Town & Country Planning, April 2011
Going beyond Legoland
Grant Schapps, our peculiarly-named housing minister, has just brought down the rage of the architectural critics on his head by gargling with the world ‘Legoland’.
There was a certain amount of ridicule from the architectural profession as well for the idea that ordinary people should cramp the style of the demigods of architecture by making judgements about aesthetics.
Heaven forfend.
His purpose in speaking out was to say that local people could exercise more control under the new planning regime. If they don’t like plans for Legoland estates, they can throw them out.
Unlike the critics, I sincerely hope that he is right, but I have yet to be convinced. The communal effort involved to throw out local housing or retail plans may be so onerous, and so expensive, that it just isn’t going to happen.
But Schapps is right that people’s ability to do this, and to stand up to developers as powerful as Tesco, is the ultimate test of the Localism Bill. Will local people let through good and useful plans? Will they be able to throw out ones they don’t like, and on aesthetic grounds? Above all, will they be able to initiate their own?
Not just in theory. We know about that already. But in practice. If they can do all three then I will personally bless the Localism Bill as an enlightened piece of legislation.
But let’s go back to Legoland for a moment. Lego is of course the ethical Finnish toy bricks manufacturer, though a little less ethical since the new American management dumped the company’s traditional opposition to war toys.
They are in many ways a symbol of some of the best of British planning, not the worst – unless you happen to tread on one of the bricks in bare feet in the middle of the night (an occupational hazard for us fathers) which would make a saint think differently.
I like the kind of pitched roof suburban housing you can make with Lego. They are human-scale and they are certainly not one-size-fits-all.
So if I had been Schapps I might have chosen a different simile. It is the soulless identikit estates made out of ticky-tacky that need to be flung out – the ones with no community, no green space and no shops.
And even worse, let us hope that local planning busy-bodies – God bless them too – will fling plans for housing towers back into the pit from whence they came, where the devouring worm never dies and the fire is not quenched.
The truth is that the aesthetic standard of so many buildings in this country is lamentably poor. Blank walls at street level. Poky little windows. Soulless walls of ticky-tacky, possibly shipped over from Finland like Lego, but without the beauty and variety.
Worse still, the mechanistic towers of various shapes that now haunt the centre of London – vast testaments to inhumanity and inequality.
Why is it so bad? I suggest it is precisely because of the horror with which the establishment regards the idea of ordinary people exercising aesthetic judgement.
I don’t just mean the architectural establishment. Richard Rogers was told by the last government to remove the word ‘beautiful’ from his report on cities, on the grounds that it was difficult to measure, and it was replaced with the phrase ‘good design’.
Actually, it is this unmeasurable quality about beauty that I like, and which makes it impossible to reduce to some kind of approved code.
Why should developers not be forced to satisfy local people that new buildings will make the neighbourhood more beautiful? The critics are unanimous that this would make everything bland. I would say it is quite impossible to make things blander than they already are.
Where would you prefer to live? Somewhere where the aesthetic sense came from a Tesco-approved guide to low cost retail design or from the conflicting sense of beauty of the people who live there?
I was influenced to put this piece of heresy down on paper by a pupil of my wife’s who complained that there is absolutely nothing beautiful in his school.
That is true and an outrage. But beauty requires attention to detail, which is only possible with a measure of localism, and it requires holding designers and planners to account.
I remember years ago, the Weller Street housing co-op pioneers in Liverpool were told, having finally won the right to build their own homes, that the city council would not let them have flowers outside.
It had to be tarmac. “You can have the choice of red or green,” they said.
My suggestion is that we end up in this kind of utilitarian horror when government gets scared of beauty.