Town & Country Planning Journal – July-August 2024
town & country planning
The Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association
July–August 2024
• Special issue - Colin Ward
• Planning for youth
Volume 93 • Number 4
• Town planning apprentices –a new type of tradesperson?
• Design Matters
In 2024 we’re celebrating 125 years of the Town and Country Planning Association – and the 120th anniversary of Town & Country Planning.
Copies of Town & Country Planning published between 1904 and 2005 are archived and free to view at: archive.tcpa.org.uk.
information and subscriptions
Town & Country Planning
The Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association
ISSN 0040-9960 Published bi-monthly July-August 2024 • Volume 93 • Number 4
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Town & Country Planning
July–August 2024 • Volume 93 • Number 4
regulars features
202 On the Agenda
Fiona Howie: The show must go on
204 Time & Tide
Hugh Ellis & Celia
Davies: The forgotten 500
246 Green Leaves
Danielle Sinnett:
Young people’s access to greenspace is fundamental to the health and wellbeing of us all
249 Legal Eye
Bob Pritchard: A tale of two systems – planning in England and Wales
251 Design Matters
Matthew Carmona: From urban renaissance to Office for Place
207 Special issue: Colin Ward
Ken Worpole
Dennis Hardy
Eileen Adams
Gemma Hyde
Martin Stott
253 125 years of the TCPA: Personal Provocations
Graeme Bell
Frank Rallings
Adam Sheppard
Barbara Norman
Mark Scott
Stephen Potter
Steve Ward
Feature articles
228 More than playgrounds and sports pitches: supporting children and young people’s doing, being and becoming
Graham Marshall and Rhiannon Corcoran share insights from young people in Halton Lea and other recent research initiatives
236 Planning for youth
Nigel Friswell on the implications of the modern planning process for meeting the social needs of children
239 Town planning apprentices – a new type of tradesperson?
John Somers on the movement towards university degree-based apprenticeships
242 Do rural planning authorities have the resources to support affordable housing delivery?
Nick Gallent and Andrew Purves on the resource constraints affecting rural planning authorities in England, and the impacts on building out rural exception sites
Cover illustration by Clifford Harper.
on the agenda
the show must go on
Prior to a general election being called for 4 July, there was much speculation about the possibility of an autumn election, with most pundits expecting the election to be held in November.
Part of that speculation was linked to the expected results of local elections. As the results broadly went as expected, with substantial losses for the Conservative Party, the ‘fall out’ was perhaps less dramatic than it might have been. Despite that, much of the analysis in the national media has focused upon what this might all mean for the looming general election, rather than what the results, including in the mayoral elections, will mean for the future of local places and their communities.
With this focus on the national picture, it is perhaps easy to forget that local government and local planning continues. There is still important work being done and to do, even if there are many known unknowns about the near future. While the TCPA is, therefore, working to influence the thinking at the national level, hard work also continues at the local and community level to support positive action and outcomes. This includes the recent launch by the Association of an e-learning platform on planning for flood risk.¹
The platform was developed in partnership with the Environment Agency and provides a suite of free, online training resources aimed at planners and flood risk professionals working in the public sector. We are clear that flood risk is a critical issue for planners and the courses are designed to support people to develop their knowledge and understanding of the key principles underpinning planning for flood risk, and the application of national policy and guidance.
The Association, as readers will know, has a long history of providing training and advice through events and our publications, but this foray into e-learning is a new experience for us (although I appreciate not new to many, many other
organisations). Further resources will be added to the training platform over time, and we are looking forward to seeing the level of engagement with this new resource.
Spring and summer are also a busy time for Planning Aid for London (PAL).² While PAL is a separate independent charity, we have been fortunate to receive funding from Trust for London for a number of years to employ a project manager dedicated to supporting the revitalisation of the charity, which is focused upon supporting people and communities in London to engage with town planning and development to shape their local environments. This clearly aligns with the Association’s strategic priority of empowering people to have real influence over decisions about their environments.
Part of PAL’s focus is to raise awareness of the role of town planning and why people should engage with local plan processes. To help achieve that the project manager and volunteers have been running several outreach events. This has included stands at local community events such as the Lambeth Country Show and Palmers Green Festival, but also using creative means of engaging people in conversations about their local environment.
TCPA Chief Executive Fiona Howie on key current issues in the policy landscape and the work of the TCPA ART-OPOLY experience in Harrow, London
on the agenda
A fantastic example of this is work in the London Borough of Harrow, which was undertaken with an arts engagement agency called We The Seeds®.³ The agency developed an experience called ‘ART-OPOLY’, which drew inspiration from the classic board game and saw a giant board being set up in the town centre that encouraged participants to ‘reimagine’ Harrow.
Residents rolled the dice, moved around the board and then, depending upon which space they landed on, were asked questions relating to specific elements of the local built environment including ‘travel’, ‘the park’ and ‘home’. PAL collected views and information from over 85 people who played the game and more than 100 people came to talk to those involved on the stand and in the game. The event was held in Harrow because the borough is in the process of developing a new Local Plan.
By using a game, views were sought from people from across the age spectrum – including children. Whilst this was not the focus of the activity for PAL, it does link neatly to the points made in Gemma Hyde’s article later in this edition of the Journal about the significant contributions that Colin Ward made to the TCPA’s community education offer.⁴
Traditional approaches to consultation on Local Plans and planning applications have not been good at asking children, young people and their caregivers what they want and need from their local environment. The youth engagement toolkit, Voice Opportunity Power, published 2020, sought to help address an element of that.⁵ But there is still more to do. I am delighted that, thanks to funding from Sport England, the Association is able to re-engage with Colin Ward’s important legacy and look again at how, through planning and place-making, we might better support children and young people to develop well.⁶
• Fiona Howie is Chief Executive of the TCPA
Notes
1 See: https://learning.tcpa.org.uk
2 See: https://planningaidforlondon.org.uk/
3 See: https://www.wetheseeds.co.uk/
4 See pages 219-222 of this issue of Town & Country Planning
5 See: https://voiceopportunitypower.com/
6 See pages 228-235 of this issue of Town & Country Planning
The TCPA’s vision is for homes, places and communities in which everyone can thrive. Its mission is to challenge, inspire and support people to create healthy, sustainable and resilient places that are fair for everyone.
Informed by the Garden City Principles, the TCPA’s strategic priorities are to:
Work to secure a good home for everyone in inclusive, resilient and prosperous communities, which support people to live healthier lives.
Empower people to have real influence over decisions about their environments and to secure social justice within and between communities.
Support new and transform existing places to be adaptable to current and future challenges, including the climate crisis.
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TCPA policy and projects
Follow the TCPA’s policy and project work on Twitter, @theTCPA and on the TCPA website, at www.tcpa.org.uk
• Affordable housing
• Community participation in planning
• Garden Cities and New Towns
• Healthy Homes Act campaign
• Healthy place-making
• New Communities Group
• Parks and green infrastructure
• Planning reform
• Planning for climate change
time & tide
Hugh Ellis and
Celia
Davis argue for an urgent and comprehensive review of the National Flood Emergency Framework for England
the forgotten 500
In January 2024 the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) revealed a major gap in funding for flood defences in England.¹ The shocking revelation of this report is that of the 2,000 flood defence schemes designed to protect communities at critical risk from flooding, 500 will no longer be funded up to 2027,² with no investment committed after that date. They are, for the indefinite future, cancelled.
The resultant reduction in the overall number of homes that will be protected by the current funding programme is dramatic (200,000 instead of the original 336,000) but to some degree this underplays the wider impacts upon the fate of communities whose long-term development prospects are predicated upon major flood defence investment.
These funding shortfalls will generate economic and social shockwaves because the failure to invest in long-term flood resilience will lead to growing challenges in gaining affordable insurance and dramatically decrease mortgage availability. This has the potential to create a self-reinforcing cycle of decline, which in turn makes local contributions to partnership funding even harder to secure.
Given the gravity of what the PAC report has revealed, it is surprising that there has not been a stronger response from those places most affected.
‘Of the 2,000 flood defence schemes designed to protect communities at critical risk from flooding, 500 will no longer be funded up to 2027’
One reason for this is that, whilst it is known that 500 schemes will not now go ahead in this spending period, the precise location of these cancelled projects has not been revealed.³ One exception to this is the Lowestoft tidal barrier, where this centrepiece of the town’s flood defence infrastructure has fallen victim to the programme’s cuts.
What future for places like Lowestoft?
The example of the Lowestoft tidal barrier reveals in more detail the practical impact on communities of the cancellation of strategic flood defence schemes. These impacts are manifest both in the immediate flood resilience of the community and in the long-term impact of undermining social and economic development. Lowestoft is one of the UK communities most vulnerable to flooding, and both the 1953 and 2013 tidal surges had a dramatic impact on the central areas of the town. In common with many coastal communities, Lowestoft faces very significant challenges around growth and regeneration in the context of increasingly severe climate change impacts.
As with many other communities, the Local Plan adopted in 2019 focuses significant housing growth inside the town as a means to secure regeneration. This includes provision for 1,400 new homes on a waterfront brownfield site in the centre of the town.⁴ The majority of this regeneration site is within ‘Flood Zone 3’ (i.e. an area at high risk of flooding from rivers or the sea) and passed the exception test* by arguing that housing growth was
Rendering of proposed Lowestoft tidal barrier
Council
critical to the town’s regeneration, and that flood mitigation and evacuation measures could be secured to make the development safe over its lifetime.
This is contingent on the delivery of strategic flood defences for the town which consist of new flood walls on the north and south riverbanks, to be connected by a river barrier which would protect the Lake Lothing area from storm surges. However, the development of the flood walls only makes sense in the context of the final development of the barrier. Without the barrier they have only a marginally beneficial effect upon the town's flood resilience.⁵
The flood defence walls were completed in 2023, and planning for the barrier was at an advanced stage when the scheme was effectively cancelled early this year because it was clear that the proposal would fail the partnership agreement funding model, with the local council unable to raise the £124 million funding shortfall caused by the significant increase in construction costs.
In this context there is no prospect of the Lowestoft scheme passing the funding partnership formula which means the future of the barrier and,
by implication, the future of Lowestoft depends upon changing the system of allocating flood defence spending.
Despite this significant impact for the resilience of the town, an outline application for 500 homes on the allocated regeneration site on the south side of the river is expected this summer. In preapplication consultations the developer has stated that the scheme can go ahead despite the barrier not being completed. That position will be extremely difficult to justify given the national policy test to ensure development is safe from flooding over its whole lifetime (100 years for residential development) and that new development should not increase flooding elsewhere (hard to achieve for a scheme reliant upon land raising in Flood Zone 3).
The Local Plan explicitly identifies strategic flood risk investment in Lowestoft as being an important contributing factor to the town’s resilience. It is concerning therefore that the five-year review of the plan conducted in March of this year concluded that there was no need to review Local Plan policy – this despite the cancellation of the barrier, significant changes to national flood risk policy and updates to the climate change flood risk allowances.
Lake Lothing, Lowestoft
Google Earth
On top of the obvious unlikeliness of local authorities being capable of raising vast sums of additional cash in times of austerity, the PAC report has found other problems with the partnership funding model. Firstly, because the cost benefit analysis is based upon the number of homes protected, the formula is skewed to larger urban areas, meaning that smaller rural communities miss out. Secondly, it does not fully reflect the costs and benefits to the wider community beyond those properties directly impacted by flood defences, and nor does it fully reflect the costs of managing decline if schemes do not go forward. Thirdly, and perhaps most strikingly in the case of Lowestoft, the formula does not recognise the potential economic benefits of new development which might be facilitated by new flood defence schemes.⁶
An urgent need for review
The Lowestoft case study illustrates some well understood and systemic problems in how we plan for climate resilience. It is now clear that the framework⁷ put in place after the Pitt Review⁸ is not fit for purpose and a further comprehensive review is now urgent.
Of course, it must be acknowledged that the impact of construction inflation (which ran as high as 28% in 2022) and other factors contributing to rising costs are challenging to manage. But the social and economic impacts of leaving so many communities vulnerable to flooding will be vast in the long term. There is an urgent need to understand the implications of the 500 cancelled flood defence schemes, but this will remain opaque until Defra and the Environment Agency publish their modelling and show which communities will be affected. We can, however, extrapolate from the one place where we do understand the existential impacts upon the social and economic future of that community. Faced with the ever-growing risk of a North Sea storm surge, rising sea levels, and with no realistic prospect of a funding solution for the barrier, the future of the town of Lowestoft is frankly bleak.
It is clear that the social, economic and cultural prospects of whole communities cannot rest on the failings of a simplistic funding formula. The fate of communities must be guided by strategic decisions and transparent conversations about which communities national government intends to defend, and which will have to be relocated.
• Dr Hugh Ellis is Director of Policy and Celia Davis is a Projects and Policy Manager at the TCPA. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 Resilience to flooding. HC 71. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, 17 Jan. 2024. https:// committees.parliament.uk/publications/42888/ documents/213370/default/
2 The figure of 500 comes from evidence given by Philip Duffy, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency to the Public Accounts Committee.
3 This is despite a number of parliamentary questions seeking further information about the impact. For example, UIN 20753 submitted by Emma Hardy MP on 26 March 2024. https://members.parliament.uk/ member/4645/writtenquestions?page=2# expand-1699099
4 Waveney Local Plan. East Suffolk Council, 20 Mar. 2019. https://www.eastsuffolk.gov.uk/assets/Planning/ Waveney-Local-Plan/Adopted-Waveney-Local-Planincluding-Erratum.pdf
5 The flood risk assessment for the Lowestoft tidal wall and barriers states: ‘flood extents are very similar to the do nothing/ minimum but with a slight decrease in flood extent in the harbourside area and with significant reduction in flooding in the area north of Hamilton Road (as expected)…’.
Flood Risk Assessment: Lowestoft Flood Walls and Barrier DRAFT pending surface water discussions, Document Version: 5, Document Number: CRM72114JAC-00-300-RP-MO-0001-S1-P05. Jacobs, Jun. 2020, p. 30. https://www.eastsuffolk.gov.uk/assets/Environment/ Coastal-Management/Lowestoft-Tidal-Barrier-TWAO/ Planning-statement-and-appendices/Appendix-1.pdf
6 Calculate GiA funding for FCERM projects. External guidance LIT 58360, Environment Agency, 5 Oct. 2023. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ media/651e6d59e4e658000d59d9a4/LIT_58360_ Calculate_GiA_funding_for_FCERM_projects.pdf
7 The National Flood Emergency Framework for England. PB 14238. Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, Dec. 2014. https://assets.publishing. service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/388997/pb14238-nfef-201412.pdf
8 Learning lessons from the 2007 floods. The Pitt Review, Cabinet Office, 25 Jun. 2008. https://webarchive. nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20100702215619/http:// archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/pittreview/thepittreview/ final_report.html
Editor’s Note: *For development proposals located within Flood Zones 2 and 3, an applicant for planning permission must submit a sequential site assessment, the purpose of which is to ensure that development is located in areas of lowest flood risk first. This is sometimes referred to as a 'sequential test'. If the sequential test is passed (i.e. no sequentially more prefereable site is available), then a further assessment must be undertaken to demonstrate that the benefits of the proposal would outweigh the risks associated with building on an area at risk of flooding. This is called the 'exception test'.
Special issue: Colin Ward
Colin Ward
In this special issue we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Colin Ward. Colin was the conscience of the TCPA throughout the 1970s and, as an anarchist, uniquely shaped the way in which the TCPA engaged with its audiences.
It was, in particular, Colin’s ability to appreciate and articulate the relationship between the marginalised - be they child, homeless person, allotmenteer, hobbyist, plotlander, free miner, or indeed anarchist - and the city as a physical expression of State power and control that made his work as the TCPA’s education officer so uniquely influential and successful.
Today we might add to the list of the marginalised the freerunner, the gig economy worker and the economic migrant.
A new generation is coming to appreciate Colin’s work and his unique perspective on education, engagement with the State and the limits of personal freedom and choice within
the highly regulated social space in which town and country planning operates.
To what extent this renewed emphasis upon and appreciation of Colin’s life, politics and work will influence this new generation and shape the future of the TCPA we must wait to see.
In the meantime, this special issue celebrates Colin’s life and work and my personal thanks go out to those who have contributed articles and, in particular, to Colin’s son, Ben, for supplying some very evocative images.
• Philip Barton is editor of Town & Country Planning
Colin Ward, 1992
Estate of Colin Ward
the house that colin built
In a letter Colin Ward sent to me in June 2005, as always paper-clipped to an article he had read that might interest me, Colin commented on an interview he had heard on BBC Radio 4 that morning. A woman dietician had spoken enthusiastically about the historic ‘healthy diet’ of Mediterranean peasants despite, in her words, living in ‘an impoverished rural world living by hard labour on the land’. Colin’s comment was customarily laconic – he could never be unpleasant or rude: ‘In fact, of course, they left by the million, just to eat’.
Colin Ward was not a romantic about everyday life, nor self-deluding as to how an anarchist approach might be the answer to all life’s difficulties. Sceptical about grand plans or revolutionary démarches – as Eileen Adams, Dennis Hardy, Gemma Hyde and Martin Stott testify in the following essays – he believed that new ways of living usually emerged from marginal locations and dispositions. In the former case these included: plotland communities on cheap agricultural land, bombsite playgrounds, amateur music-making societies (Martin Stott’s reference to Jeff Bishop’s
and Paul Hoggett’s seminal study Organising Around Enthusiasms: Patterns of Mutual Aid in Leisure is a wonderful reminder), housing cooperatives, cycling clubs, primary and secondary school curriculum initiatives (where ‘lower-status’ teachers were give a degree of freedom), and refuges and refugee programmes. In short, wherever cracks appeared in the edifices. Rather like Richard Mabey’s beloved ‘weeds’ – Mabey was one of Colin’s protégés – it is often out of place migrants that have the tenacity to outwit the conventional order of things.
Ward’s emphasis on the needs of children, highlighted by Gemma Hyde, is more urgent than ever; Hyde noting the scarcity of reference to children in the National Planning Policy Framework. Were he still alive, Colin would have soon noted the current pushback against low traffic neighbourhoods and the 20-minute city by the car lobby, anxious not to cede any further territory to the pedestrian, cyclist or advocates of street play and the child’s ‘right to the city’.
