The government calls it a “fast-track to beauty”. It means a set of rules, clearly stated by public bodies, about what constitutes good architecture. In the recent white paper Planning for the Future, it proposes that a development that follows these rules – or “design codes” – automatically gets planning permission. That way, a minimum standard of quality is set, without the kerfuffle of subjective argumentation that goes with committees discussing what is and is not beautiful. Which processes, to judge by the built environment we see around us, are not particularly successful.
It’s an attractive idea. Georgian London and 20th-century Manhattan were built roughly along these lines, and they’re generally considered to be successful examples of city-building. The point is partly to make the process foolproof – a developer who follows these rules doesn’t have to be a genius at design to produce a tolerable result – and also to achieve a degree of coherence between different bits of building, and between old and new.
Then the difficulties crowd in: how can you create a code that works for the many different characters of places not only across the country, but within counties and even individual towns? How do you identify the aspects that really do make places successful? How do you avoid imposing an aesthetic tyranny in which the men from the ministry know best? How do you have enough looseness to allow for invention, without making the rules so loose that they’re meaningless?
To get some idea of the future the government might have in mind, you can look at the plans for Fawley Waterside, a “mercantile city” of 3,750 inhabitants and 2,000 jobs, planned for the site of Fawley power station, a mighty but redundant 1960s structure in a mixed zone where the bucolic New Forest collides with the industrial edges of Southampton Water. The proposal is put forward by the Cadland Estate, which is the Wodehousean name of the large neighbouring landholding of Aldred Drummond, whose banking ancestors got rich financing George III’s unsuccessful attempt to retain the American colonies.
Fawley Waterside, for all that it intends to attract tech businesses and their employees, doesn’t particularly look like the future, but rather a mixing of Regency terraces with traditional cottages that (according to the computer-generated images) come with actual thatch and real donkeys. This old look is the point: Fawley is inspired by Prince Charles’s model town of Poundbury in Dorset, which aims to apply traditional building patterns to modern development. The advisers behind the government’s enthusiasm for design codes like to cite the Duchy of Cornwall’s work among their inspirations.
Léon Krier, the architectural guru behind Poundbury, also worked on Fawley. He resigned when he felt his ideas were getting watered down – including the rejection of his plan for keeping the power station’s 198-metre chimney, with a classical capital added, such that it would become the largest Tuscan column in the world. But the current proposals still have recognisably Krieresque aspects, in particular a close-packed, slightly irregular plan like that of traditional European cities.
The planning application, which was approved last month, comes with many admirable promises – a pedestrian-friendly environment where everything is within a 10-minute walk of everything else, the creation of a canal, and the reinstatement of a biodiverse landscape that connects to the New Forest. It also comes, as does Poundbury, with a set of design codes.
Different types of “grain” – by which they mean the density and scale of the buildings – are specified: “coarse”, “less coarse” and “much finer”, depending on the location on the site. Building height limits are set, except for some “mixed-use buildings of stature” – little towers that in the visualisations look weirdly Ruritanian, also like miniaturised versions of socialist realist landmarks in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Desirable window proportions are stated. At times the code seems to be a rather tedious guessing game, to which the correct answer is always “neo-Georgian”.
The likely result of the admirable promises will be a much higher quality of development than you would get from the average volume housebuilder, and as with Poundbury its residents will no doubt like its traditional styling. Me, I find it clammy, plonky and prissy, and not meaningfully connected to the rather wild and anarchic environment in which it stands. I feel that the literalness of this kind of classicism gets awkward when handling advances in window technology since the Napoleonic wars, or the humane modern regulations about wheelchair access. And if Poundbury is anything to go by, there will be a lot of porticoes, arcades and verandas that look like agreeable gathering places in theory, but in practice are not.
But then I’m not in their target market. What matters for the rest of the country is how codes can capture what might be good about new development of whatever style. This has a lot to do with tangible and unarguably beneficial qualities, such as minimum space sizes for rooms and daylighting standards. Those much-loved codes for London and New York were primarily to do with the practical issues of stopping fire spread and limiting overshadowing respectively, but they happened also to contribute to making successful streets and a memorable skyline.
Using the codes to push up density would be a good idea, both to use land effectively and encourage walkable neighbourhoods. It might be nice to stipulate minimum standards of external materials. Most importantly, and most difficult, the framers of design codes will have to take on highways engineers, who as Matthew Carmona of University College London pointed out, still insist on space-eating road layouts that are miserable for children’s play or for anyone on foot.
The government has called for a return to “pattern books”, which were once used to set out a limited range of house types for builders. As Carmona has also said, modern developers have their own ranges of standard types: the problem is that they are not very good ones. To find rules that really work will be a complex task, requiring resources and expertise. Let’s hope the government means to fund it.
