Beauty and the Built Environment

Andrew Lewer Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hayes]

I am delighted to say that I agree with every word that the hon. Gentleman said. I think of where I was brought up in south-east London. It was a council estate built, as so many were, in that period during the war and just after. Houses were not only well built—they were attractive. Care was taken about the design of the house. There were a variety of house styles across the estate. There were houses of different sizes to accommodate different kinds of people; there were smaller properties, suitable for elderly people, and large homes suitable for families. The variety of houses, the look and feel of the development, the street layout, the presence of a widely used parade of shops, the church, the school, the community hall, and so on, were the component parts of a functioning community, of which everyone felt part. I am not sure that can be said of many developments now.

The hon. Gentleman is right that privately owned, but also rented properties, are often soulless, ubiquitous and indistinguishable from one another, looking the same from Penzance to Perth, with no sense of the vernacular, no sense of local personality and thereby, incapable of inspiring the local and particular sense of place necessary to build communal feeling. That is where we have got to. It is extraordinary that we have, given the opportunity that existed in the post-war years after the bombing of many of our cities. The redevelopment could have been not only regenerative, but inspiring. I have to say that we, as a nation, failed. Now, this Minister in his time in this job has the opportunity to put that right.

In my roles in the various offices of state, I have tried to influence the quality of development and what we build. As Energy Minister, I acted to ensure that wind turbines were constructed in appropriate locations after proper consultation with local communities, which is critical. Consideration about the impact on landscape became a vital part of the approval process. Some then simply dismissed the argument I made as irrelevant, on the basis of the easily grasped but utterly crass notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The notion that beauty is relative has been used to justify much of the ugliness imposed on our towns and cities by architects, planners and developers since the war. Such developments have succeeded only in undermining public confidence in new housing. What is often not appreciated is how the public’s perception of development has changed.

I think what I have already described would be agreed by Members across the House of Commons, and certainly beyond it, but the sad fact is that planners by and large still have not learned their lesson. Even today, for example, some still laud the idea of streets in the sky. Plans are apparently afoot to extend the misconceived network of elevated walkways constructed in the City of London after the war. Streets in the sky were never a substitute for real streets—for architecture on a human scale, in proportion and in harmony with its environment. As anyone who has ever attempted to walk to the Barbican Centre knows, urban walkways are alienating, confusing and a poor substitute for design that puts people first. The Barbican is far from the worst example. There were any number of large developments, mainly of social housing, with walkways and gantries that not only became havens for criminals but often isolated rather than united blocks of flats.

[Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con)]

This is not a whimsical issue for my right hon. Friend, but a long-standing issue of concern, as it is for me. My postgraduate thesis was on the Gothic revival in domestic architecture in the mid-18th century. That brings me to my question. How do we reconcile space for innovation, as the Gothic revival was in some respects, with respect for the vernacular in our very different counties and neighbourhoods?

[Mr Hayes]

As a direct result of that intervention, let me make my first demand of the Minister. I have more demands to make at the end, so I will get this one out of the way now—I see the Minister glancing at his civil servants nervously.

It is critical that every local authority has a design guide that is not only particular to its locale, but that has site-specific design appraisals for those most important regenerative opportunities. It is not enough for a local authority to rely on some county-wide or area-wide design guide or very broad general motherhood-and-apple-pie design principles. There have to be specific requirements for developers, which allow places to continue to change in a way that is in keeping with what has been done before. That is about materials, scale and sometimes eclecticism; there are particular places that look a particular way. We do not want every high street and every housing development, every town and every city to be indistinguishable one from another, but that will happen only if we are very demanding of what we expect of developers.

As you know, Ms Dorries, I have been Minister or shadow Minister for virtually everything, and I was once shadow Housing Minister. I met many big developers, big names that we could reel off if we wanted to, and they all said to me, “John, if you are clear about the requirements, we will build our business plans to meet them. We understand that you want to build lovelier places, and we know that that is what people want anyway. We are quite happy to build things that people will like and want to buy, or places they will want to rent. Be very clear about your requirements and we will work to them.” It is not about taking on developers; it is about working with them, but being demanding of them.