Place matters profoundly to people.  We invest more resources in our homes than in anything else, and by some measures we spend more time gardening than we do on any other pastime.  This is no less true of our shared home.  Protecting the countryside from suburban sprawl has substantial costs in terms of foregone economic growth, but green belts are widely supported, and were introduced only after a huge grassroots campaign for them.  The countryside is a treasured public good, and the British people are prepared to make sacrifices to preserve it.  Sustaining high streets by prohibiting new out-of-town shopping centres is similarly expensive, but it has been a widely supported part of planning policy since the 1990s. The same willingness to sacrifice time, energy and wealth for the places that we love is shown in our support for national parks, conservation areas and neighbourhood planning, and in the countless local groups and civic societies that work to protect and enhance neighbourhoods around the country.

The debate on how to preserve and create good places is currently shifting profoundly in Britain.  The existing system has tended to produce the wrong sort of homes: too greenfield, too car-dependent, too monotonous, too treeless, and too ugly.  This is one reason for the intense resistance to housebuilding in the places where it happens, resistance which is the fundamental cause of our current housing shortage.  Policy Exchange’s work has focussed on trying to break this cycle, empowering local communities over the form of new building so that they can ensure they see the kind of developments they want.  Our campaign led to the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, whose extensive recommendations the Government has now largely accepted.  The Government has extended this programme further with the Planning White Paper and the National Model Design Code.  In the years ahead, policy in this area will change more profoundly than it has since 1947.

It is hard to understate how rapidly our physical surroundings are changing. The time is still within living memory when Britain was a place without skyscrapers, without supermarkets, and almost without private cars.  In 1926, the year of the Queen’s birth, Britain had a national speed limit of 20mph, planning applications did not exist, and a small villa in suburban Northampton was perhaps Britain’s sole modernist building. What often goes unrecognised, however, is how actively we have shaped and managed the changes that have come since.  Green belts, New Towns, National Parks, conservation areas, heritage listings and the planning system were conscious policy steps, without which Britain today would look utterly different.  The lesson that the twentieth century has for our current debates is not fatalism: the physical form of contemporary Britain was to a great extent actively chosen, for better and for worse.

There is some level of consensus about the direction we should be going in.  Most people agree that we should no longer build or rebuild towns primarily around the needs of the car; the importance of walkability, public transport, greenery and street-based urbanism are widely accepted.  Local heritage and character are now widely considered important.  There is also increased recognition of the continuing relevance of older ways of creating places.  In settlements like Nansledan in Cornwall and Fawley Harbour in Hampshire, elements of traditional architecture and urbanism are being revived. In others, as in Derwenthorpe near York or Goldsmith Road in Norwich, they have been thoughtfully blended with elements of more recent origin. 

Much, however, remains contentious.  Though there is general recognition that millions of houses need to be built in the years ahead, we have not yet settled where they will be, what they will look like, and what sort of neighbourhoods they will collectively form.  Though there is general recognition of the importance of beauty in the built environment, many British people remain uneasy with the conception of beauty that has guided planning policy and public commissioning in recent years, as the polling that accompanies our inaugural issue suggests.  The choices that we make about these things will shape the country that we bequeath to our descendants.

In this column we seek to contribute to this debate, critically monitoring important changes in the built environment, and championing ideas, initiatives and buildings that help to make our common home a more humane and sustainable place.  We are especially keen to investigate the themes that most concern our readers.  If there are developments, campaigns or proposals - large or small, good or bad - that you think deserve our attention, please write to us at placematters@policyexchange.org, or contact us on Twitter at @SCP_Hughes or @bswud

It is sometimes said that the British public tends to like old buildings simply because they are old, or because they are typically smaller than more recent ones.  It is thus interesting that the most popular option in our survey was Bristol City Hall (ranked on average 3.08th out of 10), an enormous building from the 1950s designed by Vincent Harris.  Its style is standardly described as Neo-Georgian, although its great curving plan is indebted to the Continental Baroque, its slender facing bricks are of Roman inspiration, and its porte cochere uses an ancient form once common in Zoroastrian fire temples. Harris was already extremely unfashionable by the 1950s, and modernist students staged ‘anti-ugly’ protests outside some of his later buildings.  But he soldiered on, and it seems that the British people are grateful for his trouble.

After Bristol City Hall are the town halls of Paisley (3.80), Nuneaton (4.40), Wigan (4.64) and Trafford (5.10).  Paisley is Victorian and Wigan is Edwardian, while Nuneaton and Trafford were built in the 1930s.  Their styles and materials vary, from the ashlared Roman temple front at Paisley, through exuberant terracotta Renaissance at Wigan, to warm redbrick classicism at Nuneaton and Trafford.  To my knowledge, no quantitative research has been done on what sort of traditional architecture the public likes most, and it would be extremely interesting to learn more about this.  Is there a tendency to prefer classical or vernacular, richly or simply ornamented, formal or picturesque?  The answer remains elusive: none of these theories gains obvious support from the results of the poll.  Perhaps the public does not have strong intra-traditional preferences of this kind.

