The country desperately needs more homes, and the government has promised to build them. This throws up immediate logistical challenges. Where should they go? How can they avoid being held up in the planning process? Who will ensure they have ample power, transport links, shops, schools and parks? How will the landowners’ interests be aligned with the interests of councillors, neighbours, local sports clubs and schools? Who will appoint and manage housebuilders, and if there’s more than one builder, who will co-ordinate their plans?
Behind these important questions lies an equally fundamental issue. What happens afterwards? Will these be places that people love? Will they engender a sense of warmth and pride? Or will they simply become rows of houses that may be well-built and safe, but lack rootedness and a real sense of community?
Great places naturally evolve over time
The answer requires an innate understanding of the single most important barrier to the creation of a new place: time.
Imagine a quintessentially English village. You may well be picturing a pub overlooking a green. Perhaps there’s a cricket match in progress. There will be trees and hedges and a sense of ‘countryside’ around, local shops that you can reach without getting in the car, a doctor’s surgery, a community centre, somewhere to go for a coffee or a meal. There will be paths and walkways, possibly a cycle path, and although there may be a main road nearby, the village won’t feel like a throughfare. For some there will be a pond or stream, for others an allotment to nurture or a playground for the kids.
And that’s before you even think about the houses that weave around them. They will be coherent – possibly using the same texture and tone of brick or stone, similar heights and roof pitches – but they will be far from uniform or bland.
That village will have evolved over centuries. At first it would have served a practical purpose. A perfect place for a farmhouse or a road crossing that lent itself to a small dwelling. In time, it would have attracted more people, and with them homes, a church, a school, a market place and new paths that formed between them.
There would have been no time pressure. These places grew organically. There would never have been a moment when hundreds of homes suddenly became necessary or desirable. The village’s ‘character’ would evolve ever so slowly, along with local quirks and traditions.
New places lack the luxury of time
Back in the present, the context could not be more different. A landowner seeks planning permission to develop a plot of land. The aim is to work fast. There are commercial pressures at work and deadlines to meet, so housebuilders are often engaged to help gain permission to build and then to roll out, say 800, homes as fast as possible.
Now, it’s important to remember why this area isn’t already developed. The nearest town or sizeable village will, by definition, have grown around the ‘prime’ local spot. And its roads, stations, power lines, shops and the rest will have developed to serve that spot. So it’s highly likely that the new place will be under-served.
Modern housebuilders are highly skilled at delivering homes efficiently and at scale. That’s what they do. And by historical standards, most can be trusted to build them safely competently.
Great places are about much more than houses
The best housebuilders are experts in building homes that people want to live in and love. What we do is create the place around the home: a community that people want to live in and will come to love.
That challenge multiplies in larger places that may have multiple landowners. These will often be built in phases, with each contracted to a different housebuilder. This lack of shared purpose can lead to a place whose design and build is incoherent, unconnected and fragmented. Crucial thinking around transport, power, shopping and the sociability of the place can fall between the cracks. Imagine a relatively new estate that doesn’t look or feel right, and almost inevitably, it will lack cohesion and rootedness.
Great ‘new’ places do exist
Before we jump to the ‘answer’, it’s important to prove it is possible to create a new place and get it right many generations after they were completed.
Like New Earswick in York, a Joseph Rowntree project where a place was driven by the lives of its future residents. Its social model weaves homes around a cricket ground, primary school and church. Each has its own garden with fruit trees. Allotments are liberally spread and over two thousand people share a sense of space and tranquillity.
Or Bournville on the southwest side of Birmingham, designed to be a ‘garden village’ for employees of the city’s Cadbury factory. Financed by a Quaker family, it wasn’t built around a local pub (!) but was planned so thoughtfully that it has become one of the UK’s most desirable places to live.
Both planned from scratch over a century ago, New Earswick and Bournville continue to work as if they had grown organically. They share an approach with recent successful developments at Alconbury in Cambridgeshire and Nansledan in Cornwall: master development.
The key is master development
Master development is not housebuilding. It is driven by the long-term state of a place. It creates a bridge between past, present and future, starting with the contours of the land and its natural environment, understanding the heritage and personality of the area, and working with local people to understand how good lives could be lived there many generations from now.
Master development is the antithesis of everything that has made the stereotypical ‘property developer’ so unpopular. It demands a long term horizon, firm financial discipline, deep technical expertise and an ability to manage complexity across many years and multiple partners. It assumes that far from being easy to push through planning into housebuilding, it is something hard that requires tremendous levels of imagination, empathy and precision. Success depends as much on judgement and continuity as it does on design or construction.
The larger the site, the greater the impact a master developer can make. If multiple landowners sell separately to different housebuilders, who connects and manages the whole? The housebuilder is rewarded for building homes, the master developer for creating wonderful places.
Working backwards
The master developer works backwards, thinking into the long-term. This requires subtlety and patience. It is not about quick wins or cutting corners. It means putting people and purpose before buildings and construction. It’s about truly getting to know the place and its neighbouring communities, meeting as many people as possible. To listen and learn rather than push and cajole.
As a result, the way houses will look and feel is left until long after a vision for the place has evolved, its natural drainage mapped and its roads, paths, green spaces, schools, shops and meeting places designed to link seamlessly. That’s the masterplan. Only then will the master developer create – with significant input from local people – a Design Code setting out the parameters within which housebuilders can get to work.
The long-term benefits of this approach are practical and tangible. Community centres will become central hubs, meeting places will be at natural touchpoints from the school run to the spot where the prettiest dog walk opens up into the local square, traffic will move better, paths and cycle routes will connect to the places people want to get to, and green spaces will be delivered where and when they are needed.
And although it may take longer for fields to become full of people and homes, the master developer unlocks enduring value for the landowner. Through disciplined financial control, strong governance and patient delivery, it creates places that mature well — socially, commercially and environmentally. In the long run, those are the places where people want to live, even if it means paying a little more for the privilege.