The work that Eileen Adams did with Colin at the TCPA which produced Art and the Built Environment was ahead of its time and astonishingly prescient. Who would have thought that artists would have ended up in the vanguard of urban studies and urban renewal, with walking now a principal modus operandi of urban enquiry, long before the psycho-geographers arrived on the scene. Finally, it is wonderful to read the warm tribute by Dennis Hardy to his old friend and colleague. The work of both Colin and Dennis have shaped my own thinking to an immeasurable extent, and it is impossible to better Dennis’s tribute to Colin: ‘He gave in life more than he took’.
• Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, whose work includes many books on architecture, landscape and public policy. Ken has served on the UK government’s Urban Green Spaces Task Force, on the Expert Panel of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and as an adviser to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. He was a founder member of the Demos think-tank and of Opendemocracy.
Colin Ward, 1954
Estate of Colin Ward
colin ward: the ‘one off’ changemaker
Dennis Hardy reflects on the life, achievements and legacy of his friend and mentor
Colin Ward was a ‘one off’. As befits someone whose name is synonymous with anarchism, there is no fitting him into conventional categories. In the words of one of his many admirers, Carl Levy:
‘Ward was the product of a Britain that no longer exists, where a lower-middle or working-class individual could progress into a professional and intellectual career, without having pursued a university degree’.¹
One can tinker with various permutations of nature and nurture to explain character formation but nothing in his early upbringing tells of what was to come. Colin was born in 1924 in Wanstead, an inauspicious suburb in north-east London. His father, Arnold, was a primary school teacher and his mother, Ruby, a shorthand typist. They were both Labour Party supporters and one can imagine that Colin’s birth in the year of the party’s first national government was a cause for special celebration.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) what proved to be his innate abilities, he was not at all inspired by his time at the prestigious Ilford County High School and left at the age of 15. One can imagine that his teachers had little hope that he would achieve much, and it is telling that his name is not presently included in an online list of notable alumni. His first job was as a builder’s mate, but it was not long before he joined Sidney Caulfield’s architectural firm as a draughtsman. This is where pointers to his future began to show. Caulfield was not only head of architecture at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, but he also designed several buildings in Hampstead garden suburb. The connections were starting to come together.
In 1942, at the age of 18, Colin was called up to serve in the army, and was soon sent to a posting in Scotland. Wars create their own ferment of ideas (and much else besides), and it seems that on visits into Glasgow he was attracted to meetings of anarchists where the ethics of violence and the rationale of a ‘just war’ were questioned. In due course he was called as a witness in a trial where a number of anarchists were accused of spreading pacifist ideas and disaffecting troops. Following that, he was swiftly despatched to the distant Orkneys (presumably where it was thought he could do no harm). By then, though, anarchism was already in his blood, and he remained a leading advocate for the cause for the rest of his life.
Colin Ward cementing in a chimney pot, 1954
Estate of Colin Ward
Special issue: Colin Ward
When the Second World War ended, Colin picked up his career as a draughtsman, gaining experience with firms specialising in the design of schools and municipal housing. His job put bread on the table, but he would return home in the evenings to deal with correspondence and paste-up pages as contributing editor (1947-1960) for Freedom² and then as editor of Anarchy (1961-1970). His only formal education after school came in the mid-1960s, when he qualified as a further education teacher. This led, in turn, to his appointment as education officer for the TCPA in 1971, where he edited the inspirational Bulletin of Environmental Education
After that, he worked freelance as a much sought-after anarchist writer and speaker, with his reputation spreading not only in this country but internationally. Words were his thing – writing, editing, and reading, not to mention the art of penmanship (his lettering was a constant source of delight in itself). With his portable typewriter he was forever putting the finishing touches to an assignment, then hurrying to the nearest post-box to send it on its way. I never knew him to miss a deadline. There was always a book in his jacket pocket and, as a non-driver, time spent waiting for buses was never wasted. His was not a world of laptops, electronic mail, and mobile phones, which makes his prolific output based on more traditional methods all the more remarkable. But it is the freshness of his writing rather than sheer quantity which makes revisiting his work so rewarding.
A short article can hardly do justice to a lifetime of achievement but, fortunately, his work has already attracted numerous eulogies that more than adequately tell the story. In the rest of this piece, I am trying to do something a little different. It was my own great pleasure and privilege to work with Colin on several projects and to come to know him as a friend as well as mentor. On that basis, the following offers just a few insights into who he was as a person as well as a household name in the world of anarchism.
‘Teachers around the country welcomed his writings and encouraged visits to their classrooms as a breath of fresh air’
Rethinking education
Colin was an original thinker and people-centred writer. While keeping a watchful eye on the politics of education, his focus was always upon the child in the classroom and at play. One only had to see him interact with his own son and friends, chuckling at their actions but never intervening. The anarchist
approach to education, he once said, is grounded not in a contempt for learning but in a respect for the learner. He drew ideas from fellow anarchists like his old friend and collaborator, Paul Goodman, and the urban theorist, Lewis Mumford, as well as earlier exemplars such as William Godwin and Michael Bakunin. But always he looked for practical experience as well, forging links with Spanish dissenters of the fascist Franco government, and college protesters in the United States of America during the 1960s.
When he joined the TCPA as its education officer, his presence was felt in a positive way throughout the organisation. His ideas were always positive yet never imposed; simply by being there he enriched the lifeblood of a body which had its own origins in the proposals of another gentle reformer, Ebenezer Howard. Teachers around the country welcomed his writings and encouraged visits to their classrooms as a breath of fresh air.
Regaining control
His work was all about finding ways to give people of all ages a new sense of control over their lives. Sometimes - given that it was once commonplace to have a hand in building one’s own home – it was a question of rediscovering lost skills. This is what attracted him to the interwar experience of ‘plotlanders’ – people who seized the chance to buy cheap land at a time of an agricultural depression and create their own communities. In a short but influential article, A borrowed pound, he told the story of a doughty East Ender, Elizabeth Granger, who in 1932 borrowed a pound as a down-payment on two plots of land (costing £5 each) on former farmland in Laindon, Essex.³ Her husband was the caretaker for a block of council flats and on his weekly day off the couple took a train from London to build their own bungalow. They made use of an army surplus bell tent while the work was underway and, with money earned by renting out the tent at other times to boys from their estate, they bought essential materials.
Colin Ward with his son, 1973
Estate of Colin Ward
Special issue: Colin Ward
Brick by brick the bungalow took shape and, when Mr Granger was transferred to nearby Dagenham, the family moved into their self-built home. Over time, they made further moves, financed each time through the growing value of what they then owned. And all on the basis of the borrowed pound. As Mrs Granger later reflected: ‘We never had a mortgage for any of them. I feel so sorry for young couples these days, who don’t get the kind of chance we had.’
Mrs Granger’s was a story writ large at the time but stifled after 1945 by an unsympathetic planning system. The plotlands, it must be said, were also a victim of their own success, with rising land and property values pricing newcomers out of the market.
Forever campaigning
Colin was certainly not the kind of person who would thrust a copy of a political magazine in front of you in a crowded shopping centre. Instead, he let his words do the talking, adding to his stock of writings probably every day of his life in response to requests and also because he was fired by personal enthusiasm to do so. I recall that while we were collecting information on the plotlands he said how much he wanted to tell the story of the squatting movement. He saw obvious parallels between self-build solutions and past attempts to secure a small piece of land or deserted property in the countryside. The outcome, in due course, was a book, Cotters and Squatters: The hidden history of housing,⁴ published by a sympathetic follower of Colin’s work, Ross Bradshaw.
In marking a century since his birth, the problem for a contributor is not a paucity of source material but its very abundance. I doubt if writing comes easily to anyone, but it always seemed that Colin could sit in front of his typewriter and words would flow. It is so much easier to write with a computer, with its various tools like ‘cut and paste’, but Colin seemed to manage perfectly well with what he
had. Occasionally, one could see a literal ‘cut and paste’ on a page, or a careful use of correcting fluid, but usually he would get it just right first time.
Mingling with great minds
Returning to Carl Levy’s observation at the start of this piece, the day has gone (or at least is more difficult to find) when someone could make their way in a professional world without a higher education qualification. One of the things that always impressed me with Colin was the ease with which he would exchange views with some of the leading intellectuals in his field and, in turn, how much they enjoyed his company and responded to his views. Colin would often speak, for instance, about the late Professor Ray Pahl, with whom he shared ideas on links between town and country, urbs et rure.⁵ Likewise, I know that Sir Peter Hall, geographer, and planning theorist, was a great friend and admirer of Colin’s work. Peter and I made a journey to Suffolk to spend the day with Colin, then in declining health, and his always welcoming and supportive wife, Harriet. Our time was imbued with warmth and various anecdotes were cheerfully recalled. That was the last time we saw Colin. Eulogies can too often be a pain to read, treacly and overdone. But I sense that everyone who has written about Colin has done so from the heart. He was genuinely a good person. He gave in life more than he took. His influence was immeasurable. As I say at the beginning, he was a ‘one off’, embodying the very best of a philosophy that puts people first. Politicians, please take note.
• Emeritus Professor Dennis Hardy is an urban planner who studied at University College London. He joined the Greater London Council and gained a PhD from the London School of Economics. He subsequently became a fellow of the Royal Town Planning Institute and was a lecturer in social science and urban planning at Middlesex University.
3 C Ward: ‘Lost freedoms in housing’. New Society, 12 May 1977. Partly reprinted as ‘A borrowed pound’, Bulletin of Environmental Education, 1978
4 P Barker: ‘Cotters and Squatters: housing's hidden history, by Colin Ward’. Webpage. Independent, 17 Jul. 2002. https://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/reviews/cotters-and-squattershousing-s-hidden-history-by-colin-ward-184692.html
5 RE Pahl: Urbs in rure: the metropolitan fringe in Hertfordshire. London School of Economics and Political Science – Geographical Papers No. 2, 1964. Available at: https://archive.org/details/ urbsinruremetrop0000pahl/page/n5/mode/2up
Colin Ward, 1992
Estate of Colin Ward
working with ward
Eileen Adams recounts how working with Colin Ward in the 1970s on the curriculum development project, Art and the Built Environment had a seminal influence on her work. Experiential learning, sense of place, built environment education, intelligence of feeling, critical study, young people’s participation in environmental change and interprofessional collaboration in education are all themes that have recurred in her subsequent research and development projects
Briefcase encounter
My first encounter with Colin Ward in 1974 was through the pages of the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) (see box), which he edited as Director of the Education Unit at the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA). I was an art teacher at Pimlico School in London, engaged in Front Door, a research project designed to consider how architects might work with teachers to develop awareness of the built environment.
This was a collaboration between the Royal College of Art, the Greater London Council’s Architects Department and the school. One of the architects gave me copies of BEE, and I was delighted and shocked to find that many of the ideas concerning the relationship between art and the built environment with which I had struggled were explored within its pages. Imagine my surprise when Tom Unwin, a pupil at the school, asked if he could interview me to write an article.
Colin arranged to meet me to find out more about the project. In preparation for this, I borrowed from Pimlico library all of the books I could find that he had written. He arrived at my flat carrying a heavy briefcase, which he promptly emptied onto the floor, so that copies of the same books tumbled out as presents for me. When he spotted my pile of books, he immediately put his back in the briefcase. I was too shy to explain that mine were only on loan, and I would have to return them to the library.
Over the next few years, I experienced more of Colin’s kind and generous nature.
Art and the Built Environment project
Colin’s interest in the contribution that art and design could make to environmental education was further developed in 1976, when the Schools Council invited him to direct Art and the Built Environment (ABE), a curriculum development
project which sought:
‘to develop in pupils a feel for the built environment, to enhance their capacity for discrimination and their competence in the visual appraisal of the built environment; and to evolve and disseminate generally applicable techniques and methods for achieving these objectives’.
Colin encouraged me to apply for the job of project officer. I attended the interview after travelling on the overnight train from Dartington, where I had mounted an exhibition of the Front Door work from Pimlico School. Colin directed the questioning accordingly, and I talked excitedly and animatedly about the project, the value of the work, the importance of disseminating the results of experimental work and the necessity of engaging teachers in research and development. I got the job. In the ABE project, we were primarily concerned with extending the role of the art teacher within environmental education. Our aims – namely encouraging a subjective response and the development of pupils’ critical skills – were also central to the aims of art education, where the importance of sensory experience was stressed; emotional response and discriminatory skills were developed, and students were offered alternative means of perception. An affective¹ approach to study was valued, and the relationships between the world of the self and the world of objects was continually explored.
We shared an office with Tony Fyson, Colin’s deputy, on the mezzanine balcony above the TCPA editorial office. Some days the space fairly hummed with activity – a busy, noisy and stimulating atmosphere with different conversations going on across the room; calls up to and down from the balcony; visitors coming and going; loud phone conversations; the clickety click of Colin’s
typewriter, and the chink of coffee mugs. Working with Colin was a partnership. He was concerned with why and what we were doing and created strong arguments for environmental education to develop a concern for aesthetic and design quality. I was preoccupied with how we might achieve our aims and contributed my experience of art and design education from my perspective as a teacher. Colin placed our ideas in a theoretical context: I focused on the practicalities of approaches to study. Colin introduced the ideas of geographers, planners, architects, and illustrators – one issue implied that Kate Greenaway² had inspired the Essex Design Guide! I encouraged teachers to create their own study methods to nurture pupils’ aesthetic and design awareness and develop critical skills in relation to environmental appraisal: art teachers needed to have a creative input and were more likely to be influenced by other teachers.
Our work involved visits to schools, in-service courses for teachers, speaking at conferences and writing articles for journals and magazines. We produced newsletters and bulletins and created special issues of BEE to disseminate the project’s ideas. As Colin’s approach to producing a monthly magazine was literally the cut and paste method, I learnt a lot about desk-top publishing using scissors and cow gum before the advent of computers. At meetings in the trial schools, teachers were keen to explain how they treated the environment as a subject for artmaking whilst Colin patiently introduced notions of looking at the environment not only as an artist, but also as a critic or designer.
At courses and conferences, Colin would often introduce the topic with a reference to being in Barlinnie Gaol (see image on page 224) to shock the audience into attention; then adopt his usual lecturing style, producing strong arguments for art education to embrace environmental study, and challenging art teachers to try new approaches. Through involvement in various committees, we attempted to influence education policy and examinations. A key aspect of the work that we took forward from Front Door was the idea of architects and planners collaborating with teachers to devise suitable study methods. To support this, we invited environmental professionals to work on in-service courses with teachers. This led to a nationwide network of inter-professional working parties that was very successful in establishing this area of study in schools.
At that time, art teachers did not use textbooks or follow a prescribed curriculum but had the professional freedom to develop their own approaches. They based work upon their particular interests and adopted or adapted ideas from artists’ work. Our final publication, Art and the Built Environment: A Teacher’s Approach provided arguments and study methods that teachers could cheerfully select or reject until they were able to subsume them into their own practice.³
The book was written, not in the TCPA office, but at Colin’s home in Suffolk. He had only recently moved into the old cottage, but the first room to be organised was his study in the back garden, previously the coal shed, but now a cosy retreat with bits of pre-loved furniture and examples of do-it-yourself construction. His desk was a door laid on top of piles of his books, my desk a card table and my chair was one that had seen better days in the garden. Colin’s typewriter was broken, so we had to use the small, portable typewriter that I had been given for my 14th birthday. At my side were boxes of rotting apples. I understand that their smell improves one’s mood, prevents panic attacks and inspires creativity – they certainly worked in my case! The smell of the apples, the buzz of the bees and the heat of the summer days lulled us into a gentle doze in the early evening, and Harriet, Colin’s wife, * had to shout loudly to call us in for supper. In his previous house, Colin’s study was also in the garden, in a shed with an electricity supply. When Colin failed to turn up for a meal, Harriet would turn off the electricity supply to warn him that it was time to stop work.
Generosity of spirit
Colin was something of a magpie, collecting information, references, quotes, songs and doggerel from many different sources, which he cheerfully shared with colleagues, audiences and readers. One source was a letter my father had
Colin Ward and Tony Fyson at the TCPA, c.1975
Estate of Colin Ward
sent to me about his childhood home. I knew that Colin would be interested in the account of living in a tenement in Greenock, so I read it aloud. It was promptly purloined by Colin, together with a photo from my album for an issue of BEE on family history. I had not sought permission for the letter to be published, and my father was shocked to see it in print. However, he was also delighted that he was now a published author, and promptly ordered 15 more copies of the magazine to send to brothers, sisters, and cousins.
‘
His good nature and good humour ensured that he was a delightful colleague to work with’
Colin’s reputation as a pundit meant that he was often consulted by researchers, writers, reporters, organisations and institutions for information and advice. I benefited from the fall-out from many of these contacts. For example, in 1978 the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA) invited Colin to a week-long seminar in Sèvres. He passed the letter to me: ‘France’, he said, ‘that’s abroad: that’s your department’. This was my first foreign assignment. This and other contacts with INSEA resulted in recommendations being made to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the relationship between art education and environmental education.
Another invitation came from a television producer to contribute to research for a programme on the Pompidou Centre. Again, Colin explained that he did not travel abroad, but volunteered my services as a consultant to accompany the producer to Paris. In my view, I contributed little to planning the programme, but I did learn that toilets produced by a French manufacturer were chosen because those produced by the British and Germans failed the tests. I wonder: what were those tests?