In an intermediate position (5.85) we find Hillingdon Civic Centre, completed in 1979 to a design by Andrew Derbyshire.  Hillingdon is an early example of architectural postmodernism, the tendency in the 1980s and 90s towards a free use of historicising details.  Derbyshire used traditional facing materials, as well as some traditional brick detailing in the pilasters and cornices, but the building’s massing recalls a natural topographical form rather than following the more formal geometries that were normal in older civic architecture.  At the time Derbyshire was criticised for deviation from the modernist path, but the poll suggests the public looks relatively kindly on his building, which scores better than any other design since Bristol.

Four designs remain: the Corby Cube (6.31), Hove Town Hall (7.16), Brent Civic Centre (7.26) and the Shropshire Shirehall in Shrewsbury (7.39).  The Shrewsbury Shirehall and Hove Town Hall are from the high modernist postwar period (1966 and 1970 respectively), while Brent Civic Centre and the Corby Cube are recent (2013 and 2010).  Although Hove scores slightly above Brent, the average result of the recent buildings is better (6.785 against 7.275), a pattern we also found in our recent survey on hospital design.  This might lead us to suspect that the public marginally prefers the direction in which architecture has moved since the 1970s, though of course the evidence is far too slight to say with confidence.

The lowest-ranked building, Shrewsbury Shirehall, is of special interest, because it is likely to be demolished in the near future.  This congenial prospect arose after an initial attempt to refurbish the building transpired to be prohibitively expensive, leading Shropshire Council to decide on sale; the Council is now exploring the possibility of moving its operations to underused public buildings in the centre of Shrewsbury and other Shropshire towns, perhaps including Ludlow’s beautiful Assembly Rooms.  Immunity from listing has been secured for the old Shirehall, meaning that the large suburban site is likely to be redeveloped for housing.  The Council Leader, Peter Nutting, described the building as ‘a big, ugly lump of concrete’ and said that the move ‘will be good for Shrewsbury and Shropshire’.  There have been the inevitable protests from brutalism aficionados.  But our results suggest that the public tends to agree with Cllr Nutting.

These rankings were fundamentally similar across different demographics: remarkably enough, Bristol City Hall wins regardless of age group, gender, region, economic group and voting intention.  The lowest ranked building in every group was either Hove Town Hall, Brent Civic Centre or Shropshire Shirehall.  Some patterns can tentatively be identified: for example, women seem to be slightly more likely to prefer the older buildings than men (though both prefer them), and more privileged ABC1 groups seem to be slightly more likely to prefer the more recent options than less privileged C2DE groups (though both disprefer them).  Older people tended to rank the Corby and Brent buildings below the Shrewsbury and Hove ones, while younger people were the other way round.  These relationships are interesting, but they are also weak.  The striking result here is how little preferences seem to vary across a range of social, economic and geographical backgrounds.

We need to be cautious in interpreting these results.  The great difficulty with surveying preferences on existing buildings is that these buildings differ from one another in many ways, and we have no direct evidence on which of those is causing the difference in popularity.  We cannot tell, for instance, whether people disprefer the Hove Town Hall because of the raw concrete, the facade pattern, or both.  There are also differences in the surroundings of buildings that could be interfering with the rankings.  Wigan Town Hall is bounded by busy roads, whereas Paisley Town Hall is set in an attractive park.  There was nothing the architects of the Wigan Town Hall could have done about this, but it might still have affected rankings of their design relative to that of Paisley.  It should also be stressed that outward appearance is only one feature of a good building.  The public may not greatly like the appearance of the Brent Civic Centre, but it still deserves admiration for its superb energy efficiency standards.  Finally, I emphasise that this particular survey gives only ordinal, not cardinal, data, though comparison with our hospitals poll gives tentative reason to suspect that people absolutely dislike the buildings that they rank relatively low here.  

All these limitations should be freely acknowledged: visual preference surveying of this kind should be just the first step towards building in a way that local people welcome.  But for all this, it is hard not to look at the results of this and other surveys without receiving the strong impression that the design of civic buildings in recent decades has been on fundamentally the wrong track.  

It is worth asking why this has been so little investigated.  Brent Civic Centre cost the people of Brent some £75,000,000.  Visual preference surveying costs virtually nothing.  For a tiny percentage of the sum spent on the Civic Centre - very much less than 0.01% - Brent Council could have uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that they were commissioning a relatively unpopular design.  Such evidence would surely be sufficient to justify a rethink, unless countervailing evidence could be found to outweigh it.  Why did this not happen?  It is all more puzzling when one considers the great quantities that are spent on public consultations, either in terms of direct cost or of delays to construction.  Surely here is a low-hanging fruit for a government that wants to promote civic building that earns the pride and affection of local people.

