Town & Country Planning, June 2013
My parents rather missed the beat generation. They were a bit too old to appreciate the Beatles and I was just too young. As a result, the only 45 rpm record we had during my childhood was Pete Seeger’s ‘Little Boxes’.
I have no idea how it came to be in with our other records, but it was.
I’m not complaining. Pete Seeger has straddled the American folk tradition from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and beyond, and – if I was living on a desert island with only one record, rather than the traditional eight, it would be a good one to have.
Also, there is no doubt that ‘Little Boxes’ expressed something about suburban planning.
More than that, the song expresses more than a whiff of the 1960s revolt against conformity. There is also something in there about a particular kind of low density development: both the song and Gertrude Stein’s remark that there was “no there there” were both reactions to the urban form of southern California.
I can’t hear it now without thinking there was something rather terrifying about the conclusion, that both the houses and the children of the people living in them: “They’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same”.
I’m no longer quite as down on suburbs as all that myself, especially as I now live in one, and we don’t all look just the same, I can tell you.
But was I was able to talk about this to Pete Seeger himself some years ago, when we were both performing at a conference about local money in the Hudson Valley. It was an honour to meet him, then aged a mere 85 (he’s now 94).
He told me the song had actually been written by the folk singer Malvina Reynolds in 1962.
“Stop the car!” she had said to her husband as they drove through the outskirts of Daly City. “I feel a song coming on.”
I thought of all this when I happened to read Hansard over the last few weeks and saw the exchange about garden cities.
Now garden cities are back on the agenda with avengence since Nick Clegg inserted them into government policy in a speech in 2011.
Their revival has become a kind of fringe Lib Dem project, as befits an idea that owed so much to the radical Liberal MP Henry Vivian. So it was Lib Dem peer Lord Stoneham who asked when the government would publish its garden city prospectus.
This was not clear from the answer, but there was an interesting supplementary question from Lord Greaves.
Tony Greaves, as Liberal Democrats know him, is a slightly disaffected Lancastrian, who has by coincidence occasionally reminded me of Pete Seeger – and who was one of the pioneers of community politics as the basis for local campaigning, part election, part education, part empowerment (another idea in exile from the 1960s).
As the inspirational and tough-minded leader of the Liberal Party’s councillors in the 1980s, Greaves turned community politics into a force which really did change local government, but that is another story.
On this occasion he asked a typically explosive question: “Can the minister tell us the difference between a garden city and an eco-town?”
Replying for the government, Conservative peer Baroness Hanham had a go. “Garden cities are what we are dealing with at the moment. Eco-towns were not very successful, but we hope that the larger developments that we are working with will get off the ground.”
But she then said something fascinating. First she drew on Clegg’s original description of garden cities, as places which “draw on the best of British architecture and design, which have their own identity and character”.
Then she said this: “We have to ensure that we are flexible but insistent that these are good developments for the future and that we are not just building anonymous estates that do not bring any sense of community.”
This seems to me the closest the government has ever come to criticising the conventional alternative to garden cities – which is an endless, soulless succession of little boxes, without identity and without community facilities, all built around suburban roads cambered to allow safe acceleration.
If we want localism is to mean anything, then the new places we build need their own identity, their own heart and their own shops. Not just little boxes made of ticky-tacky which all look just the same.
Because without communities, then localism becomes meaningless. Perhaps that is the real difference between garden cities and eco-towns.