Freedom and responsibility
Colin was a wonderful friend and mentor, kind-hearted, funny, compassionate, and wise. Working with him was an intense experience. His antipathy to coercive authority was evident in his management style, which could be described as inspirational, charismatic, collaborative, consultative, participative and laissez-faire. He did not direct the project so much as encourage and inspire and was more liable to give hints and suggestions than to issue directives. He was happy to listen to all my bright ideas while he smoked and typed about something completely different, ready to agree to suggestions, and content to pass on any
responsibility that he could, while being prepared to dig me out of any hole that I might have fallen into. His good nature and good humour ensured that he was a delightful colleague to work with – ready with an anecdote, a quote, or a burst of song. He was very funny and made me laugh! His humanity shone through in his dealings with everyone. I always had great admiration, respect, and love for Colin. It is not often one can say that about the boss (I use that word advisedly). Working with him influenced my perception of the world; how I think, and how I work. There was a lot of sideways learning involved: he would casually push a book under my nose; or mention an author; or make an off-hand remark; or place me in an unfamiliar situation, or set me a challenge. I knew that he would defend or rescue me if I were in trouble. As a friend, he was always positive, encouraging, and supportive, though he did say that as he grew older, he would get up in the morning as an optimist but go to bed as a pessimist.
Legacy
Working with Colin impacted profoundly on my subsequent work, which was based on the action research model established in the Front Door and ABE projects:
‘‘Teachers are being asked to develop a critical stance to their own work, and colleagues are asked to share their experience so that others might learn from it.’ ³
This included:
• developing a national network of inter-professional working parties of teachers, architects and planners;
• researching the use, management and design of school grounds in the Learning through Landscapes project, and
• promoting drawing as a means of study through The Campaign for Drawing.
I am not on my own: Colin has influenced a generation of educators around the world.
• Eileen Adams is an international freelance researcher, educator, author and filmmaker. She continues to be influenced by Colin Ward, who described their work as ‘a lever for educational change and a vehicle for the empowerment of the child’.
3 E Adams, C Ward: Art and the Built Environment: A Teacher’s Approach. Longman for the Schools Council, 1982
*Editor’s Note: Sadly, Harriet Ward died on 14 June 2024.
BULLETIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION
1976-1979
During the three years when the Art and the Built Environment project was based at the TCPA, a number of issues of the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) explained ideas underpinning the project and reported on work in progress.
BEE 68 Experiencing Townscape (December 1976)
This was devised by Keith Wheeler, chairman of the project’s consultative committee. Methods were set out as a series of experiences such as steeplechasing, townscape notation and building assessment profiles. The project was aimed at art teachers, but these approaches did not prove popular, as they seemed too prescriptive and rooted in geography teaching.
BEE 72 Sensing the Environment (April 1977)
Brian Goodey was invited to share approaches designed to enlarge aesthetic awareness. The sensory walk proved popular, but the ‘streetometer’ left art teachers cold.
BEE 73 An Approach to the Appraisal of Buildings (May 1977)
Although disappointed at the use of the stereotype image of the teacher on the cover of BEE, I was pleased to see the question of building appraisal tackled by Jeff Bishop, who focused on the criteria for judgement in his CRIG analysis: context, routes, interface and grouping.
BEE 78 Art and the Built Environment (October 1976)
More popular with art teachers were case studies of work in schools, set in the context of current issues in art education. This issue compared the use of the environment as a stimulus for artwork with treating the environment as a subject for critical study.
BEE 83-89 The House that Jack Built (August/ September 1978)
Colin Ward prepared the material for The House
That Jack Built, which took the work of a number of artists and examined their assumptions about the urban scene. He drew parallels between the work of Kate Greenaway and the Essex Design Guide
BEE 94 A Townscape Appraisal by Hampshire Teachers (February 1979)
This issue, reporting on an in-service course with teachers, architects and planners in Hampshire, proved to be very popular with art teachers, as study techniques could be easily adapted for pupils in schools.
BEE 96 Front Door (April 1979)
This issue was a reprint of Front Door News first published as a broadsheet by the Greater London Council Architects Department in 1976. It was very popular with teachers, who appreciated the many examples of pupils’ work.
BEE 98 A Rainy Day in Derbyshire (June 1979)
This issue was based on an in-service course for teachers in Derbyshire. Approaches to study and strategies for critical appraisal could be adapted for use in schools.
BEE 102 Art and the Built Environment Travelling Exhibition (October 1979)
The final issue, BEE 102, was a catalogue of a travelling exhibition prepared to disseminate the project’s ideas. It comprised 30 A2 size laminated panels and was lent to teachers and lecturers through the network of Schools Council regional collection centres and information centres in England and Wales.
Art and the Built Environment newsletter no. 19, pp. 2
Art and the Built Environment newsletter no. 19, pp. 3
missing presence –reflecting on the child in the city
Gemma Hyde explains why, rather than being nothing more than a harmless nostalgic indulgence, Ward’s writings
about ‘the child’ are of crucial
relevance today
I admit that prior to this year I was unaware of Colin Ward, especially his time as an education officer with the TCPA, and his work exploring how people
engage with and influence their environments. Nor had I read The Child in the City, despite my interest in the relationship between children, young people* and the built environment. Furthermore, little did I expect Ward’s insights from 1978 to resonate with me so much.
The Child in the City carefully explores and exposes the world of childhood, the ability of children to counter adult-based intentions and interpretations of the built environment and proposes that the right way to judge a city, or any planning scheme, should be through what it delivers for children.¹ Writing in the late 1970s Ward’s work covers so many contemporary issues around children, young people and where they live, including the differing needs and rights of girls and young women in public space; the exclusion of children and young people from decision making about the places in which they live; the impacts of poverty and deprivation on life outcomes, and the continued failure of planners and designers to consider children at all in the planning and designing of places.
What Ward delivers through the book is powerful, challenging and sadly depressing because the conditions and barriers he outlines have not really shifted since the book was written 46 years ago. We are not planning, designing, building and delivering spaces and places where children and young people have equal opportunities to thrive.
The Child in the City opens with a question: ‘Is it true, as very many people believe it to be true, that something has been lost in the relationship between children and their environments?’
Colin Ward’s far-sighted work
And despite the intervening years since publication, the answer from myself and many others is, I think, the same. Yes. Something has been lost, and something needs to change.
My ‘yes’ is partly based upon the avalanche of statistics telling me how unhappy and unhealthy our children are:
• One in five young people aged 8 to 25 has a probable mental disorder, this is up to four pupils in an average secondary classroom. This is a substantial increase from 2017, when prevalence stood at about one in eight.²
• Girls are twice as likely as boys to have a probable mental health disorder in adolescence compared with boys. Although rates are similar in childhood, prevalence begins to diverge in adolescence and the gap widens with age.²
• In England, one in three children leaving primary school is overweight, with one in five living with obesity. Children resident in the most deprived parts of the country are more than twice as likely to be living with obesity than those in the least deprived areas.³
• 53% of children and young people (3.9 million) do not meet the chief medical officer's guidelines of taking part in sport and physical activity for an average of 60 minutes or more every day.⁴
• Only 22% of children and young people in England believe their views are important to the adults who run the country, whilst under one half of teenagers believe they have the power to influence the issues they care about.⁵
‘Something has been lost, and something needs to change’
We have all been children. Childhood, unlike so many other types of life experience is universal, and it is difficult not to compare our experiences to those we observe children now having. It is of course extremely easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses, with ‘memory and myth’ about what it was like to inhabit the streets and neighbourhoods of our times, but equally it is a powerful catalyst for action.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary select committee inquiry on children, young people and the built environment⁶ in January of this year, I was struck by how many of the interactions between the inquiry participants were framed through reflections by the MPs on their own childhood experiences. For example, Ian Byrne, MP:
‘When you are talking, I am just thinking back. In the summer, we used to have a car park that would be a tennis court, a cricket field or a football pitch. Everybody would play out in the street on it. That was where you would go.’
Designing in opportunities for free play
Or this from Clive Betts MP (Committee Chair): ‘I am also starting to regress back and think about my own experience – it was a long time ago – of playing football and cricket in the street. At that time, the only time we had to stop for a few minutes was when the ice cream van arrived because it was the only vehicle we saw all day.’
There is a danger of course of giving in to nostalgia, but these memories and the sense that something has changed, and not for the better, can act as a catalyst, not to return us to the ‘good old days’ but to stop, to think again and ask afresh to children, young people and their care-givers: what do you want? What do you need? What would bring you back to the city, the streets? Because we no longer see children, no longer hold space for them, no longer invite them to explore the spaces and streets that make up their neighbourhoods. They are a missing presence, and we are all suffering for it.
How the child sees the city
Ward states that ‘the child’s world is full of miracles’. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure/ pain of walking anywhere with a toddler can relate
Henry Ren, Unsplash
to the levels of fascination that sticks, puddles, cracks in the pavement, bollards, kerbs and ditches can evoke. Textures, changes in ground levels, paths and boundaries are all physically close to a young child, and present opportunities for interaction, risk, learning and development. The Bernard Van Leer Foundation’s Urban95 initiative⁷ communicates this through the core question: ‘If you could experience the city from 95cm - the height of a healthy 3-year-old - what would you change?’. They have developed three lessons for toddler-friendly cities including that ‘think babies’ should be a universal design principle which is likely to create spaces and environments that ultimately work for everyone. This is similar to the 8 80 Cities⁸ approach where place shaping is ‘guided by the simple but powerful idea that if everything we do in our cities is great for an 8 year old and an 80 year old, then it will be better for all people’.
Both approaches speculate, like Ward, that there are ways to create places and spaces where the relationships between people and their environments can be more fruitful and enjoyable to all when the needs of children and young people are embraced. And yet, in English planning policy, and too often in practice, children and young people are not mentioned and not considered. In the main
body of the National Planning Policy Framework⁹ for England, children are mentioned only once – in relation to providing housing for families. The words ‘youth’ and ‘young’ are entirely absent.
There is a void in national policy and direction, and so it is not surprising that local planning policy so often fails to address the needs of children and young people. The government is failing to take a lead, despite the wealth of evidence to suggest that the built environment is a key determinant of health. For children and young people, who are developing rapidly both physically, emotionally and socially, this means that their environments can have a profound impact upon their educational performance, social and emotional development, work outcomes, income and lifelong physical and mental health, including life expectancy.10
Happy habitats
All lives are inherently spatial, they happen somewhere. For children, the spatial geographies they inhabit are generally smaller than for adults – home, doorstep, street, school. Since 1980, opportunities for independent play and mobility have been restricted by the entrenched spatial injustice of streets being given over to cars. Ward recognised this loss of freedom and the increased fear of the streets in parents, caregivers and children alike. Groups like Playing Out,11 a resident-led organisation that supports temporary ‘play takeovers’ of streets across the UK, state that the car is the number one immediate barrier to children playing outside. Residential streets used to be multi-purpose but have become monocultural places for driving through and car storage, pushing children out of what was once communal space. Many studies have shown that increased traffic danger is the main reason children play out less than they used to. And there is a vicious cycle: the less children are seen outside, the more roads become just for cars. Children are losing out and this needs to be addressed in planning and design, in addition to providing access to formal and informal play and public spaces that exist for and welcome children and young people.
Ward writes that a city that is really concerned with the needs of its young will make the whole environment accessible to them, because, whether invited or not, they are going to use the whole environment and find ways to play everywhere and with everything. Quoting Iona and Peter Opie, Ward states ‘that the most precious gift we can give to the young is social space: the necessary space – or privacy – in which to become human beings’. Planning and building for children is a spatial justice issue, as well as a social justice one.
The TCPA: ‘a vehicle for the empowerment of the child’
The TCPA’s vision is for homes, places and communities in which everyone can thrive. The mission is to challenge, inspire and support people to create healthy, sustainable and resilient places that are fair for everyone – including children and young people.
Children fundamentally seek the same characteristics from their urban environment as everyone else: a healthy, safe and secure place to call home, safe and clean streets, access to public and green spaces, clean air, things to do, the ability to confidently get around and the freedom to see friends and feel like they belong.12 Many of these things are represented in the Garden City principles13 and place-making frameworks like the 20-minute neighbourhood.14 Planning and designing cities from a child’s perspective has the potential to be a unifying aid to tackling place-based challenges across many contexts. It focuses not only on what the physical environment looks like but also the way in which it works and the relationships it supports or hinders for some of the most vulnerable members of society.
For the last decade the TCPA has worked in collaboration on healthy place-making, pursued and supported the principles of 20-minute neighbourhoods and partnered with Sport England and others on the youth engagement toolkit Voice Opportunity Power. 15 This year, we are re-engaging with the legacy of Colin Ward to develop the TCPA’s work using the lens of planning places where children and young people develop well.
A general election was called in May and the parliamentary select committee inquiry on children, young people and the built environment closed before publishing its final report. However, it is a special coincidence. It is a special coincidence that this year’s parliamentary select committee inquiry on children, young people and the built environment coincided with the centenary of Colin Ward’s birth. There is a groundswell of interest and passion to re-visit and see positive change in the relationship between children, young people and built environment professionals and I am excited to circle back to the legacy of Colin Ward’s insight and stand in the footprints of the contemporary child in 2024 to see how we might take an inclusive approach to place-making that re-centres, engages, supports and promotes the rights of the child to not only live in the city but shape it at all scales.
• Gemma Hyde is Projects and Policy Manager – Healthier Place-making at the TCPA.
*It is important to note that children and young people are not a homogenous group, and their needs and experiences of the built environment will
vary depending upon their age, physical abilities, emotional, social and educational experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Ward also covers this in the preface of the first edition of The Child in the City quoting Margaret Mead: ‘Every time we lump them together, we lose something’. The author recognises the imperfect nature of talking about children and young people in such broad terms.
Notes
1 P Barker: ‘Anarchy in the suburbs’. Prospect, 19 Jul 1999. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/55570/anarchy-in-the-suburbs
2 T Newlove-Delgado, F Marcheselli, T Williams, D Mandalia, M Dennes, S McManus, M Savic, W Treloar, K Croft, T Ford: Mental Health of Children and Young People in England; Overview. NHS England, 2023. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/ statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-peoplein-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up#
3 ‘Obesity Profile’. Webpage. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, 2024. https://fingertips.phe.org. uk/profile/national-child-measurement-programme
4 Active Lives Children and Young People Survey Academic year 2022-2023. Sport England, Dec 2023. https://sportengland-production-files.s3.eu-west-2. amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023-12/Active%20 Lives%20Children%20and%20Young%20People%20 Survey%20-%20academic%20year%202022-23%20 report.pdf?VersionId=3N7GGWZMKy88UPsGfnJVUZkaTklLwB_L
5 R de Souza: The Big Ambition: ambitions, findings and solutions. Children’s Commissioner, Mar. 2024, p. 113. https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/ wpuploads/2024/03/The-Big-Ambition-AmbitionsFindings -Solutions.-Embargoed-until-00.01am-25thMarch.pdf
6 Oral evidence: Children, young people and the built environment. Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee. HC 94, 24 Jan. 2024. https://committees. parliament.uk/oralevidence/ 14157/pdf/
7 See: https://vanleerfoundation.org/urban95/
8 See: https://www.880cities.org/
9 National Planning Policy Framework. Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities. 19 Dec. 2023. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65a11af7e8f5ec000f1f8c46/ NPPF_December_2023. pdf
10 M Marmot, J Allen, T Boyce, P Goldblatt, J Morrison: Health equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 years on. Institute of Health Equity, 1 Jun. 2020, p. 36. https:// www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/ marmot-review-10-years-on/the-marmot-review-10years-on-full-report.pdf
11 See: https://playingout.net/
12 C Brown, A de Lannoy, D McCracken, T Gill, M Grant, H Wright, S Williams: ‘Special issue: child-friendly cities’. Cities and Health, 2019, Vol. 3(1, 2), 1-7. https://pure.hw. ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42630708/ child_friendly_ Special_Issue_Editorial_FINAL.pdf
colin ward and everyday anarchist solutions: allotments and other makeshift landscapes
Martin Stott explores the historical and social context of self-directed development as a response to social, political and economic upheaval
Colin Ward was always drawn to the kinds of spaces where people could participate in what he referred to as the ‘anarchy of everyday life’. Not strictly ungovernable spaces, but contexts in which self-organising was at least tolerated and where activities that were messy or seen as odd could be enjoyed without being disturbed. These were often spaces colonised by children, outside the formality of playgrounds and the prying eyes of adults. But also those ‘makeshift landscapes’ to be found on the edges of towns and cities where railway lines and canals meet abandoned quarries and gravel pits, landfill sites, scrap metal dealers’ breakers yards, and allotments.
Why was Ward so taken with these unplanned and largely unloved spaces? His intellectual journey was influenced by a number of anarchist and utopian writers.
Firstly, and most notably, Pyotr Kropotkin, especially his books Mutual Aid: a factor of evolution (1902) and Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (1899), which Ward re-edited and introduced to a contemporary audience in 1974.¹
Secondly, the philosopher Martin Buber, who set out in Paths in Utopia (1949) the difference in the
Pyotr Kropotkin c.1917
Special issue: Colin Ward
space between what the political power of the state needed to be and what it often was; in the process squeezing out what he referred to as ‘social spontaneity’.
Thirdly, the writings of planners and educationalists Paul and Percival Goodman, whose books Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947) and Growing Up Absurd (1960) articulated a view of childhood and the spaces that children inhabited that advocated for a more informal learning environment for children, which was at odds with the rigidity and conformism of the educational system as they knew it.
Ward’s biographer, Sophie Scott-Brown² sets out the social vision underpinning his anarchism in her introduction:
‘For Colin Ward, anarchy was ordinary, everywhere and always in action. It happened on our city streets, allotments, around kitchen tables, in village halls, town squares and pub snugs.’
‘Spaces colonised by children, outside the formality of playgrounds and the prying eyes of adults’
The decentralist and localist impulses, the advocacy of mutual aid, and the focus upon human need are what she refers to as ‘an ethics of
practice’, the anarchy of everyday life. This approach led to a world view that did not always sit easily with the anarchist and other countercultural trends that exploded around him from the 1960s onwards.
As Scott-Brown puts it:
‘There were significant differences between his invocations of ‘everyday life’ as a sphere of meaningful political action and the ‘personal politics’ of for example feminist activists. Where he laid much stock in invoking ‘common sense’, the latter sought to challenge and disrupt the very notion of it […] His favourite characters, allotmenteers, art teachers or housing cooperativists, may have been on the fringes of society but they were not social outsiders; if anything they were quite the reverse.’
To Ward these were people who practiced the anarchy of everyday life and did so in spaces that they carved out themselves from a more conformist mainstream society.