A positive development in the British public debate about the built environment has been increasing recognition of the importance of strengthening towns and smaller cities, especially those that have been most affected by deindustrialistion.  Achieving this is complex and involves work on many areas, but one thing that is needed is investment in beautiful, convenient and secure public spaces – in preserving and enhancing the sense of place.  This leads to greater use of public spaces, which itself makes them more attractive, engendering an upward cycle.

The town centre of Wigan presents an impressive example of this, one of a number of important initiatives by its highly regarded council.  Fine historic streets have been pedestrianised or semi-pedestrianised, greatly improving the environment for leisure or shopping.  They have also been repaved, with a setted carriageway, granite kerbs and wide pavements of good flagstones.  Street trees have been planted, and a number of plots have been sympathetically infilled.  Elsewhere in the town the beautiful Mesnes Park has been superbly restored, while Victorian industrial buildings have been creatively renovated.  Last year saw the unveiling of the dignified Wigan Mining Statue by the Hull-based sculptor Steve Winterburn, the result of a local campaign to commemorate the town’s mining heritage. 

The Wigan Mining Statue (2020) and Mesnes Park (c. 1880, recently restored).

One of the most important tools with which the Government seeks to influence the form of new development in Britain is the design code.  In the Planning White Paper, it proposed to roll-out design codes across the country, and in the National Model Design Code it gave some indication of what sort of design codes it has in mind.  This is an extremely interesting idea, which might yield much good.  But there are risks too.  Both points are nicely illustrated by the code for Barton Park, an urban extension to Oxford that is currently under development.

The code contains a good deal that is valuable, like its careful rules on the materials to be used for roads, pavements and kerbs (p. 32), and its provisions for storing bins behind houses or in containers (p. 44).  Its provisions on materials (p. 40) are also excellent, and have an enormous positive impact on the appearance of the neighbourhood.  Requiring the use of stock bricks rather than wire cut ones is such a simple and effective way of improving the appearance of a development that it is puzzling that it has taken so many decades to become common.

The code also has elements that might be in tension with the objective of winning local support for new developments.  At many points throughout the report, traditional detailing is explicitly prohibited: at one point a list of ‘Unacceptable’ elements is provided, including such naughtiness as white-painted doors, fanlights and small-paned windows (p. 40).  ‘“Mock” period styles must be avoided’, the code notes severely.  But – why?  A substantial number of visual preference surveys, together with the revealed preference evidence of the private housing market, suggest that many British people like these things.  If the current push for design coding leads to their being forbidden more often than they already are, the Government may find that it has quite the opposite effect on local support for new developments than the one it hopes for.  

The coming months will see the long-awaited completion of Google’s UK headquarters, an enormous building which slots into the space to the north-west of King’s Cross Station.  Like most of the King’s Cross development, it has considerable urbanistic virtues, respectfully helping to define the plaza to its south, the street to its west, and the canal front to its north.  In this it recalls the wisdom of the Austrian urban designer Camillo Sitte, so grossly neglected in the last century, that buildings should be shaped around public spaces rather than public spaces simply being whatever is left over by the buildings.  The credit for this is due to a partnership between Alliance and Morrison and the classical architect Demetri Porphyrios, who drew up the masterplan of the whole King’s Cross development.

The scaffolding has come off the new ramps on the North Porch of St Paul’s Cathedral. The Surveyor to the Fabric, Oliver Caroe, aimed to show that ‘carefully designed adaptations for accessibility can not only be permitted, but can enhance heritage’.  Years of fundraising, consultation and building have now terminated in brilliant success: two elegant curving ramps, symmetrically disposed around the entrance like the great double stairways of Baroque Italy, faced with Portland stone to match the rest of the facade.  It is curious that such splendid and harmonious additions do not happen more often: ramps surely have no less intrinsic potential for such treatment than stairs do.  Is it just too expensive? Or is it the gloomy doctrine associated with the Venice Charter, that additions to old buildings should be obviously alien in character to avoid ‘falsification’?

Perhaps the ramps could be even better.  The north front of St Paul’s, like all classical architecture, is structured in rectilinear, circular and triangular forms: every element of the facade larger than the detailing is made up of these shapes.  Caroe instead gave his ramps a swooping, sinusoidal geometry.  He also omitted the mouldings that Wren used to visually define the elements of the facade.  Studying the renderings, I was concerned that these features would have the effect of visually alienating the ramps from the rest of the building. In fact, I am not sure they do: this is one of those rare structures that looks better in real life than it did in the architect’s pictures.  In any case, one should not cavil: this is an excellent project, and gives hope that the entrances of other public buildings may be remodelled in a similar spirit.