The gifts of gentle density

The knot of Britain’s problems grows ever more Gordian. We are millions of homes short. Our neighbourhoods fracture. Mutual trust erodes. Productivity growth stagnates. We need to tread more delicately upon the planet. Nationwide, town centres are shuttered and forgotten. Housebuilding is snail-like, snared by our uniquely discretionary and high-risk planning system, overly-dependent on a handful of large firms. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

Gentle density is not just a way of building but a way of living

What should we do? There is no neat solution to our problems. Anyone who says otherwise is selling snake oil. But let me sketch one idea that is part of the solution for the new places which we must create and for the stewardship of existing places which we must improve. It is a necessary step upon the path to more homes and better health and the journey to more neighbourliness and boosted productivity. I call it “gentle density”.

Gentle density is not just a way of building but a way of living. It is the “missing middle” of place-making between the extremes of tower blocks which maximise density on a given plot and detached homes which are popular but very land-hungry. Depending on the precise split of houses and flats, the widths of roads and the size of gardens, gentle density is anything from 40 or 60 homes per hectare (think Wandsworth in London or Clifton in Bristol) to about 175 to 225 homes per hectare (think Pimlico or Earl’s Court).

At its best, gentle density is a network of beautiful streets and squares, of mansion blocks and terraced and semi-detached houses anchored around a village green or a corner shop; tree-lined avenues, streets that children can safely walk along, beautiful houses that cherish and evolve the local vernacular and nestle thoughtfully in the landscape.

What are the gifts of gentle density? The first gift is that we can create more homes on less land. New British greenfield development now averages a density of around 24 dwellings per hectare. On the same amount of land that was used for greenfield development in 2023 we might have built not 112,240 homes but 220,471 homes if we had developed at an historic “gentle density” of, say, 55 homes per hectare instead of 28. Alternatively, we might have built the same number of new homes on much less greenfield, on just over 2,000 hectares instead of just over 4,000 hectares. This is not just good for our landscape but reduces the risk of opposition to new development.

The second gift of gentle density is that in creating new places we can spend less on infrastructure and consequently build more quickly. At Create Streets our report with the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust (previously Sustrans) included a detailed case study in Chippenham. This study showed how by moving from a sprawling to a gentle density urban extension at 55 not 28 homes per hectare, £75m of budget could be freed up from a dual carriageway that was no longer required. Homes closer together require fewer big roads. That matters for clean air as well as cost. Big roads do not just sever places; they concentrate traffic, emissions and exposure, especially for children and for people living closest to the carriageway. In our case study, fewer new roads freed up budget for town centre improvements, a new cycling and active travel network (which in turn cuts car miles and the everyday nitrogen dioxide and particulate pollution that comes with them), car clubs, and support for new shops and a high frequency bus network before the new development had critical mass. In short, it made it possible to create somewhere not anywhere, with cleaner air as well as better streets.

The third gift flows from the second. By creating places in which it is easy and natural to walk and cycle and where daily errands do not require an engine, we can make it simple for residents joyfully and normally to tread more lightly upon the planet and to do so healthily and happily. A neighbourhood in which children can safely cycle to school or their parents to the train station will burn less carbon. It will also be associated with happier and healthier residents. It will mean fewer car trips overall, and therefore less roadside air pollution: fewer tailpipes, less brake and tyre dust, and less idling at junctions. Most of us do not have the time or patience to go to the gym on a daily basis but a daily life in which it is normal and natural to walk and cycle is reliably associated in the research with greater health and lower personal carbon footprints.

The fourth gift of gentle density is the most necessary for helping the British public fall back in love with the future. Done beautifully, gentle density is hugely popular. People love streets with the qualities of Georgian, Victorian, or Edwardian architecture. They love sinuous, humane and interesting places with materials that are local and patterns that vary and rhyme. “Could be anywhere” architecture which gleams and glistens, which ignores local materials and which does not nestle within the landscape is not the settled preference of the British people. No one ever complained that a town had too many squares. People respond more warmly, innately, and organically to streets which have coherent complexity, colour, texture, and whose forms and features mimic, however imperceptibly, some of the curls and swirls of nature. Revealed preference data via pricing and multiple polling studies are clear and consistent. 

Gentle density shows how to improve our left behind towns and cities

What was once a trickle of evidence is now a flood. Poundbury, the long running experiment by the King to create a beautiful and walkable “real place” as opposed to the extremes of ugly traffic-modernism or drive-to cul-de-sacs, now sells for a premium of 55 percent. This is thanks not just to the public’s preferences but to the higher gentle density that people find themselves preferring. This greater sales value in turn makes it easier for the developing landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall to subsidise street trees, high quality public and 33 percent affordable housing within the new town.

Finally, gentle density shows how to improve our left behind towns and cities. It is not normally by big and shiny investments. These may be necessary but unless you improve, intensify, and energise the local town, jobs generated by revived industries will not stick. The problem with most of our poorer towns is not just a lack of jobs but a lack of what we might term “place attraction”. Money may flow in but it will flow out again if there is no reason to stay. One of our litmus tests at Create Streets when we are working in a less prosperous place is to ask our (normally senior) clients where they live. If no one lives in the actual neighbourhood, we know we have a problem. Unless a town centre attracts everyone to want to live and work, it is not functioning.

A town is a place where people wish to come to meet, to converse, to buy, to sell, and to be amused in the process. But too few of England’s town centres, particularly the poorer ones, are places where anyone would choose to be. They have lost their purpose. Left behind towns tend to be lower density and to be unseamed by fast roads. They suffer from big box commercial buildings and surface car parks in the town centre, cutting away at local prosperity and tax take. Among the dozen least prosperous urban neighbourhoods, ten have fast roads running through or along them.

Gentle density therefore teaches us how to grow centripetally not centrifugally, supporting not dissipating local vitality and productivity, restitching towns to be fine grained “Lego towns”, not desensitising them to be crude-gained “Duplo towns”. Streets of gentle density make for better lives and mixed neighbourhoods by use and tenure. They are associated with higher productivity places.

Every left behind town should worry less about the “big bets” that they pay for and more about how they enable change and de-risk the beautiful intensification of existing streets with no planning risk. Local government and landowners should not think of “sustainable regeneration” as something that they do and start thinking of it as something that they enable. The most profound and long-lasting improvements to a place have many authors, not one. Helping abandoned places grow back naturally into the gentle density of real town centres is the easiest path to take.

If we are serious about cleaner air, stronger communities, and more homes with popular consent, we should make gentle density easy to do and hard to block. Two practical reforms would help.

First, councils should use existing mechanisms (such as Local Development Orders) to create fast, rules-based permission for gentle density, street-by-street, where proposals meet a locally-set design code for height, frontage, materials, and greenery. If it fits the code, it should be approved quickly, without costly discretionary risk. This will tilt the balance in favour of new gentle density developments.

Second, councils should stop forcing car-dependence into new homes. End parking minimums in walkable locations and set parking maximums near town centres and stations. Use the road and infrastructure savings from tighter developments to invest in better pavements, safe crossings, cycle routes, and frequent buses. That is how you get the clean air benefits of density in practice, not just in theory.

The post-war politician Iain Macleod wrote, “you cannot ask men to stand on their own two feet if you give them no ground to stand on.” If the rising generation is to be granted home, hope, and happiness then many new homes will need to be built, and many existing towns will need to be renatured and restitched. This will allow us to grow sustainably on less land.

Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? The dystopia of dislocated housing estates, urban dual carriageways and drive-to-retail box land has no answer. If the bad news is that there is no one “quick fix” to productivity and sustainability, the good news is that a key part of the solution is not just good for the planet but good for our souls.