As a young man, writing in Freedom (incorporating War Commentary) in 1946, he celebrated the occupation of disused military camps by homeless families after the Second World War as a form of instinctive mutual aid, which he characterised as ‘the practicability of anarchism’ in the face of a serious housing shortage. Over time, this morphed into a fascination with the area between country and city where a wide range of spaces and settlements and newer forms of habitation and livelihood transformed the landscape; what the Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic, Raymond Williams, referred to as ‘border country’, and what has more recently come to be known as ‘edgelands’ – a term coined by the British writer and campaigner for countryside access, Marion Shoard.
Ward explored these spaces where he and fellow writers, including Dennis Hardy and David Crouch, found caravan sites, plotlands, camping grounds, smallholdings, allotments and children’s dens and hiding places. The attraction was not just to these intermediate physical spaces in themselves, but also to the activities, or ’social space’ that Buber identified, and that they frequently engendered. It is this which Jeff Bishop and Paul Hoggett³ analysed and celebrated – that of the unexplored world of the hobby or enthusiasm, of how people organise their joint activities in their spare time, and the myriad of everyday cultural and leisure activities and the clubs, groups, associations and federations created to sustain them. These activities are about communication, neighbourliness, sharing and mutual support, rather than competition, whether that be cricket clubs, model railway enthusiasts or ballroom dancing.
Whilst many like upholstery, snooker or drama are physically quite bounded, many others such as
Ward’s article in Freedom, 7 September 1946
Dr Pietro Di Paola
canal or railway preservation, metal detecting or orienteering take advantage of the same intermediate physical spaces as well as enhancing that social space in their locality too. The further the authors delved into the subject the more they felt that they had stumbled ‘into an area of social life which was massive in its proportions, rich in detail and of fascinating complexity, but almost completely overlooked’. For Ward this was an infectious delight in the ordinary; anarchy in action.
‘Ward’s interest in the land and its opportunities, whether that was for squatting, self-build, or small-scale agriculture, has lengthy antecedents’
Ward’s interest in the land and its opportunities, whether that was for squatting, self-build, or small-scale agriculture, has lengthy antecedents. One of the many themed issues of Anarchy under his editorship from 1961-1970 was one on ‘The Land’ (Number 41, July 1964). The issue focuses mainly upon agriculture, and he wrote (under the pen name of John Ellerby) on the importance of small-scale agriculture and industrial production, reprising Kropotkin’s ideas in Fields, Factories and
Workshops (which indeed doubles as the title of his article). Kropotkin, way ahead of his time in many ways, emphasises that humans are an intrinsic part of nature – ecological sensibility – and that soils could be improved in terms of productivity by human activity, as small-scale agriculturalists and allotmenteers well know. In this context he also emphasised the importance of intensive agriculture, horticulture, market gardening, intensive field cultivation, greenhouses and kitchen gardens. He prefigures the more recent concerns around organic growing, ‘human scale technology’, permaculture and community gardens, all of which Ward champions. One of Ward’s most insightful analysts is Stuart White,⁴ who connects his town-country ‘social vision’ through Garden Cities, housing cooperatives, community gardens and allotments to small scale industrial production in community workshops, and the mutuality of local exchange trading schemes (LETS). While this can, with a little imagination, be seen as a vision of a possible future society, Ward is generally more concerned with what people can and do experience right now.
Ward’s interest in self-build movements in housing – he was a great admirer of Walter Segal’s methods and successes in south east London –was most fully articulated in his work with Dennis Hardy on tracing the history of ‘plotlands’,⁵ starting at the end of the 19th century, when working class people began to purchase land within a reasonable
Plotlander Arthur Vance resting from his labours. Dunton, Bedfordshire, c.1932
distance of cities such as London at depressed prices. The term ‘plotlands’ came about because when land was ‘dirt cheap’ in the agricultural depression from the 1870s until 1939, it was parcelled up into ‘plots’ by speculators and sold off, often for £5 or less per plot. The purchasers built on the plots and in doing so new communities, most famously Peacehaven in Sussex and Jaywick Sands in Essex, became established. They weren’t exactly loved by local planners or their neighbours, but rather seen as ‘bungaloid growth’ in a pristine landscape. As White puts it:
‘Many middle class observers viewed the developments at the time with alarm and disdain, and post war planning legislation was motivated in part by a desire to prevent them happening again. Ward however is deeply impressed by the episode. Where others see an unpleasant untidiness, even a ‘vast pastoral slum’, Ward sees a prime example of creative direct action by which working class people crawled out of the very real urban slums in which they lived and found for themselves a modest place in the sun.’
A ‘peopled landscape’ was what Ward called these places, somewhere low income families ‘gained the freedom to move into a more spacious life that was taken for granted by their betters’. Ward describes the process:⁶
‘Mr Fred Nichols of Bowers Green in Essex was in his seventies. He had a poverty-stricken childhood in East London and a hard and uncertain life as a casual dock worker. His plot 40ft wide and 100ft long cost him £10 in 1934. First he put up a tent which his family and friends used at weekends, and he gradually accumulated tools timber and glass which he brought to the site strapped to his back as he cycled the 25 miles from London. For water he sank a well in the garden. His house was called ‘Perseverance’.’
It reminds me of the ‘horticultural strips’ I came across outside Bidford-on-Avon when I was working for Warwickshire County Council and was responsible for, amongst other things, their farms and smallholdings. These, eight in all, are an extraordinary remnant from the medieval strip farming systems – long, narrow and typically about half of one hectare each. A cross between an allotment and a smallholding they support a thriving community of part-time farmers who have developed an extensive system of sheds and barns where they engage in everything from motorcycle and farm machinery repair to large scale home brewing, as well as the small-scale commercial cultivation of their plots. Marion Shoard poetically refers to these kind of encampments as ‘selfseeded dreamscapes’. ‘Wildlife diversity here is often far greater than in the surrounding
countryside and many of the structures are more fascinating than those of nearby towns and cities.’⁷ Heaven on earth for Ward.
Dreamscapes, self-seeded or not, are what attracts many an allotment plot holder to their plot and are what Ward and his fellow author, David Crouch, home in on in their book The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988). For them the allotment is a marginal but vital place where people of modest means can reclaim something of their own lives and where old patterns of mutual aid still flourish, where the ‘gift relationship’ is simply part of the fabric of life. What plot holder has never given away to neighbours lovingly tended veg’ in a time of glut, or gratefully accepted seedlings after their own were ravaged by slugs? The allotment is not just about food production but a cultural freedom that has thrived on official disregard and neglect.
The image of the allotment as tatty old eyesore is correct, if that is what the viewer wants to see, but Ward and Crouch insist that it be granted the dignity of its own unique if accidental aesthetic. Many a photographer over the past thirty years has come to the same conclusion, with moving and insightful results. This is a peopled landscapeundesigned, diverse and rooted in a history which seems to run back over five hundred years - as the Bidford plot holders attest to. Ward and Crouch celebrate the immigrant in the tapestry of allotment history, men such as Sebastien Espada the anarchist refugee from the Spanish Civil War who, in the 1940s, used his training in horticulture to grow peppers, aubergines, and even Kentucky tobacco on his plot in Ealing, until the excise man came calling.
That tradition of immigration driving innovation, learning, and reform on allotment sites continues to this day. The chair of my own site is a young Palestinian woman, while other plot holders are Kurdish, Algerian, Chinese, American, Serbian and Polish. An Iranian refugee currently housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge visits a British family and is to be found helping with the pruning, mowing, and
The allotment: an anarchist utopia
Martin Stott
weeding on their plot. Trained as a carpenter in a previous life, he has constructed a series of raised beds on their plot that are the glory of the site. The nature and composition of the working class that Ward and Crouch refer to has changed in the nearly 40 years since they wrote The Allotment, but the allotment still represents, for them and us, a particularly vital landscape. As they put it: ‘… a working class landscape, a productive landscape, conforming to no style… found in conditions of need and poverty… it is an intensive and inventive landscape, free from everyday outside controls and forced by necessity towards initiative and invention.’
In a sense this is what Ward recorded in Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (2002) –marginalised groups setting about creating their own futures under the nose of authority. He describes the ‘free miners’ in the Forest of Dean who in the 19th century existed as ‘a community of small proprietors [with] a considerable degree of independence and freedom from authority’. Then there is the history of popular squatting in royal forests, something refugees were reported to be doing in the New Forest in 2023 and, more extensively, in the Calais ‘jungle’ at Sangatte, France as they attempted to reach the UK; ‘people’s history’ being played out in real time.
In my experience, rather than being the preserve of the stereotypical male, the old man cycling home with a bunch of carrots over the handlebars, allotments these days are as much or more for children, especially as families – perhaps reinterpreting the aspiration of Harry Thorpe’s advocacy of allotments as ‘leisure gardens’ in the 1960s – are to be found ensconced on their plot appreciating the sunshine and birdsong, while their children are making mud pies, chasing pigeons, finding little spaces of their own between the hedge and their parents’ shed, gleaning harvest leftovers, or helping with the barbeque on a weekend evening as friends join them for music, beer and song at the end of a long day. For children, allotments are a safe space. A recurring theme in Ward’s The Child in the City (1978) is children’s creative appropriation of city spaces. Ward contrasts American playgrounds ‘designed for insurance companies’ with what he argues all urban children should have access to:
‘…gardens where they can keep their pets, and enjoy their hobbies, and perhaps watch their fathers working with real tools; secret places where they can create their own worlds; the shadow and mystery that lend enchantment to play.’
In a way, allotments can be described as quintessential Ward. Scott-Brown quotes Ward as
saying: ‘I am not a utopian anarchist – I look for day to day anarchist solutions’, and she goes on to say: ‘If the utopian pursued anarchism as an entire social design the latter [Ward] took it as a multipurpose gadget for loosening the restraints of everyday life. As a propagandist, he championed the designs, but by personal and intellectual convictions he was a gadget man, presenting ideas as resources to be picked over for the bits that could be used in the present.’
‘In a way, allotments can be described as quintessential Ward’
Ward himself, in his book Influences (1991), in summing up why Martin Buber was so important to him, said:
‘Buber’s exploration of the paths to utopia, far from confirming an acceptance of the way things are, confirms, […] that the fact that there is no route map to utopia does not mean that there are no routes to more accessible destinations.’
What Ward found on allotments and similar places of escape or play were those ‘accessible destinations’ for an anarchist, right in our midst.
• Martin Stott is a member of the Arts of Place research network, based at the University of Birmingham, and a photographer.
Notes
1 P Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow: a new edition of the anarchist classic Introduced and edited by Colin Ward. Harper & Row, New York, 1975. Full text at: https://archive.org/details/ fieldsfactoriesw0000krop
2 S Scott-Brown: Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy. Routledge, 2023
3 J Bishop, P Hoggett: Organizing Around Enthusiasms: Patterns of Mutual Aid in Leisure. Comedia, London, 1986
4 S White: ‘Social anarchism, lifestyle anarchism and the anarchism of Colin Ward’. Anarchist Studies, Vol. 19(2), 1 Jul. 2011, 92-94. https://www.proquest.com/ docview/913288310?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals
5 D Hardy, C Ward: Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape. Mansell, 1984. Full text (2004 edition) at: https://archive.org/details/ arcadiaforallleg0000hard
6 C Ward: ‘A peopled landscape’. In: K Worpole (Ed): Richer Futures: fashioning a new politics. Earthscan, 1999. Full text at: https://archive.org/details/ richerfuturesfas0000unse
7 M Shoard: ‘The age-old appeal of living life on the edge’. Observer, 6 Mar. 2011.
more than playgrounds and sports pitches: supporting children and young people’s doing, being and becoming
In the March/April 2024 issue of Town & Country Planning, Graham Marshall and Rhiannon Corcoran presented a critical analysis of research conducted in the NHS Healthy New Towns demonstrator site at Halton Lea, Runcorn. In this issue, they share insights from the young people in Halton Lea and other recent initiatives
Introduction
‘We need to be reminded, as Margaret Mead never fails to remind us, that ‘It’s a good thing to think about the child as long as you remember that the child doesn’t exist. Only children exist. Every time we lump them together we lose something’. It is not just a matter of the enormous differences between individuals. Every child is in a different state of being or becoming.’¹
Drafting the previous article on ‘supporting young people’s wellbeing’ sparked deeper reflections with us, along with conversations with folk from Escape2Make² in Lancaster, Playful-Anywhere³ in Leeds, and embryonic thinking with colleagues about a substantial research bid. Some of that reflection has been about our own and our children’s childhoods, as well as that of the young people we have worked with over the years. Imagining the perfect play environment, we
recalled the Saturday morning kids’ show, Here Come the Double Deckers!.⁴ It involved a group of London children whose den was an abandoned garage full of scrap material and a red double decker bus. The idea of abandoned resources in a space that you ‘owned’ and could transform was enormously powerful. Several years after it was broadcast, we were in Camden Square talking to play leader Abdul Chowdry about the adventure playground there, children busy all around us with tyres, pallets, planks, hammers and nails. This place brought the Double Deckers! to life. Graham was undertaking an open project on play in his landscape architecture degree at the time, and it was not hard to see the difference between this living-lab of children, and the other sterile play areas in North London. While the latter seemed bereft of children or joy, the children in Camden Square were absorbed in ‘doing’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. It is possible that one of those children playing
around us that year was the landscape architect Maisie Rowe, who later wrote about her experiences in this wonderful place:
‘There was a sense of faith in the child, an almost benign neglect of letting children get on with it themselves. There was an informality, overseen in a gentle way by very cool adults. Today, middleclass parents lament the loss of this so they send their children at £28 a time to structured schemes to climb trees at a [sic] specifically designed areas, like Go Ape in Battersea. It is like a weird perversion of the adventure playground ideal.’ ⁵
In Camden Square, children chose when to go there, how long they would stay and, they made their own way through the streets. They chose who they would interact with and negotiated on what they would do together through the year. They would also know that this rich resource was theirs and in their neighbourhood. By contrast, in Battersea’s ‘Go Ape’, the trip needs to be convenient for the family, children are accompanied, all choices are controlled or limited and there is no sense of ownership in a private or municipal venture.
‘Imagining the perfect play environment, we recalled the Saturday morning kids’ show, Here Come the Double Deckers!’
Like other adventure playgrounds, we felt that Camden was idyllic, and Maisie amply describes the myriad virtues of her childhood experiences there in her writings. But she also writes of darker things:
‘Sadly, I uncovered a deadly reminder that play is
a serious business, indeed, a matter of life and death. If Camden Town gave us fashion and music, Kings Cross brought us drugs and crime. For the area’s youngsters, trouble was never going to be hard to find. It was devastating to learn that at least ten children who played in the Square did not survive their early years.’ ⁶
Our childhood play experiences were similar with the freedom to choose and move around unsupervised. We also experienced the duality of the world - simultaneously a joyous, absorbing and deadly place. Contemplating children’s need for free play and the dangers inherent in our urban environments raises the question of how do we make childhood a safe adventure? As adults ‘in charge’, we seem to have lost sight of Colin Ward’s wisdom stressing childhood ‘state(s) of being or becoming’ to enable only ‘doing’. Our responses to the living environment shape our lives and so we must think of them as human habitats. In evolutionary and sustainability terms, places
Camden Square adventure playground, 1979
Get on board with the Double Deckers! (1970)
Roy Simpson and Century Film Productions
‘become’ too. However, we mostly plan, design and steward them as places of human consumption and rapid transit; places of ‘doing’ where ‘liquid communities’, are:
‘… less territorialised, less tethered to locality (where). The social and spatial, once soldered tightly together, begin to drift apart. Each step less moored to any specific place...’ ⁷
Successful living environments provide a supporting backdrop to children and young people’s wellbeing and socio-cognitive development. Outside the home, independence, confidence, cooperation, and creativity can all be nurtured by an environment that responds to and provides for those needs. Unfortunately, children and young people’s ability to use the built environment has been eroded over the last half century or so while the focus of planners and other built environment experts has been on supporting local and national economies, not the overall wellbeing needed to maintain a successful human habitat. As children’s independent movement and access to free play has been curtailed, so we have seen a parallel rise in childhood and adolescent mental health difficulties.
Working with young people in Halton Lea NHS Healthy New Town
In our earlier article, we reported the findings of workshops held with secondary and primary school pupils in this demonstrator project. It emphasises the need to accommodate free play in the built environment, children and young people’s need to be heard and to feel that they matter, and it stresses a need to widen the lens outwards, away from a focus on formal amenities like playgrounds and sports pitches towards matters such as safety, active and public transport, equity of access and the provision of incidental spaces to facilitate children’s free play and adolescent togetherness. To explore issues of wellbeing with the students, we shaped the following programmes for the sessions:
Secondary school workshop
Task One – feet-finding. Students were asked to draw a freehand map of how they got to school that morning. This activity partly demonstrated that they could all communicate graphically irrespective of their beliefs about artistic skills. It also illustrated the differences in what the students noticed about their journey dependent on travel mode.
Task Two – discussion of key issues. Table-based group discussions around three questions:
1. What do we understand about health and wellbeing?
2. How do the places that we live in effect these things?
3. What would make a good place for everyone?
From this discussion, each group created a brief for the next task.
Task Three – creative task. In groups, the students designed and made a model of a neighbourhood that ‘would make a good place for everyone’. Specifically, the task was to design an island in the River Mersey that could support young people’s wellbeing. We find that people struggle with existing fabrics in terms of what they can change or introduce so we provided this imaginary ‘site’ between the old and new Runcorn bridges. While removing constraints, the river basin replicated the scale of the Halton Lea neighbourhood. The task was designed with principles of ‘free play’ in mind, calling on cognitive and social skills such as creativity, imagination, negotiation, turn-taking, collaboration and delegation.
Task Four – summary discussion. A plenary discussion focused on how their ideas could be taken forward.
Primary school workshop
Task One – feet-finding. The pupils drew freehand maps of how they got to school that morning.
Task Two – local play experiences discussion. A whole group discussion focused on pupils’ experiences of playing out in the neighbourhood; what they liked to do and what new things they would like to do.
