This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I have not been a fan of what the Conservative government did over the last 14 years to the country’s architecture. Whatever may have been their good intentions — and it should not be forgotten that many Conservative MPs are admirers of the late Roger Scruton, who in 2018 was appointed to chair the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission — in practice they were beholden to developers who were party donors.

They gave them as much freedom as possible to knock down old buildings and put up monster new developments designed to attract international firms to London. So, the last 14 years have been disastrous for London.

Outside London, most new housing has been nondescript — standardised and characterless housing developments on the outskirts of towns such as Aylesbury and Cambridge where developers such as Persimmon and Barratt Homes were able to acquire large acres of land without difficult neighbours and then construct tracts of housing, mostly red-brick and vaguely neo-Georgian, without regard for the particularities of location.

The most conspicuous monuments of the last decade are the vast warehouses alongside motorways, built to service online shopping.

The big question following the election is whether the new government is going to be able to do anything better. The Labour manifesto suggested it would construct 1.5 million new homes over five years by building new towns. It has not said where these will be, other than that it will take a strategic view of the green belt.

I hope Labour will resist too much pressure to destroy the green belt, which was created to protect the countryside around cities and has done so remarkably successfully in contrast to other European countries, most obviously Italy where the whole of the Po Valley is disfigured by unplanned light industrial building.

Strangely, I would advocate the government talking to the big landowners to see if there is a way of working creatively with them on new towns. Not surprisingly, landowners are interested in the profitability of new housing developments and take a longer view on return on investment than the average developer, providing the government is willing to fund appropriate infrastructure, including new roads.

There ought to be a way of working with them. It was, after all, the big landed estates who were responsible for the construction of much of 18th century London.

The second pledge in the Labour manifesto was “building more high-quality, well-designed, and sustainable homes”. Again, it did not say how. So the other counter-intuitive policy I would recommend is to encourage more consumer choice in housing — allowing more private house-building, as on the continent — and encouraging smaller new private developments.

If it were possible to liberate planning controls on architect-designed private houses, you might suddenly discover a host of new houses in places you wouldn’t expect, a more interesting way of encouraging new building than getting stuck in debates about where to locate new towns. In Britain, only five per cent of new houses are self-commissioned. In Germany, it is over 50 per cent.

A third issue Labour draws attention to is the mass of new housing developments which are empty because they are bought off-plan by foreign investors. Is it not possible to double or triple the rates for properties which are not occupied, as has been done on holiday homes in Wales?

Most new developments have an element of so-called affordable homes, but this requirement is seldom enforced and often reduced during the course of construction.

In London, there are still large areas of brownfield sites in the east which could be developed by new infill housing on brownfield sites, as is evident in this year’s RIBA London Awards.

Outside London, more could be done to regenerate medium-sized towns. I often visit Caernarfon, an example of a small-scale town with a good, but under-occupied historic centre which has suffered from out-of-town supermarkets destroying the viability of shops in the centre.

In the 1970s there were grants to householders who took on the regeneration of historic properties. Is there not a way that these could be offered again, particularly to first-time buyers? In many foreign cities, there are rate reductions to family-owned shops. Could we not do this?

Keir Starmer has been reticent about making pronouncements on housing policy, as on so much else; but so far as one can tell, his instincts look to be sensible, in fact, far more conservative with a small c, than the free-booting neoliberals who have been in government.

In a conference speech last autumn, Starmer said that he was in favour of Georgian-style homes. If by this he means well-built, properly insulated, two-up, two-down, newly designed terrace housing built at high density to service social need whilst ensuring that there are local shops and doctors’ surgeries nearby, then I suspect he will have support.

The same could apply to six-storey developments, provided they are not too uniform, are architect-designed and have some level of architectural character.

Government is always very constrained in what it can do, not least by the short horizons of the electoral cycle. But it ought to be possible to tweak the system of funding and legislation to support higher quality, smaller-scale and more localised new building development in place of the knock-it-down, build-it-quick ethos which has dominated the Conservative decade.