This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Britain, we are told or tell ourselves, is in the grip of a housing crisis. A rapidly increasing population means that we need to build millions of new homes to keep pace with what appears to be galloping demand.
Britain has, though, been in the grip of a housing crisis pretty much since the Industrial Revolution, when people crammed into towns and cities in search of work and a roof over their heads and our population soared.
What followed is a tale of appalling slums, proliferating suburbs, well-meant attempts to contain and address this sprawl and, today, a contagion of near-identical mass housing abutting long-settled towns and villages and across what were once fields and meadows, eschewing art, craft and architecture, and turning everywhere and anywhere or nowhere in particular into a national cul-de-sac of insensitive design, commuting and cars, with precious little in the way of new industry, jobs and creativity, much less beauty or care of nature.
Is this what we really want? In cities at least, we can choose to build new homes compactly into the sky, question the design of new buildings and intensify public transport, yet in the countryside we opt all too willingly for a low-rise diffusion of more or less identical anodyne catalogue-style homes from the brink of Basingstoke to the borders of Bolton, whilst allowing ourselves to be bamboozled or bullied by ambitious politicians and quangocrats into accepting by a contentious new wave of artless, hot-air-driven “garden villages”. Those who object are labelled Nimbys, standing selfishly in the way of those in need of homes.
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Certainly, the pressure to give in to witless, if often highly lucrative, new development — especially in what survives of rural Britain close to cities — is intense, vehement even. The case of opposition to plans, for example, for Godley Green Garden Village at Hyde to the east of Manchester is instructive.
This unsettlement of 2,150 new homes on 254 acres of the city’s Green Belt has been designed to complete the jigsaw of built-up suburbia stretching between Manchester Piccadilly and the Pennines. These 254 acres — including a farm, a riding school, green lanes and views over fields of untamed Lancashire hills — have been unbuckled from the Green Belt. Local authorities proposing the scheme sing of “sustainable development”, “vision and ethos”, “working with and for nature” and, somewhat vampirically, of working with “stakeholders”, for which, I suppose, we should read eager housebuilders and energy supply companies.
As for objectors, the Leader of the Labour-held Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, Brenda Warrington, made her position to opposition councillors in a manner that would have made Joseph Stalin proud. Reported by BBC News in March 2022, Warrington barked, “I will be on that bulldozer that already starts to dig up ready-to-build houses at Godley Green and believe me it will be rammed down your throat.”
In defence of her bellicose attitude, Warrington said that Tameside was being forced to meet housing targets set by Greater Manchester and central government, encouraging the council to build on Green Belt land.
If approved, the “visionary” garden village would also generate a tell-tale £9m in income for the council. It was as if the farmlands of Hyde were somehow the Garden of Gethsemane and Labour councillors betraying it and those who live there for the equivalent of 30 pieces of silver.
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Whilst Brenda Warrington stood down in May 2022, it should be remembered that when it was first proposed in 2016 the thinking behind Godley Green Garden Village had been Tory government policy. The uncaring spread of new houses across rural England — Britain, too — together with poorly thought-through plans for “sustainable” new “Garden Villages” and “Garden Towns” with the power to undo Green Belts, uproot farmland and belittle local people whilst generating ever more road traffic, is deeply unsettling. Is this really the best we can do?
It does seem absurd — the stuff of blunt satire — to glance at housebuilders’ and estate agents’ brochures or to skim through the seemingly AI-generated clichés of government, local authority and quango reports unabashedly celebrating the age-old joys of long-settled towns, villages and patches of feted countryside that are about to be invaded, degraded and uprooted by their banal new housing schemes.
Whilst writing Where We Live: The Fractured Art of British Housebuilding and How to Build the Homes We Need, I added to the many journeys I have made, especially through parts of rural England I have missed before, turning off along roads to villages saddled uncomfortably with new homes that appear to have been delivered by drones from some central housebuilders’ depot.
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Revisiting Cragside, the wildly romantic and technologically inventive house designed by Norman Shaw for Sir William Armstrong, the Victorian inventor and industrial magnate, set in thousands of Himalayan-like acres within the wider boundaries of the Northumbrian National Park and as far you might think it is possible to get away from “anywhere” homes, here there was no escape; the latest outgrowth, on the edge of Rothbury, the village closest to Cragside, is set cheek-by-jowl with a sign heralding the national park.
Skirting the Suffolk-Norfolk border along the A143 from Bungay to Diss, this green corridor — once a bucolic railway line that gave up the ghost to passengers even before Beeching — is newly interrupted by the construction of an extensive “anywhere” suburban commuter housing development: cul-de-sac triumphant.
I stopped elsewhere in Suffolk at a level crossing for a train calling at Brampton. A single-platform station on the East Suffolk Line with 40 daily passengers, Brampton is one of England’s quietest. The line itself, running from Ipswich to Lowestoft, was saved from closure in 1966 following a spirited campaign led by local people. The track at Brampton crosses a narrow rural lane. Just by the level crossing, though, I spied hoardings concealing a handkerchief of former grazing land about to be built on with out-of-keeping suburban houses. Why here of all places? So that, perhaps, those moving in can catch the train to Ipswich and even on to London on weekdays as if they were living in Metroland?
Further along the lane and across the old London Road, lies Brampton Church of England Primary School. It has around 80 pupils. Directly across from the school, seven acres of arable land are likely to be built over by 48 new houses using “traditional build forms” — renderings show “anywhere” homes — that might put pressure on school numbers. There are no shops to speak of in Brampton, so future residents will need their cars. There are few job opportunities locally, so they will need to commute, yet perhaps not by train; Brampton station has just five parking places.
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It might seem a little unfair to focus on a Suffolk hamlet, yet Brampton’s story is repeated throughout the country. Homes are being shoehorned into any patch of land if someone is willing to sell, a housebuilder is willing to take a risk and a compliant local authority is prepared to rubber-stamp planning permission.
Our history reveals generations of graceful and courteous homes, clusters of houses, villages and market towns complementing their rural settings whether through self-conscious design or by a slow process of vernacular building. We need to learn from these anew.
We need, too, to think of how vacant rural sites, from former military airfields to abandoned quarries, can become the focus of concentrated small towns characterised by the best in terms of architectural design and building skills and underpinned by new industries — real places with a focus, a heart and a purpose. The Duchy of Cornwall’s Poundbury has tried; collectively we need to try that much harder to build intelligently and engagingly into the future.
We need, perhaps, a new Domesday Book of sorts, a survey and ledger of land that we might build on thoughtfully and well, a guide to how our rural shires can accommodate new homes compactly and in tune with nature, although only when these are truly needed beyond the Green Belts of towns and cities.
Mostly, we need to disabuse ourselves of our evident lust for sprawl as we take stock of where we live — whilst taking both ourselves and our reckless governments to task.