Task Three – designing an ideal outdoor play environment. The pupils worked in pairs to design their play space on a cardboard pentagon panel. The team gently led them to think about the kind of things that make good places for children, including formal and informal play spaces, school gardens, access to nature etc, while steering them away from special occasion things like fairgrounds. The pairs were asked to write down a few words that described their play space and what it meant to them.
Task Four – bringing the work together. All the individual panels were brought together to create a geodesic dome; a co-created shelter that provided a memorable output from the workshop. Each pair who designed a play space was asked to write a few words that described what the place they had designed meant to them, or how it would make them feel.
The young people’s insights – open discussions
The students particularly enjoyed the creative design activities and expressed enthusiasm about being asked for ideas to do with the development of their town. They were interested, reflective and co-operative and demonstrated a good
understanding of what it means to be fit and healthy, with the secondary school students displaying a well-developed understanding of broad issues to do with place, community and wellbeing.
It was noticeable in the feet-finding drawings that many of the secondary school students started the day online, travelling to school using their phones for social media or to listen to music with earphones. Whether walking, cycling, using public transport or car, the overall impression was of little directed attention towards the environment encountered during these habitual journeys. The general impression was that those who walked to school tended to create more detailed maps overall, indicative of greater awareness of their day-to-day environments.
Thematic analysis of the secondary school students’ discussions identified several primary themes with clusters of subthemes within them. In the plenary discussions there was broad consensus between the groups and across the separate workshops.
Theme One – ‘understanding wellbeing’, generated subthemes on: happiness; positive mindset; physical and mental health; selfimprovement and autonomy. It was clear from the responses that health and wellbeing was understood as feelings of happiness and the maintenance of a positive mindset: ‘ Happiness ’; ‘functioning well – focus on the positives’. The
data revealed how physical and mental health are equally important: ‘physical health and mental health are equal but not equally balanced in society’. Demonstrating an understanding of sustainable or eudaimonic⁸ wellbeing, self-improvement and autonomy were stressed where the broader determinants of wellbeing afforded by society were referred to, including ‘skills’ ‘education’ and ‘jobs’.
Capturing the idea of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ from ‘doing’, one participant reflected: ‘the important things are to make you and your body happy mentally and physically and to make yourself improve and make you healthy’.
Theme Two – ‘drivers of wellbeing’, generated the subthemes: tolerant, positive others; selfexpression and individuality; hobbies and activity; rest and relaxation. There was a focus upon the relational aspect of wellbeing and the critical role that others play in determining individual wellbeing: ‘Being around positive people can make us feel better. Helping others to be more positive is good too’.
It was acknowledged that the important ‘others’ who provided support and love, were friends and family for the most part: ‘my family sticks together through hard times’, and ‘my family and friends make me feel happy because they make me laugh and talk to me about my feelings’.
A clear appreciation of the need for individuality
Student travel to school exercise
University of Liverpool
and self-expression was apparent, embedded in statements of the need for others to tolerate these expressions of ‘difference’ or of ‘becoming’: ‘Health and wellbeing is important to help people be themselves. They need to be themselves but are afraid to because they want to fit in.’
As expected, hobbies and interests were referred to as being important to maintaining wellbeing: ‘because they allow you to do things that you love', ‘something you can focus on’.
It is easy to forget the importance of rest and relaxation for health and wellbeing where thoughts tend to focus on ‘doing’, not ‘being’ in the context of the living environment beyond the home. However, adequate relaxation is important for teenagers who can often feel under pressure due to schoolwork, for example. There was reference to sleep and holidays: ‘not moving from my bed!’, ‘laying in the sun and feeling the warmth on my face’, and ‘going on holiday is a great stress relief –not having to worry about anything’.
Theme Three – ‘barriers to wellbeing’ generated the subthemes: behaviours; fitting in; social comparisons. There was a focus upon factors whose presence prevents good wellbeing. Those specifically referred to included ‘smoking’, ‘alcohol’, ‘disease’ and ‘illness’. ‘Pollution’ and ‘not recycling’ were specific issues referred to as impacting negatively on health and wellbeing. In terms of social factors, ‘loneliness’ was referred to and reference was made to the negative consequences of not fitting in; being prevented from becoming the person you need to be: ‘people try to fit in with the ‘popular’ children and they hurt themselves’.
In the same vein, the negative ‘becoming’ consequences of social media use were referred to: ‘social media has an impact on everyone’s lives because it makes us feel insecure looking at celebrities and people who are skinny and pretty. Makes it look like competition.’
However, the dominant factor referred to in this respect by these young people was social class and lack of money: ‘they have a lot of money and they are healthy’.
Theme Four – ‘the places we live in’, generated the subthemes: ‘litter and mess’; ‘feeling unsafe’; ‘consequences of living in a disadvantaged area’; ‘nothing to do’, ‘public transport’. These students reported that litter and the run-down neighbourhood environment impaired their ability to enjoy themselves outdoors:
‘in some areas it’s hard to have fun with friends outdoors because facilities like parks are being destroyed by graffiti and litter.’
‘a good place would be somewhere where people have a place to go where litter isn’t a problem, with less homeless people on the streets.’
Specific issues mentioned included ‘shards of glass’, ‘cigarette stumps’, ‘chewy stuck to the floor’ and ‘dog poo everywhere’. Several young people noted the state of disrepair of local buildings and infrastructure: ‘dull and rundown’, ‘empty buildings needing refurbishment’, and ‘bus stops are trampy’. These young people reported feeling scared and vulnerable when out and about, feelings related to anti-social behaviour that impacts each of ‘doing’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. These clear expressions of fear were significant enough to impact on wellbeing and included ‘not feeling safe’ and therefore ‘not being able to go out at night’ because of a fear of ‘what is around the corner from you’. The presence of drug-related threats and ‘gangs’ were major concerns: ‘walking in the street and seeing people drunk or high on drugs’, and ‘children’s parks that get taken over by groups of older people’.
The students identified that coming from and living in a disadvantaged area had implications for their wellbeing. A range of statements were provided from reference to ‘homelessness’, ‘material deprivation’ and ‘inequality’ to place ‘stigma’ and the enduring consequences on ‘becoming’ of social class: ‘social exposure -different groups affect your outlook on your life’; ‘living in deprived areas limit people to go on and be successful, and therefore happy in the world’ and ‘getting a bad reputation from living in Runcorn’.
At the same time, there was pressure to conform to social expectations and to fit in with reference to ‘social pressures’ and ‘judgements’ in a place that fosters independence where: ‘[you] can’t go anywhere without somebody knowing who you are’.
Having nothing to do and nowhere to go was expressed frequently alongside some comments that, though seemingly paradoxical, suggested that what provisions there are, were shunned: ‘nowhere local to go with friends’; ‘being in isolated areas can make people feel down’ and ‘no-one uses facilities e.g. community centres’.
On infrastructure and services, they referred to the quality of affordable public transport services within a car-dominated environment that was over-crowded and dangerous: ‘expensive transport’; ‘buses are rubbish’ and ‘a good transport system makes life easier’.
Theme Five – ‘on making a good place’, generated the subthemes: ‘a just society’; ‘being part of a good community’; ‘intergenerational connections’; ‘being able to enjoy the outdoor environment’; ‘equity’. Many referred to general notions of a fair and just society. Statements of
acceptance, lack of judgement and diversity were common as were ones about equality:
‘a good place to be would be a friendly place. There should be activities for local people. And also, people to accept other people for who they are: – Sexuality – Religion – Gender – Individual – everything not to be a camp – type of music they listen to.’
And ‘all should have access to required living substances (i.e. food, gas, electricity)’.
In the making of good places, these young people focused on the need to address poverty to achieve equity as a starting point, referring to good, equal quality homes in particular: ‘equal life-long homes’; ‘equal conditions in houses’, and ‘houses with necessities for different age groups’.
The students’ thoughts on community revolved around ideas of being felt to matter, being heard, feeling like you belong within a positive, helpful, neighbourly and cooperative community: ‘everybody should have a say in THEIR community’; ‘not competition – more cooperation’; ‘a sense of belonging in the environment you’re in is very important to stay happy’ and ‘living amongst a community can encourage happiness’.
The young people mentioned a range of inclusive activities emphasising ‘something for everyone’ across age and race differences while also continuing to stress the importance of activities and spaces for kids and teenagers. There is a strong sense here of communities guiding how young people ‘become’: ‘having evenings where young and old people can get together and bond’; ‘the ability to talk to others, regardless of age is important – get together to talk’; ‘different types of food and places for more mixed race to meet others who are scared of different race’; ‘somewhere for kids to be kids’, and ‘needs to be more places for teenagers to do as we get told off if we sit in the park but there’s nothing to do’.
Unsurprisingly, there was a focus upon interventions that would enable young people to engage in formal sporting activity with dedicated facilities but also the ability to enjoy the natural environment safely and comfortably. Linking to community, specific mention was made of: ‘football clubs getting involved in the community’.
During the short discussion that made up task two of the primary school workshop, the pupils told the team about their experiences of playing in the town. Answers included games like ‘man hunt’ played in the local woods, football on a local pitch, the skate park, and an imaginative game called ‘everything’. This game was a reminder that children see the world through eyes that can turn everyday things into sources of adventure. When asked who preferred indoor or outdoor activities, the group was split. Some said that playing at home was ‘nice and safe’ but, the group tended to agree that playing out
with friends was preferable to playing alone: ‘I get bored when I am out alone and stay much longer when my friends are out with me’.
Sadly, there were lots of references to this age group being regularly picked on by older children when they were out.
The young people’s insights – creatively designed spaces
With the secondary school students, a feature common across groups was the creation of spaces where activities and functions could be segregated, with access controlled. Creating a secure environment was a priority for most groups, with many wanting to exclude ‘bad’ people. Members of one group suggested: ‘what we need is a big camera in the middle of the island that can see everything’.
A second feature common across groups was the exaggerated scale of ‘landmarks’ that defined their ‘centres’ to visitors and passers-by. They mostly talked about central spaces with squares and gardens conceived as communal areas.
Consistent with definitions of wellbeing offered by the group during the discussions, key activities for most groups focused upon making people happy. One group developed their project on sports-based activities in a natural environment called ‘secret escapes’: ‘it is somewhere that you visit’ in the centre of Halton to escape. This resonated with sentiments from all the secondary school groups of feeling ‘stuck’ in Runcorn, and not being able to ‘escape’; being prevented from ‘becoming’.
Another group based their designs on a contemporary townscape, including garage/ petrol station, car and retail parks. When prompted if they really wanted a car-dominated island they responded, ‘yeah, we just need them’. Another inevitability for some groups was the inclusion of shopping and restaurants as a route to happiness,
Fresh Start island
University of Liverpool
which was characterised as ‘having a proper day out’ and ‘a place to chill and relax’ and conceived as a safe space to enjoy the company of friends or having a meal with the family.
At the end of the sessions, the students voted for their favourite ‘island’. On the second day, the winners were a group of three girls who designed ‘Fresh Start island’; an island for everybody; somewhere that if you misbehave in school, you get a second chance. With a central ‘university’ building, the girls stressed the island is about intergenerational knowledge and learning rather than formal education. Their belief was that if they can build a positive model on ‘Fresh Start’, then it would naturally spread out to influence the wider town and communities.
The girls offered the following description of ‘Fresh Start island’:
‘Here at Fresh Start we welcome all in order for them to prosper and enhance their lives for the better. We offer access to university and training centre for students with passion to excel without the fear of being judged. Here you can be yourself!’
The group’s concept of ‘Fresh Start island’ resonates strongly with’ being’ and ‘becoming’.
At the primary school, after completing their play space panels, each pair of pupils was asked to provide a couple of words that described what the place they had designed meant to them, or how it made them feel. Prominent in these short offerings were themes consistent with notions of free play: fun, safety, variety, creativity and imagination. A range of responses are provided below:
‘Friends, learning, fun’; ‘cool, safe environment (trees), climbing trees, hiding, making ramps and adventure’; ‘happy, colourful, imaginative’; ‘creative, game lab’; ‘enjoyable, happy’; ‘creative, thoughtful, fast, safe’; ‘gates so no one comes in because it is just us’; ‘leads to hiding places, shelter, safe areas’; ‘happy, safe, awesome’; ‘fun, great, exciting, fantastic, safe’; ‘passion (like hobbies and interests)’; ‘dream, a lovely feeling, amazing’.
Reflections
The foregoing narrative from these young people was a snapshot in time. It needed to develop into something meaningful for them; a co-design change process with them at the centre. It’s sobering to think that this was 2017, and that some of these older children are in their mid-20s now and may be parents themselves.
We have mentored many conversations like this that scratch the surface to reveal that young people have nuanced understandings and frustrations about their places and how they impact and shape them. Colin Ward was writing about the same issues in 1978. We know that our professionalised knowledge has multiplied since then. However, at
the same time the support that children need to independently ‘do’ has evaporated, impacting their capacity to experience (well) ‘being’, and from that, they have ‘become’ mentally distressed rather than ‘becoming’ their natural well-functioning selves.
A group of young people we recently worked with lived in an apparently high-quality rural area, with equally high disadvantage in their community and very few resources allocated to them. When we initiated conversations with the adult community, the negative narrative about the children and young people in the town started immediately and continued over twelve months. ‘Don’t spend any money on them, they will only smash it up’. When we met up with the town’s young people, they proved a challenging group to work with, because for all the greenspace, they suffered from a lack of free play, and it was difficult for them to be creative about their futures having had no resources to draw upon.
Two decades ago, the town’s high school had been demolished and the only resource that remained was the old school bus shelter. When asked what they would like, one group said, ‘we’d just like a bigger bus shelter’. We sketched a plan for a bigger shelter, play space for both younger children and adolescents, nuanced for boys and girls, along with gardens for older residents to sit and watch them and a community growing space as part of a wanted ‘edible’ project.
Vocal adults in the town ridiculed this approach and demanded the area be turned into a muchneeded car park and the shelter removed because it would only attract antisocial behaviour.
More recently we have been asked several times how we think young people could be engaged in the Local Plan production process. Perhaps a better question would be how communities, including the
An old bus stop shelter and an isolated bench –adequate facilities for young people? Google
This proposal to improve the area for young people was ridiculed by some adults in the town
authorities, could be engaged in the development of children and young people. That might provide more understanding of what is needed.
‘Although you can easily walk everywhere, there is nowhere to walk to’
To close, we are reminded of a group of young people who shared their views during a professional webinar. Their first speaker recounted her experiences of ‘place’ through growing up in a small city in the north of England and then moving to an affluent southern university city. She described both cities as beautiful and ‘very walkable’ (using our planning jargon). But the problem for her was that: ‘although you can easily walk everywhere, there is nowhere to walk to’.
• Prof. Rhiannon Corcoran is Professor of Psychology and Public Mental Health at the Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool and Co-Director of Prosocial Place. Graham Marshall is Co-Director of Prosocial Place and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Population Health, University of Liverpool. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 C Ward: The Child in the City. Architectural Press, 1978 p.3. https://archive.org/details/childincity00coli/page/n5/ mode/2up
2 See: https://escape2make.org/about/
3 See: https://www.playfulanywhere.fun/about-1
4 ‘Here Come the Double Deckers!’. Website. Wikipedia®, 5 Mar. 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Come_ the_Double_Deckers!
5 D Carrier: ‘Portraits of our Playgrounds’. Webpage. Camden New Journal. 11 May 2017. https://www. camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/portraits-of-ourplaygrounds-past?sp=24&sq=Trees
6 M Rowe: ‘Look back in play – part 3’. Webpage. Child in the City. 15 Sep. 2017. https://www.childinthecity. org/2017/09/15/look-back-in-play-part-3/?gdpr=accept
7 J Young: The Vertigo of Late Modernity. Sage, 2007
8 Eudaimonic wellbeing is achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose, whereas hedonic wellbeing is achieved through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment.
Prosocial
planning for youth
Whilst formal education is usually recognised when Local Plans are being prepared and the need for sports facilities is also considered, the informal needs of young people seem to be forgotten. Nigel Friswell examines some of the implications of the modern planning process.
The South East of England is one region where the UK government sees the need for much more housing, resulting in Horsham District Council (HDC) in West Sussex being told that it will have to take 20,000 new homes over the next 20 years. Perhaps it is fortunate that a legal challenge by Natural England regarding water neutrality (i.e. the balance between demand and supply) has seriously delayed the publication of the HDC Local Plan.
Horsham is interesting because it is bordered by Crawley (with Gatwick airport), which was developed as a new town and is now 'full up' as far as realistic accommodation of new housing is concerned. Under its duty to cooperate, HDC is bound to help out with the demand for more homes in Crawley. A few years ago, the newly designated South Downs National Park was established and has substantial protection from the threat of new development. To the south is the coastal strip from Brighton to Worthing which, like Crawley, is full up with very little opportunity for expansion.
HDC's draft Local Plan illustrates the aspirations of the promotors of large-scale housing developers as reflected in its strategic allocations. A couple of these slipped through the planning applications net before the water neutrality shutter came down. Examination of those planning applications showed that some of the needs of any young people who would live on the new estates are being overlooked.
The local education authority is, of course, mindful of the need for schooling and crunched the demographic numbers to forecast the extent to which existing schools can cope with an influx and whether a new school is needed. As part of the provision of community facilities on a new development there is usually agreement for the developer to provide some formal sports facilities or multi-use open space for use by youngsters. What seems to be forgotten is the social needs of young
people outside their school life.
It often surprises city folk to learn that there are frequently anti-social behaviour problems in semi-rural villages like those around Horsham. The kids want to socialise, some like a youth-club type environment but others do not. They all want a bit of fun of some sort, and it is not surprising that this can be misplaced, leading to damage and outright vandalism.
