote in favour of these plans in local referendums, councils would have to adopt them.
Ministers sense design will be more important because if houses are not attractive it is more likely that local people will reject developments.
In his letter to the Design Council, Shapps will complain: “We all recognise the bog standard, identikit Legoland homes that typify some new developments – all looking exactly the same on streets that could be anywhere in the country.
“Whilst we are seeing good examples emerging, too often new developments are dominated by the same, identikit designs that bear no resemblance to the character of the local area.” He will say developers need to think outside the Legoland box.
Previous housing ministers have railed against uniform design largely driven by developers’ lower costs, but ministers hope that the concept of neighbourhood plans, designed and voted on by communities themselves, might drive architects out of their complacency.
Planning and decentralisation minister, Greg Clark, joins Shapps in condemning British household architecture, saying “banal, identikit housing schemes have given development a bad name”.
Clark claims: “Experience here and overseas shows that when local people have the chance to influence the function and appearance of developments, opposition can [be] turned into enthusiasm and buildings are constructed that we can be proud of.”
Shapps also praises developments at Port Sunlight, Wirral, Merseyside – a conservation area since 1978 where nearly every building in the village is Grade II listed .
Critics will say it is not the quality but the quantity of homes being built that should exercise ministers. According to the Housebuilders Federation, across Britain just 33,000 homes were approved for construction in the last three months of 2010 – 9% down on the previous quarter and 22% down on a year ago. Social housing was hardest hit with only 5,500 approvals – a new low for the survey and particularly concerning with 5 million people already languishing on local authority housing waiting lists.
The number of new homes completed in England in 2010 fell 13% on the previous year – itself the lowest peacetime number since 1923.
Ray of sunlight
Port Sunlight, a purpose-built village planned in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever for the employees of the Lever Brothers soap factory, was an unprecedented combination of model industrial housing. It was created on the basis of the architectural and landscape values of the garden suburb, influenced by the ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. The stated aims of Lever were “to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour”. Nearly 30 architects were employed by Lever to create the unique style of the village, where each block of houses was designed by a different person and each house is unique. Lever named his creation after his company’s Sunlight Soap. Containing 900 Grade II listed buildings, it was declared a conservation area in 1978.
Ben Quinn