This is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the early 1900s there were similar problems (although more often in towns than villages) and even less for youngsters to do than there is now. Some enlightened individuals saw the need for youth clubs, and these were often formed under the auspices of the local church as units of The Boys' Brigade or the Church Lads' Brigade (the girls' organisations generally came later). However well intentioned, the local vicar or schoolmaster was not always the best person to run a youth club but, whoever it was, they often needed help. This came in the form of Boer War hero, Lt Gen. Sir Robert S S Baden-Powell KCB, who ran an experimental camp for 20 boys on Brownsea Island in August 1907. Then, on 24 January 1908, Sir Robert publicly inaugurated The Boy Scout Movement at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) hall in Grange Road, Birkenhead, Wirral. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today there are nearly 400,000 young scouts in Britain. In the Horsham Scout District (which is the northern half of the HDC area) there is a young scout member (aged between 6 and 18) for every 10 homes. Continuing at that rate for every 1,000 new homes there will be 100 young people wanting to be scouts. There will, of course, also be other youngsters who do not wish to become scouts.
Scouting is organised on a local group basis in sections depending upon age. The sections
This Scout headquarters benefits from being adjacent to a public recreation ground but it lacks dedicated parking and easy access to load/unload camping equipment and other bulky items. The building includes two halls plus kitchen, toilets, etc. Note the access ramp and security fencing.
comprise ‘squirrels’ for pre-school children (ages 4-6 years); ‘beavers’ (ages 6-8 years); ‘cub scouts’ (ages 8-10½ years); ‘scouts’ (ages 10½-15 years), and ‘explorer scouts’ (ages 15-18 years). Many scout groups have two beaver sections and two cub packs; some have two scout troops. Each of these generally meet once a week for between one and two hours, usually in the evenings. This means that there are up to eight section meetings each week.
Each scout group is self-financing. Subscriptions for week-to-week expenses are paid by the young members, as are the camps, etc. Other overheads are often met by fund-raising events and there is an annual membership fee which goes to the national and county organisation. Scout leaders and local officials are all unpaid volunteers (West Sussex Scouts has only one paid employee). Each scout group is a charity in its own right with trustees in the form of an executive committee, usually formed mainly of parents.
I have gone into some detail because it helps to explain the challenges which scouting faces when a new development of 1,000 houses
(equivalent to one new scout group) appears on a greenfield site. There is no existing community to turn to for fund-raising, so it falls to the new residents to self-organise as they move into their new homes. This, of course, happens only gradually. However, in the meantime their children want to join the scouts. Some will have been scouts before moving and ought to have some priority.
It is, therefore, no use starting to think about facilities for scout activities when all the homes are occupied because the demand is there (albeit initially in small numbers) soon after the first residents move in. Space needs to be set aside for a meeting place when the development is conceived, not when the homes are occupied. Meanwhile there is the challenge of recruiting and training new adult leaders. That could be the subject of another article, elsewhere!
When scouting started in 1908, in addition to interest from churches and some schools, there was a lot of support from the gentry and from landowners with a military background. Scouting was never trumpeted as a military organisation but with the founder's background and the uniform it often chimed with the outlook of former soldiers. Many scout groups benefited from the donation of land for a meeting place; sometimes they even got a wooden building too – often a disused farm building or a former army barracks. Land was cheap then, so it has left some old-established scout groups notionally asset rich but cash poor. Looking back a century, developers often had a local connection so there was some kudos from donating land (or even a building) for the local scouts. Today's developers do not have this link – they answer only to their shareholders.
So, the situation is different today. Oh, that someone would give the scouts a plot of land, let alone build a scout headquarters! Nevertheless, on those new strategic sites they do need some help. Local scout leaders are busy getting on with providing fun and adventure for the kids. They often do not realise until too late that all those new houses next door will mean that the waiting lists to join will be impossible to fulfil. No child likes being on a waiting list (perhaps for years).
Now this article becomes a plea to planners, developers, and promoters to think about the youngsters who will be the future of your sparkling new development. I have written about the scouts because I have been a scout nearly all my life and that is what I know about. But the problem applies equally to the Girl Guides, The Boys Brigade, and any other youth organisation in your locality. An appropriate planning obligation or developer contribution could make all the difference to the long-term future of that new neighbourhood in your area.
Nigel Friswell
The
scout ‘hut’
The scouts’ meeting place (often mis-called a ‘hut’) needs to be able to accommodate up to eight two-hour evening meetings each week. There could be up to 36 young people with their adult leaders. Activities will range from quiet sessions when all are seated, to craft activities and energetic indoor games. The building should have reasonable provision for access and use by people with disabilities in accordance with the current Approved Document M of the Building Regulations. Fire alarms, smoke detectors, etc. must be installed in accordance with current relevant regulations.
Ownership:
Most scout headquarters (HQs) are owned by the scout group (under the control of the Scout Trust Corporation) on land that has been gifted to the group or is on long-term lease (usually from a local authority).
Meeting hall(s):
A small village group can operate with one large meeting hall but for many activities it is useful to have a second, separate, meeting area which can be a smaller hall or a large room. The minimum realistic hall size is 100 square metres (sqm). Ideally the small hall should be at least 60 sqm. Another room, say 3 m x 4 m, is a useful extra; it could serve as a kitchen.
Heating:
The heating needs to be economical and effective, heating up quickly before meetings. Oil or gas-fired water systems are most economical but sometimes take a long time to heat up, needing supplementary ‘instant’ heaters. Future changes in legislation may require new ideas to resolve how this 'instant' heating will be achieved. There is no known experience of heat pumps being used in this way.
Storage:
Because of the wide range of activities undertaken by all scouts (i.e. ages 4-18 years), equipment storage is a major consideration. Equipment for weekly indoor activities can usually be stored in one cupboard (floor area 1 sqm x 2 m high) for each section. So, eight cupboards are needed, easily accessible from the main meeting hall. For outdoor activities, such as camping, much more storage is needed, up to 200 cubic metres, and consideration needs to be given to storing long items, such as pioneering poles. Although some scout groups use outdoor containers for storage, local planning authorities may not allow this for new build.
Cooking facilities:
A kitchen is essential for the preparation of refreshments; meals for training courses, and
sleepovers for the younger scouts. It should be equipped with an oven, hob, refrigerator and freezer. A microwave is also useful. There should be full washing-up facilities, although a dishwasher is not always appropriate.
Toilets:
Provision that complies with Part M and Part T of the Building Regulations. Additional wash facilities are helpful for washing hands after certain activities.
Security and other amenities:
Facilities for the cleaner of the premises; WiFi network; security perimeter fence; cctv to protect perimeter and foyer. A combination lock for the perimeter access but a master key system for any building(s) and internal room access. Provision for waste and recycling bin storage and collection, taking into account the fact that the building may be unoccupied at times when the bins are to be collected.
Outside:
An outdoor grassed area of at least 200 sqm is needed for activities such as practicing tent-pitching, unless there is an adjacent public space which the scouts have permission to use. Parking is needed for a minibus and trailer (say 50 sqm). This needs to be secured against vandalism and theft attempts. There also needs to be space for leaders to park during meetings (30 sqm). There should be an area for parents to drop off their children and park when waiting to collect them after a meeting.
SUMMARY:
Hall Sizes: Hall 1: 100 sqm (75 sqm minimum) Hall 2: 60 sqm
Storage: Eight cupboards (2 cubic metres each)
Equipment 180 cubic metres
Kitchen: Large enough for cooking as an activity or as another meeting room with: oven, hob, fridge, microwave, two sinks with hand washing facilities, cupboards, and a towel airer.
Toilets: Three lavatories plus one accessible lavatory and three additional wash basins for post-activity hand wash.
Parking: Minibus and trailer plus worker parking – 80 sqm minimum.
Greenspace: Grassed area (could be adjacent public space) for activities such as tent-pitching.
NOTE: The above criteria are based upon existing successful scout meeting places.
• Nigel Friswell is an individual TCPA member. He joined the scouts at the age of eight and is still scouting as leader. All views expressed are personal.
town planning apprentices –a new type of tradesperson?
John Somers examines the movement towards university degree-based apprenticeships and, in particular, the town planning apprenticeship, which aims to address issues such as skills shortages and staff retention
When people are asked about apprenticeships, trades such as bricklaying or carpentry may come to mind. However, this is changing. September 2024 will see the first intake of apprentices on the ‘medical doctor degree apprenticeship programme’. That’s right, there is now the option to become a doctor via the apprenticeship route. So, what are apprenticeships?
Apprenticeships are a great way to stem skills gaps and to support economic growth and they are a cost-effective way for employers to expand or upskill a workforce. Open to new and existing staff, apprentices are employed in full-time paid positions, learning on the job (at no cost to them) while studying for a qualification. A range of apprenticeships are available for built environment professionals which range from surveyors, project managers and the relatively recent town planning apprenticeship.
In November 2023 the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) published its annual state of the profession report, which painted a picture of the planning profession today. The retention of planners, resourcing, salaries and political uncertainty were amongst some of the key problems planning departments across all sectors were experiencing.¹
Whilst we are seeing continued cuts to funding and resourcing in the sector as a whole, the ability
to recruit planners is also proving problematic. As indicated in the Local Government Association’s local government workplace survey 2022, 58% of all county, district and single tier council respondents said they were experiencing difficulties recruiting planning officers, with further RTPI research indicating that only 10% of planning departments in local authorities were fully staffed.²
Whilst the planning profession is seeing improvements in figures from previous annual reports, the picture is still in need of improvement.
Such figures beg the question of how we go about generating interest in planning as a career choice and attracting more planners into the workplace, given the constraints on the ability to resource planning teams and particularly to train up newcomers into our industry. Apprenticeships could be the answer.
The beginnings of the new wave in apprenticeships arose in 2015, out of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, which sought to expand the offer of apprenticeships. They saw degree apprenticeships in particular as ‘crucial to filling skills gaps and boosting this country’s productivity’ and offering ‘students the opportunity to gain a degree whilst earning a wage rather than incurring tuition fee debt’.³
Then, in 2018 we saw the RTPI supporting a trailblazer group of employers from the sector, working with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to develop the apprenticeship standards (The RTPI is the professional body that manages the ‘end point assessment’, which upon successful completion, leads to apprentices becoming chartered members of the RTPI).
‘Learning at university is changing from the traditional scene of theoretical lectures and teaching to giving apprentices the right vocational and practical experiences to complement academic study’
This followed on from the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, where organisations from all sectors with an annual wage bill of at least £3 million contribute to an apprenticeship levy, a type of tax
that goes into funding and acquiring apprenticeships. As part of the scheme, employers can utilise the money they pay into the apprenticeship levy to fund the cost of an apprenticeship course to upskill their employees. Employers with lower wage bills also benefit given that they are eligible for a government contribution of up to 95% of the cost of an apprenticeship degree.⁴
The RTPI has supported the development of two Town Planning apprenticeship standards, the Town Planning Assistant (Level 4) and the Chartered Town Planner (Level 7). There are currently 11 accredited planning schools across England delivering the Chartered Town Planner apprenticeship which is typically taken as a day release from the regular working week. At MA level, an apprentice can gain a MA degree and Chartered status with the RTPI in as little as three years. This compares to the traditional route which could take four or more years part time. Whilst boosting skills and capacity for the employer, retention can also be improved with many apprentices remaining at their employment for the three years of the duration of the Masters apprenticeship, as well as staying with the employer beyond the apprenticeship.
University of Westminster RTPI Apprenticeship students visiting Amsterdam’s IJburg District
Trish Murphy is the Apprenticeship Lead at the RTPI and states:
‘The RTPI is delighted that the highly successful Chartered Town Planner degree apprenticeship is going from strength to strength. Apprentices are providing a vital supply of talent into the profession which is very welcome. There are now over 700 apprentices studying on the apprenticeship programme with 11 accredited Planning Schools in England now delivering the apprenticeship. Apprenticeships are increasingly growing in popularity amongst both employers and potential apprentices and having more employers recruiting via this route is always welcome. Apprentices can bring a new perspective to planning and really benefit from having the opportunity to study and apply their knowledge directly in the workplace. On completion of their studies, apprentices undertake the end point assessment and once successful, achieve RTPI Chartered status. Our Chartered members consistently inform us that the status, professional recognition, as well as using their new post-nominals (MRTPI) that Chartered membership brings, is the biggest benefit to them.’
‘Apprenticeships are a great way to stem skills gaps and to support economic growth’
One of the Universities that offer the MA level apprenticeship route for urban and regional planning is the University of Westminster. Students undertake theoretical and practical modules, and in addition there are four professional practice weeks, which are intensive week-long modules with guest speakers from industry that focus on developing the key skills that apprentices need for the workplace as well as to be successful in completing the RTPI end point assessment. Included in the price of the course is an international field trip – previous locations including Amsterdam and Paris – which gives the apprentices a broader experience and perspective of planning issues affecting places outside the UK. This emphasises a new pedagogical approach, that learning at university is changing from the traditional scene of theoretical lectures and teaching to giving apprentices the right vocational and practical experiences to complement academic study; prepare them for their day to day role and help them to build a successful career in urban and regional planning.
For more information on apprenticeships, see the RTPI website at www.rtpi.org.uk/apprenticeships.
• John Somers is Senior Lecturer, Planning and the Historic Environment and Course Leader, MA Urban and Regional Planning (RTPI Apprenticeship) at the University of Westminster. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 G Csontas: State of the Profession 2023 – The UK planning profession in numbers. Royal Town Planning Institute, Nov. 2023, p.25. https://www.rtpi.org.uk/ media/16015/state-of-the-profession-2023-final.pdf
2 Local Government Workplace Survey 2022 Research Report. Local Government Association, Jan. 2023, p. 13. https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ documents/LG%20Workforce%20Survey%202022%20 -%20Final%20for%20Publication%20-%20Tables%20 Hard%20Coded.pdf
3 ‘Value for Money in Higher Education’. Website. UK Parliament, 5 Nov. 2018. https://publications. parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/ cmeduc/343/34302.htm
4 ‘Employing an apprentice’. Website. GOV.UK, 2024. https://www.gov.uk/employing-an-apprentice/ get-funding
do rural planning authorities have the resources to support affordable housing delivery?
Nick Gallent and Andrew Purves report on a survey of resource constraints affecting rural planning authorities in England, and the impacts on small local needs housing projects
It will come as news to no-one that planning authorities are overworked and overstretched. The recent Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) report into the operation of the housing market concluded that planning authority capacity is a major impediment to housing supply.¹ Without additional resources, authorities cannot produce the plans and deliver the permissions that housebuilders need to increase output up to the local market absorption rate (i.e. planning has a role in helping developers build what they want to build whilst achieving their target return). It is also the case that, without enough staff with the right skills, authorities are unable to support the delivery of non-market housing. This was the subject of a recent survey conducted by a team at University College London (UCL), which was part of a wider study into the factors underpinning the delivery of affordable homes on rural exception sites (RES) across rural England.²
The survey sought a clearer picture of resource constraints, their impacts, and potential mitigations. Using Defra’s distinction of urban and rural areas, three types of authority were targeted: mainly rural, largely rural, and urban with significant rural parts. Responses from a broad geographical mix, and from different authority types, were sought. To that end, an online questionnaire was dispatched to 157 authorities with the help of the Rural Services Network. A number of authorities came back to us, saying they had neither the time nor the resources to complete the questionnaire! Fair enough – we treated this as valuable feedback. However, 40 full responses were received, and the pattern of these responses is shown in the table below:
We asked lead planning officers (respondents had a variety of roles and titles, noted below) to answer 61 questions divided between the following themes: • The nature and severity of resource constraints affecting each local authority.
• The impacts of those constraints on the general planning service and on the delivery of small rural housing sites.
• Perceptions of the operability and value of different mitigation strategies, leading to an assessment of resourcing priorities.
Respondents tended to be senior, having spent an average of 24 years in the sector and 12 years in their current authority. Most were directors or heads of planning. Some were more junior, having been delegated the task of answering our questions. As the table at the bottom of this page shows, the authorities were a mix of districts, larger unitaries, and national parks. This meant that the size of planning teams varied considerably, but the average reported team size was 37. The smallest comprised three officers and some had more than 100 staff in planning.
Unfilled posts
All of the authorities reported unfilled posts – an average of just under four per authority. They claimed to be struggling to recruit senior and experienced planners, which led many to bring in less experienced recruits, often through the degree apprenticeship route, which they greatly valued. It was noted that authorities often lacked specialists, experienced in particular types of project or able to deal with specific technical issues, and this tended to slow planning decisions. The recruitment crisis is rooted in pressure on budgets, preventing authorities from offering competitive salary packages or recruiting the experienced staff they need. Outsourcing jobs and tasks to private companies tends to leave planners in those authorities with fewer opportunities for progression and promotion. It also limits the range of experience gained by newer professionals.
About the resource constraints
Two-thirds of responding authorities claimed to lack the resources – workforce and skills – needed to perform statutory duties. They couldn’t develop relationships with their development partners or with their local communities. This tended to result in a more remote planning service, less understood and therefore less valued.
‘All of the authorities reported unfilled posts’
For small projects, some of the authorities had suspended their pre-application services whilst others noted a ‘reduced capacity’ to provide advice ahead of applications. The majority reported increasingly protracted timescales for pre-application enquiries.
Service pressures and negative impacts on staff are of course closely correlated. A significant majority of authorities (80%) drew a link between workload pressures and higher rates of staff turnover. And yet, morale seemed to be holding up at a mid-point between extremely good and extremely poor, with planners feeling that the work they do is valuable. Despite the pressures, job satisfaction remains high.
Working from home more regularly has been identified in some quarters as a challenge for the planning service – it can weaken personal relationships. Whilst our respondents agreed that this was a risk and felt that active learning between colleagues could be reduced, they pointed to time savings from not having to travel to the office – time that could be spent dealing with higher caseloads. On reflection, this may not be a positive: overworked officers cutting themselves off from colleagues, communities and clients so they can
simply plough through a mountain of cases, which would of course be lessened, and made more deliverable, if authorities could recruit to those unfilled posts.
Besides staffing, new duties placed on planning authorities, dealing with nutrient neutrality for example, was cited as an added pressure. But it was not an unwanted pressure:
‘The wide range of duties is what makes the planning role interesting; there is always something new, bio-diversity [sic] net gain and nutrient neutrality. This should be attractive to professionals.’
Impacts on the planning service and smaller rural housing sites
Despite staff vacancies and pressures, two-thirds of authorities felt that the planning service continued to be timely and high-quality. The right decisions were being made within statutory time scales for major and non-major applications. Planning performance data for the respondent authorities confirmed that the vast majority of applications were being turned around on time. Respondents also felt that they were able to deliver local plan commitments, even if this sometimes meant outsourcing and using consultants.
In relation to small sites, particularly RES, there was limited awareness of how these worked or recent experience of their delivery. This finding was reported by the National Housing Federation in February. Only 17% of all rural authorities delivered affordable homes on RES in 2021/22. Responses to the survey may reflect this pattern, and also the
practice of prioritising larger sites against the backdrop of resource constraints. However, only two respondents explicitly stated that their authority had made a conscious decision to support larger development opportunities over RES.
‘An improved planning system requires changes to the system of planning fees and to departmental budgeting’
Concerning community consultations around small rural sites, respondents tended to point to the responsibilities of housing colleagues and rural enablers (independent ones or those embedded in housing departments) to run consultations and build evidence of local need for affordable homes. They were quick to point out, however, that constraints affecting planning were also felt in other departments. They suspected that capacity in housing might be a factor limiting engagement with RES projects: a suspicion borne out by recent delivery data.
Mitigation
How might resource constraints be mitigated? The planning officers responding to the survey drew attention to the importance of ‘rural housing enablers’, based either in the local authority or funded by Defra and engaged by a branch of the Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE) network. Half of all respondents said that these lend
Only 17% of all rural authorities delivered affordable homes on rural exception sites in 2021/22
George Clerk /
capacity and momentum to small housing projects, being able to advise communities and deal with a range of planning and housing questions prior to the submission of a planning application (though of course, enablers are not in a position to give pre-application advice).
For rural authorities, the enabling service takes some of the pressure off planning, but this is not a general mitigation. That usually comes from the outsourcing of broader functions (where authorities are able to pay for that outsourcing) to relieve pressure and allow officers to focus on less routine tasks.
‘Overworked officers cutting themselves off from colleagues, communities and clients so they can simply plough through a mountain of cases’
Where there is no budget for outsourcing (and also where there is) a key mitigation involves local authorities sharing good practice. Nearly 80% of respondents listed shared learning as key to increasing planning service capacity and most of these said that this was already happening.
They were less enthusiastic, however, about sharing staff or more formal ‘shared service’ arrangements. Such arrangements – officers splitting their time between neighbouring authorities – supported the training of new staff, but it did not raise the delivery capacity of authorities. Every officer shared was a half full-time equivalent reduction in capacity as far as many respondents were concerned.
But somewhat contradictory to this, just under half of all respondents noted the general value of ‘changing working practice, partnering with others, and making less go further’ as a necessary response to resource constraints. Our sense was that whilst authorities want to learn from each other, and occasionally pool some skills, they believe that a good planning service requires in-house resource.
What do rural planning authorities want?
Much of what planning authorities want, and what they need to deliver an improved planning system, requires changes to the system of planning fees and to departmental budgeting. They want to be able to recruit and retain senior staff, who play a key role in guiding and inspiring more junior colleagues. More than 90% of authorities stated that staff retention and upskilling were their main resource priorities, next to clarity in planning policy and a stable system, which was not constantly changing and placing further pressure on limited resources. Note: respondents welcomed the widening goals and
duties of planning, which they saw as enriching their jobs; but constant changes to policy, only weakly justified, caused added pressure without discernible benefit. More especially, respondents from our rural authorities wanted the following:
• changes to application fees and budgeting that support increased planning capacity and upskilling;
• Incentives for the retention of senior staff, encouraging them to stay in public sector planning or return to the sector;
• flexibility in the work-life balance available to planners, which increases the appeal of the sector for new entrants;
• continued support for degree apprenticeships, which were seen as a way of equipping people already working in planning, often as assistants, with the skills needed to make a bigger contribution to local authorities;
• an end to the denigration of planning by government, which often colours communities’ and clients’ expectations of local services, fueling negativity (and adding to the pressure on public planners) even before that service has been experienced.
Our survey, undertaken as part of wider research into the delivery of affordable homes on rural exception sites, provides some insights into the pressures facing the public sector. The CMA report into the functioning of the housing market, noted at the start of this article, highlights the need for a well-resourced planning service able to work closely with development partners. There is continuing uncertainty around how the planning system might be reformed, to deliver against social and economic goals, but there seems to be no doubt that a greater level of resource for planning is urgently required.
• Prof. Nick Gallent and Andrew Purves are based at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 Housebuilding market study: Final report. Competition and Markets Authority, 26 Feb. 2024. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ media/65d8baed6efa83001ddcc5cd/Housebuilding_ market_study_final_report.pdf
2 N Gallent, A Purves, I Hamiduddin: Factors in the Effective Delivery of Rural Exception Sites in England UCL and National Housing Federation, Feb. 2024. https://www.housing.org.uk/globalassets/files/rural/ factors-in-the-effective-delivery-of-rural-exceptionsites-in-england-8.pdf
green leaves
Danielle Sinnett explains how the right type of greenspace safeguards mental health for children and young adults
young people’s access to greenspace is fundamental to the health and wellbeing of us all
The mental health of children and young people is in crisis. The World Health Organization reports that around 14% of young people aged 10-19 years have experienced a mental health problem¹ and, in the UK, 20% of children aged 10-16 years have a probable mental disorder, increasing to 23% in those aged 17-19 years.² Mental disorders in children and young people have increased, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, with Young Minds reporting a 53% increase in referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services between 2019 and 2022.³
‘There is good evidence that access to nature can reduce mental health problems in children and young people’
There are a multitude of reasons why our young people are experiencing poor mental health and greenspace is not a panacea to the systemic problems they face. However, there is good evidence that access to nature can reduce mental health problems in children and young people.⁴ Yet, 8% of households do not have access to a private garden, with inequalities across race and social class.⁵ Although 74% of children report being able to walk to a local greenspace easily, those in urban areas were less likely to visit them⁶ and 34% of children with a probable mental disorder had not spent any time in greenspace in the previous seven days.⁷
Colin Ward, the TCPA’s education officer throughout the 1970s, wrote eloquently about the inequalities between children’s experiences of the city, but it is only relatively recently that we have started to understand the consequences of this in terms of their mental health.
Most adults with mental disorders, including anxiety and depression, develop these conditions between the ages of 14 and 24 years. Although independent access to greenspace might be limited in younger children, they are often catered for in our parks and other greenspace, and, if they have someone to take them, can access the benefits to health and wellbeing. However, for teenagers and young people, there is often little provision for them outside of multi-use games areas and skate parks. Too old to access the play equipment for young children and treated with suspicion for ‘loitering’ with friends, teenagers and young people can feel unwelcome. Girls are worse off – they are more likely to experience mental disorders⁸ and are less likely to use the little provision that there is for teenagers.⁹
Our systematic review of evidence found that exposure to greenspace has a positive impact upon the mental health of those aged 14-24 years.⁴ Factors including social interaction, physical activity, better sleep, and mindfulness are important intermediaries in this relationship. For example, greenspace enables social activities and exercise, which in turn can prevent depression.
However, many of the existing studies were experiments, often conducted in Asian countries with students, where young people’s mood or anxiety was measured before and after an organised walk through a greenspace (for example, a forest or a park) or an urban environment. It is therefore hard to extrapolate this evidence to the UK, to other young people, or to a more everyday experience of greenspace. Even so, less robust studies examining the relationship between
green leaves
neighbourhood greenspace access or vegetation and mental health tend also to find that better access is associated with better mental health, and this is perhaps more analogous to everyday experience. Moreover, it is these everyday, incidental, experiences that are so important, especially as we also found that young people tend to underestimate the benefits of using greenspace, so are less likely to seek it out.
We need to ensure that greenspace is accessible to young people, especially given that they have low levels of independent mobility – they often cannot drive or afford public transport and may struggle with navigating unfamiliar neighbourhoods. This means also providing safe, high quality walking environments – there’s little point in providing greenspace for young people if they cannot get to it quickly, enjoyably and safely. It is also crucial to maximise opportunities for incidental contact with nature. This could include the provision of green active travel routes and street trees, so that exposure to green infrastructure is designed into everyday activities like travelling to school, work and social activities.
Some young people do recognise the benefits that greenspace provides. In our recent submission to the government’s call for evidence on the experiences of children and young people of their built environment,10 we highlighted evidence from
young people with anxiety and depression that greenspace provides them with freedom and the ability to think things through, get away from things, including stresses at home and school, boredom, technology, social media, noise and traffic, as well as to behave like children.⁴
‘We need to ensure that
greenspace is accessible to young people’
Colin Ward talked extensively about the balance between privacy and isolation and its importance for children in the city, and young people also talked about their discomfort in overcrowded greenspace and a preference for spaces large enough to find solitude. Despite being seen as threatening by adults, young people have the same concerns regarding their personal safety in greenspace, especially those that are unlit or where groups congregate. Boys and girls are concerned about safety – but for different reasons; boys appear to be more concerned about being mugged or beaten up, whilst girls are more worried about sexual harassment and violence.
If young people do not seek out greenspace, we need a better understanding of why this is, how they
Greenspace large enough for young people to find solitude
Freepik
green leaves
ccccc experience the greenspace they do use and what might encourage greater use. However, there is a surprising lack of evidence about the specific features of greenspace that young people prefer (although Make Space for Girls have been instrumental in filling this gap in recent years). Our evidence suggests that young people value sensory experiences from visiting greenspace, including feeling the sun, breathing fresh air, and seeing and hearing nature. They value spaces in which trees and sky dominate rather than buildings, but with some distance to the trees to reduce feelings of oppressiveness, as well as more wild spaces to explore. Crucially, young people relate the design of greenspace to their experience and resulting use of it.
‘Colin Ward talked extensively about the balance between privacy and isolation and its importance for children in the city’
The review for the Wellcome Trust was part of a programme of reviews11 that examined different ‘active ingredients’ for managing anxiety and depression in young people. What was particularly interesting about this was how greenspace could act as a site for many of the other active ingredients, including social interaction, physical activity, problem solving, and positive activities such as volunteering – so getting this right will enable other beneficial behaviours.
The scale of mental disorders in children and young people means that it is essential that we provide high quality green infrastructure throughout our towns and cities. This includes ensuring that places young people access are designed for them, including parks, educational settings, and greening neighbourhoods and active travel routes. In the same way that Colin Ward recognised that children are an indicator of a functioning city, this in turn will benefit all age groups, not just children and young people and the adults they become.
• Prof. Danielle Sinnett is a Professor in Sustainable Built Environments, and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 ‘Mental health of adolescents’. Online fact sheet. World Health Organisation, 17 Nov. 2021. https://www.who.int/ news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health
2 T Newlove-Delgado, F Marcheselli, T Williams, D Mandalia, M Dennes, S McManus, M Savic, W Treloar, K Croft, T Ford: Mental Health of Children and Young People in England; Overview. NHS England, 2023. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/ statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-peoplein-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up#
3 ‘Yearly referrals to young people’s mental health services have risen by 53% since 2019’. Press release. Young Minds, 2023. https://www.youngminds.org.uk/ about-us/media-centre/press-releases/yearly-referralsto-young-people-s-mental-health-services-have-risenby-53-since-2019/
4 I Bray, R Reece, D Sinnett, F Martin, R Hayward: ‘Exploring the role of exposure to green and blue spaces in preventing anxiety and depression among young people aged 14–24 years living in urban settings: A systematic review and conceptual framework’. Environmental Research, Vol. 214(4), Nov. 2022, 114081. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0013935122014086?via%3Dihub
5 ‘One in eight British households has no garden’. Webpage. Office for National Statistics, 14 May 2020. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/ environmentalaccounts/articles/ oneineightbritishhouseholdshasnogarden/2020-05-14
6 ‘National statistics – The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2023 update’. Webpage. Natural England, 29 Nov. 2023. https://www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/the-childrens-people-and-naturesurvey-for-england-2023-update/the-childrens-peopleand-nature-survey-for-england-2023-update
7 T Newlove-Delgado, F Marcheselli, T Williams, D Mandalia, M Dennes, S McManus, M Savic, W Treloar, K Croft, T Ford: Mental Health of Children and Young People in England; Part 2: Sleep, loneliness, activities and health behaviours. NHS England, 2023. https:// digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/ statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-peoplein-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up/part-2-sleeploneliness-activities-and-health-behaviours
8 Ibid. Part 1: Mental Health https://digital.nhs.uk/ data-and-information/publications/statistical/mentalhealth-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2023wave-4-follow-up/part-1-mental-health
9 S Walker, I Clark: Make Space for Girls: the research background 2023. Make Space for Girls, Jan. 2023. https://assets-global.website-files. com/6398afa2ae5518732f04f791/ 63f60a5a2a28c570b35ce1b5_Make%20Space%20 for%20Girls%20-%20Research%20Draft.pdf
10 ‘Children, young people and the built environment inquiry – Levelling-Up Committee publishes evidence ahead of opening evidence session’. Webpage. UK Parliament, 19 Jan. 2024 https://committees.parliament. uk/committee/17/levelling-up-housing-andcommunities-committee/news/199504/levelling-up_ committee_publishes_evidence_ahead_of_opening_ evidence_session/
Bob Pritchard explains the current state of differentiation between the English and Welsh planning systems
a tale of two systems –planning in england and wales
Over the past decade, the planning regimes in England and Wales have taken increasingly divergent paths – an inevitable consequence of planning being a devolved function, with the two administrations pursuing contrasting political agendas. These ideological differences are reflected in the views expressed by ministers on the role and purpose of planning. In her introduction to Future Wales: The National Plan 2040 (Future Wales), the Minister for Housing and Local Government suggests that:
‘The planning system has a key role to play in making Wales healthier, fairer and more prosperous. It shapes the places we live in, where we work, how we travel and the quality of the environment around us.’¹
The UK government’s recent pronouncements on planning have been far less effusive, often characterising it as a barrier to growth rather than a positive tool for change, emphasising the need to assist developers to ‘overcome tiresome bureaucracy by slashing red tape’.²
There have also been contrasting approaches to planning reform. After rowing back from its White Paper proposals to abandon a system rooted in discretionary decision making at local level and to adopt a more zonal approach, the UK government has chosen to use primary legislation to ‘bolt-on’ additional provisions to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (the 1990 Act), together with a raft of secondary legislation, in an attempt to make the current system work more effectively.
In Wales a Law Commission report³ on planning law came to the unequivocal conclusion that
simplification and consolidation are what is required. In responding to the report, the Welsh government accepted the necessity of this approach, in the interests of enabling ‘all stakeholders operating, using or engaging in the system to clearly access and understand the law directly affecting them’.⁴ A consolidation Bill has been proposed, bringing together planning provisions from a number of Acts from the 1990 Act onwards. However, this is a challenging undertaking and progress to date has been slow.
Turning to the contentious element of planning, enforcement powers are now better aligned following the introduction of enforcement warning notices in England (they have been in use in Wales since 2016). They can be issued where it appears that there has been a breach of planning control, and there is a reasonable prospect that, if a planning application is made for the development concerned, then planning permission would be granted. A major advantage of these notices for local planning authorities is that they ‘stop the clock’ when it comes to unauthorised development gaining immunity from enforcement. However, Wales has yet to follow the lead from England and introduce a standard ten year time limit to establish immunity from enforcement.
When it comes to development management, a major area of contrast that has very recently emerged is the approach to securing biodiversity gain. Wales has eschewed the formulaic approach adopted in England and has instead opted for a policy mechanism predicated on a more sitespecific and qualitative assessment. Net Benefit for Biodiversity (NBB) was introduced through an amendment to Planning Policy Wales in February 2024. ‘Net benefit’ is defined as development leaving:
‘…biodiversity and the resilience of ecosystems in a significantly better state than before, through securing immediate and long term, measurable and demonstrable benefit, primarily on or immediately adjacent to the site’.⁵
England and Wales diverge in their approach to securing biodiversity gain
NBB is based on the principle that biodiversity enhancement should be proportionate to the scale and nature of the proposed development and should be appropriate to the local and national environment. It relies upon a qualitative assessment utilising the DECCA resilience attributes⁶ rather than employing a standard metric. Assessing impacts upon habitats involves an incremental ‘stepwise’ approach. National policy in Wales provides that, where adverse effects on biodiversity and ecosystem resilience cannot be avoided, minimised, mitigated, restored or, as a last resort, compensated for, it will be necessary to refuse planning permission.
Whilst other differences in the two development management systems are more nuanced, when it comes to planning policy there are clear divergences, both in terms of the overall framework and the content. Unlike England, Wales has a National Spatial Strategy. Future Wales establishes a national development framework and a direction for Strategic Development Plans (SDPs) at regional level, with Local Development Plans at local authority level. It sets out a vision for all of Wales in key sectors, including housing and affordable housing growth, placemaking, well-being and quality of life, sustainability, and renewable energy. It takes the form of a Development Plan Document, which means that, (unlike the National Planning Policy Framework in England), it attracts statutory force in decision making equal to that of development plan policies. Whilst its policies are expressed at a high level of generality and rely upon SDPs to flesh out the detail, Future Wales is not lacking in ambition and offers a positive blueprint for growth.
At the time of writing, there is a distinct possibility that there will be Labour administrations in both England and Wales by the time this issue of Town & Country Planning is published. Unfortunately, recent pronouncements from senior Labour politicians in England have been peppered with negative rhetoric, with the shadow chancellor referring to the planning system as ‘the single greatest obstacle to our economic success’ and ‘a barrier to opportunity, a barrier to growth – and a barrier to homeownership too’.⁷
Whilst the case for planning reform is undeniable, any incoming administration may be well advised to take its cue from the Welsh experience and ensure that any changes are rooted in a genuinely spatial approach, recognising the positive role of planning in supporting growth and economic recovery.
• Bob Pritchard is Head of Knowledge in the Shoosmiths Planning Team. All views expressed are personal.
Notes
1 Future Wales – The National Plan 2040. Llywodraeth Cymru. 24 Feb. 2021, p.5. https://www.gov.wales/sites/ default/files/publications/2021-02/future-wales-thenational-plan-2040.pdf
2 R Sunak, M Gove: ‘Build on brownfield now, Gove tells underperforming councils’. Press release. Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Prime Minister's Office, 13 Feb. 2024. https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/build-on-brownfield-now-gove-tellsunderperforming-councils
3 Planning Law in Wales Final Report. HC 1788, Law Commission (No. 383), Nov. 2018, pp.6, 43. https:// cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f. s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/30/2018/11/6.5134_ LC_Welsh-Planning-Report_Final_281118_FINAL_WEB. pdf
4 The future of Welsh law: revised accessibility programme 2021 to 2026. Llywodraeth Cymru. 18 Jan. 2024, par.15. https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/ pdf-versions/2024/1/2/1706019586/future-welsh-lawrevised-accessibility-programme-2021-2026.pdf
5 Planning Policy Wales Edition 12 | February 2024. Llywodraeth Cymru, WG48893, par.6.4.5, p.145. https:// www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2024-02/ planning-policy-wales-edition-12_1.pdf
6 Diversity, Extent, Condition, Connectivity and other Aspects of ecosystem resilience. See: https://cdn. cyfoethnaturiol.cymru/media/696279/ecosystemresilience-in-a-nutshell-1-what-is-ecosystem-resilience. pdf
7 ‘Rachel Reeves Mais Lecture 2024’. Press release. The Labour Party, 19 Mar. 2024. https://labour.org.uk/ updates/press-releases/rachel-reeves-mais-lecture/
Philip Barton
design matters
Matthew Carmona asks: will the Office for Place be the sort of challenging, proactive, and innovative driver of change that we so clearly need?
from urban renaissance to office for place
25 years on
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Urban Task Force report – Towards an Urban Renaissance – and the decade long sequence of policy, practice, and investment interventions that followed. he Urban Task Force initiative was commissioned in 1998 by Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. Its purpose was to identify the causes of urban decline and establish a vision for UK cities based upon the principles of good design, social well-being and environmental responsibility. At the heart of the initiative was an attempt to turn our suburban nation into an urban one, whilst simultaneously solving the housing crisis. On the former, to a good degree, it succeeded, on the latter, it failed.
Its key success was to awaken us to the great value and potential of under-utilised urban land and to use place-based design strategies to encourage us to embrace urban living. On that front, across its more than 100 recommendations, the report espoused many of the essentials of the latest incarnation of those ideals, the 15- (or, 20-) minute city. In doing so it encouraged a new wave of investment, both public and private, into our larger cities which, over time, also led to their densification; sometimes designed well and sometimes not.
Its failure was in government timidity, then as now, to tackle the national housing delivery model that throughout the 1980s and 1990s had become ever more reliant upon a few large national house builders whose rational interests as market players have rarely been served by maximising housing output. Instead, there is often a preference for drip feeding new housing into the market to maintain sales values. And this too often goes hand in hand with avoiding building too much social housing and infrastructure, or housing environments of a better quality than absolutely required.
Now, 25 years on and looking at the prescriptions lined up in the famous yellow book, it is hard to see many that aren’t still relevant today and which an incoming government might like to revisit; albeit now we might expect to see a far greater emphasis upon zero carbon, nature recovery, health and well-being, and affordability.
A new kid in town
On the design front, while the Urban Task Force did not recommend the establishment of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), that organisation emerged as part of a wider policy response and as a key entity charged with delivery of Urban Task Force recommendations, and notably with raising design quality ambitions across England. History tells us that the austerity years and everything that came after quickly swept all of this away, and 15 years on we are reinventing the wheel: first through the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission report, and now with the Office for Place.
The Office for Place¹ is a new arms-length agency of government with around 25 staff and a base in
The famous yellow book
design matters
Stoke-on-Trent. It was formally launched with a fanfare in March, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to its inaugural conference, ‘Places at Pace’.²
While the mood music around the Office for Place is clearly different to CABE – beauty, popular design, community engagement, digital technology, and a context of ongoing austerity – I could not help feeling a strong sense of déjà vu around the sorts of ‘tools’ that the new organisation plans to use. These include support to local government, publication of advice and best practice, training, research, and an initial focus on design coding that CABE also played a critical role in championing during its middle years.
The major absence is the omission of any design review function. CABE inherited its national design review role from the Royal Fine Arts Commission before it, but in many respects it was always its Achilles heel, with many of the architects and developers who had fallen foul of its design judgements increasingly critical of this role and ultimately delighted at CABE’s demise. Curiously, there is now more design review,³ more widely spread than ever before, albeit not a national panel for which there seems little demand or potential any time soon.
My own research⁴ showed that CABE was a remarkably effective organisation in much (although not all) of what it did. Reflecting this, the Place Alliance and others⁵ made the case for reestablishing a national organisation to champion design quality in the immediate aftermath of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission which, like the Urban Task Force before it, had not recommended setting up such an organisation. I am therefore delighted to see that after an extended period of gestation it is up and running.
My more recent research⁶ has shown how critical such advocacy for, and leadership in, design quality can be at both national and local scales, notably for ensuring that a culture of design quality emerges and that this informs policy and place-based decision-making across all scales of development.
Wishing every success
Whether the Office for Place is as effective as CABE was, and I truly hope it will be, will depend upon many factors, not least (one suspects) the attitude of the new government. Notably it will depend upon the place of design within their plans to (yet again) reform the planning system.
Now that the Office for Place has been let off the leash of direct government control, my hope is that they can capture a little of the spirit of renaissance that infected, in a positive sense, the CABE years.
Ultimately the Office for Place needs to become the sort of challenging, proactive, and innovative driver of change that we so clearly need. It also, despite the predilections of some ministers,⁷ needs to avoid being associated with a prescribed national style or any mechanism that might, rightly or wrongly, be seen to be imposing one.
There is now the potential to quickly gain momentum and after a decade and a half of hiatus, to become a strong national voice on design quality, helping to lead the national conversation (as CABE did) and drive change locally. In doing so, one hopes, it will feel able to speak truth to power –something that CABE struggled with – not least on the point of our national development model that for decades has been broken. Unfortunately, until we fix it (and that means much more than tinkering with the planning system) we will never get great design as a norm, never deliver enough new homes, and never complete the still much needed urban renaissance.
• Prof. Matthew Carmona is Professor of Planning & Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. All views expressed are personal.
2 N Boys Smith: ‘A week on from the Places at Pace conference’. Webpage. Office for Place, 26 Mar. 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/ news/a-week-on-from-the-places-at-pace-conference
3 M Carmona, V Giordano: The Design Deficit. Design skills and design governance approaches in English local authorities. Place Alliance, Jul. 2021. http:// placealliance.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ Design-Skills-in-Local-Authorities-2021_Final.pdf
4 M Carmona, C de Magalhães, L Natarajan: ‘Design governance the CABE way, its effectiveness and legitimacy’. Journal of Urbanism, 2018, Vol. 11(1), 1-23. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ epdf/10.1080/17549175.2017.1341425?needAccess=true
5 M Carmona: 72. ‘A design quality unit for England – marmite to manna’. Blog. 27 May 2020. https:// matthew-carmona.com/2020/05/27/a-design-qualityunit-for-england-marmite-to-manna/
6 M Carmona, J Bento, T Gabrieli: Urban Design Governance: Soft powers and the European experience. UCL Press, London, 2023. https://discovery. ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10166947/1/Urban-DesignGovernance.pdf
7 M Gove: ‘Long-term plan for housing: Secretary of State's speech’. Speech. Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 24 Jul. 2023. Transcript available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ long-term-plan-for-housing-secretary-of-states-speech
personal provocations
When thinking about how best to celebrate the Association’s 125th anniversary, and the 120th anniversary of Town & Country Planning, I thought it would be appropriate to ask those who have made the TCPA Journal what it is over the years – its loyal contributors – to look both backwards and forwards in time and share their personal reflections about what the coming 25 years (or longer) are likely to hold for society as a whole, the planning profession and the TCPA.
I was surprised by the incredibly enthusiastic response to this plea and sufficient responses were received to allow space in successive issues of Town & Country Planning in 2024 to be devoted to these sometime whimsical, sometime strident, but always intensely personal provocations.
I have given free rein to contributors to say whatever they feel needs to be said. I hope all readers will find at least one of these personal provocations that chimes with their own views but also at least one that challenges their world view.
• Philip Barton is editor of Town & Country Planning
keeping the TCPA ship afloat
Graeme Bell OBE is a Vice-President of the TCPA. He served as a Director of the TCPA between 1998 and 2021. All views expressed are personal.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned! Back in late 1997, when I expressed an interest in the vacancy as director, I was sent a set of the latest accounts, which showed we were broke. I used to joke that throughout my career in public service if I’d asked people for money, I’d have got the sack. At the TCPA it was the other way round. So, finance dominated throughout. The TCPA survived, and at the end of my stint we even had the best balance sheet in a decade, thanks to an unexpected source.
Back in the day nearly every local planning authority was a TCPA subscriber, which then made up about a third of its income, but this source of funding was early casualty of budget cuts. To spread the message and generate vital cash-flow the TCPA mounted a punishing conference schedule. Unfortunately, many other organisations had the same idea, just as training budgets were slashed. Sponsorship became a crucial income stream, and we drafted in students from University College London and elsewhere to fill the room when attendance was poor. We couldn’t afford to cancel an event. It was nip and tuck.
We had hoped that the New Labour government would look kindly in our direction when it came to core or project funding. It didn’t happen. We came up with the idea of corporate fellowship for companies. In return for a fee, executives from various sectors could attend TCPA briefings with key politicians and experts in planning and development. It generated income and also created some valuable networks.
When it came to campaigning, it was ‘in at the deep end’. On my first day I was in front of Gwyneth Dunwoody MP and the environment select committee, flanked by two great professors – Peter Hall and Mike Breheny. The committee was examining the housing issue – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Their report and our powerful research findings about the growing housing gap
were largely ignored as the government danced to the tune of the countryside lobby.
It wasn’t as if the TCPA didn’t get access to Parliament. Pre 9/11 if you looked as if you owned the place anyone could walk straight off the street and into the House lobby with just a smile to the copper. Backbenchers and shadow ministers were often accessible, but those able to actually do something always seemed too busy to see us.
The TCPA organised a debate in Cambridge about the housing crisis, sponsored by The Guardian Then the TCPA took the evidence-based presentation around the country. At the Maidenhead and District Housing Association’s annual general meeting, our acetates on the overhead projector clearly showed the upward curves of household growth; an ageing population; divorce trends, and suchlike compared with the flatline of housebuilding. Local MP, Theresa May, in the front row must have seen the figures but even when she was in Number 10, nothing changed.
‘The real game changer came from the most unexpected source, and from the other side of the world’
As ever throughout our history, the TCPA punched well above its weight. With only five full time equivalents in post (some tough and unpopular decisions had to be taken early on to reduce the wage bill), we lobbied and spread the message as best we could. I was massively assisted by my chairman Prof. Peter Hall. How could someone retain-and retrieve-so much information about land use, movement and social affairs, and be such a wonderfully decent human being too?
Our centenary in 1999 was a high point. We decided to institute a commission led by the TCPA’s chair, Baroness Sally Hamwee, to gather evidence from around the country on future social, economic and environmental challenges. The TCPA Centenary Commission was the first to call for an over-arching national plan for land use and movement and also for planners to research and respond to the growing dangers of climate change. The TCPA was able to use these recommendations when we appeared at the series of examinations into the draft regional strategies for England, most of which barely mentioned climate change.
‘Local MP, Theresa May, in the front row must have seen the figures but even when she was in Number 10, nothing changed’
The TCPA booked a venue in London’s Barbican Centre for a debate chaired by television newsreader, Anna Ford and she helped make the day a roaring success. We also booked the Middle Temple, one of London’s historic Inns of Court, for our celebratory dinner with Channel 4’s Jon Snow as guest speaker. He arrived in his DJ and pulled off his bicycle clips! Both events took heaps of organising but generated enormous goodwill amongst TCPA supporters and helped us reach those that the TCPA hoped to influence. Tom Osborn and his sister Margaret Fenton, the children
of former TCPA chairman, Sir Frederic J Osborn (FJO), helped fund the centenary events and the FJO lecture and gave us all gentle encouragement throughout.
However, the real game changer came from the most unexpected source, and from the other side of the world. One morning I received a telephone call from Mike Ash, Chief Planner at the Department of the Environment. He had a party of planners and politicians from South Korea and the minister who was supposed to see them had been called away. Could I take them for a couple of hours please? They arrived, I made them tea, talked about the work of the TCPA, answered their questions and then thought little more about it. About three months later, I received a letter from the government of South Korea, asking if the TCPA would undertake a review of the green belts around Seoul. A handsome fee was promised.
The contract was daunting, but we had to accept the challenge. Prof. Sir Peter Hall was outstanding. He knew the country and, even better, he knew that Prof. Nick Gallent at Manchester had studied South Korean planning. My old boss Geoff Steeley, TCPA vice president, former director of planning at Hertfordshire County Council and chair of the technical panel at SERPLAN (the London and South East Regional Planning Conference) gave his time freely to the cause. And new TCPA staff member, Miles Gibson, expertly project managed. It was only afterwards that I learned that the TCPA was singled out for the job because of its distinguished reputation and also because, when they visited London, the director offered them the greatest courtesy of making them tea. Little did they know it was because I was the only one in the office!
Being director was a roller-coaster ride. Thanks to a magnificent team effort, we were able to hand over a going concern. However, whilst I regret not making more of a difference, I reflect on my pride in having occupied that desk overlooking The Mall, standing on the shoulders of giants and doing one of the best jobs in town and country planning.
Note
1 H Han, C Huang, K-H Ahn, X Shu, L Lin, D Qiu: ‘The Effects of Greenbelt Policies on Land Development: Evidence from the Deregulation of the Greenbelt in the Seoul Metropolitan Area’. Sustainability, 2017, Vol. 9(7), 1259. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/7/1259
town planning –reflections
Frank Rallings was Senior Lecturer (Town Planning) at the University of Brighton Planning School from 2008 to 2017. He is now a Visiting Lecturer (Town Planning) for the University of Brighton, specialising in development finance, European and Neighbourhood Planning. He has also been involved in major green infrastructure projects in the Rother and Hastings areas of East Sussex. All views expressed are personal.
Founders of the Town and Country Planning Association faced a plethora of environmental, social, and housing issues some 125 years ago. Following decades of change, with many successes and some failures, we are again on the cusp of significant change. The need for a re-evaluation of the art and science of town and country planning locally, nationally, and internationally is widely evident.
At a local level, the COVID-19 pandemic changed some of our patterns of living at quite a pace. The future of our town centres; shopping habits; banking (increasingly online), and employment (working from home) are all changing the dynamics of development. The economy and functioning of our cities, towns and villages will need to be re-evaluated.
In addition, there is a housing crisis. There is a significant under-provision of new social housing and a rapidly shrinking stock of council housing in rural and coastal areas, with short-term holiday lets playing a big role in this. In urban areas there is similarly a dearth of true new social housing, as opposed to ‘affordable housing’ in the form of shared ownership and ‘Help to Buy’, which are beyond the financial means of many people.
Over countless centuries, cities, towns and villages were founded and then became established on the basis of locational factors – economic, community and environmental – in effect growing as would any living organism. With the impact of digital technology, this locational interdependence is
waning and needs to be re-evaluated in future spatial planning efforts.
Health and wellbeing; decent housing; local employment, and greenspace were pivotal in the thinking of early town planning pioneers. Also, writers such as Charles Dickens and George Orwell flagged up social and environmental issues in the Victorian and inter world war eras respectively, identifying social problems that must have similarly influenced those various pioneers throughout the years. Today, as we move forward, we need to once again re-evaluate how best to include health and wellbeing and social objectives in town planning thinking. In this regard, town centre vitality and viability may need new approaches to encourage investment and the retention of goods and services.
At both local and national level significant issues are raised by climate change. It would be useful if some form of strategic plan making could be introduced which would deal with spatial planning issues on a regional and/or national basis. The key elements of this broad base would be housing; transport; energy (on and offshore electricity generation); flood protection; coast protection; landscape (national parks, national landscapes, Green Belts); food and farming issues, along with methodologies for resilience and mitigation.
The next 25 years
What are the key issues that need to be addressed in the next couple of decades?
Special section: 125 years of the TCPA – ‘personal provocations’
Locally
• Social housing provision (as well as market housing)
• New Towns
• Future uses for town centres (business support/ regeneration)
• Employment zones policies
• Clean seas and rivers
• Biodiversity and environmental improvements
• Green belt policy
• Changing times song: Times They Are a-Changin’, Bob Dylan
Nationally
‘Today, as we move forward, we need to once again re-evaluate how best to include health and wellbeing and social objectives in town planning thinking’
• Strategic planning (national and/or regional)
• Climate change policies
• Resilience and mitigation policies for transport, energy supply, coast protection, flooding, and a secure food supply
Internationally
• COP28 Dubai
• Climate change song: World on Fire, Dolly Parton
Conclusion
Town and country planning should be the solution, not the problem.
The future: imagining alternative worlds – one foreseen by George Orwell and one inspired by Greta Thunberg
Frank Rallings, 2021
Frank Rallings, 2021
Special section: 125 years of the TCPA – ‘personal provocations’
prior disapproval
Adam
Sheppard is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning in the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham. All views expressed are personal.
The insidious creep of ‘prior approval’ in England reflects a wider ideological shift of planning in the last nearly 25 years. The emphasis upon reducing state oversight in the interests of increasing speed, certainty, and creating freedoms for the market has resulted in an ever-increasing use of permitted development rights in place of express planning permission. This has created new and challenging dynamics in placemaking, including impacts upon quality, local authority income, planning gain contributions and affordable housing delivery, as well as a loss of effective control by the state over aspects of spatial land use management.
This trend has also shifted the positioning of uncertainty within the system. In the determination of a planning application there is the uncertainty of discretionary decision making; in prior approval the uncertainty is in how the market and other actors will respond to the regulatory freedoms created. What forms of development will come forward, and where? What will the long-term impacts be upon our urban centres, rural communities, business and retail parks, and residential areas of the various provisions now in place? These things are difficult to predict and whilst commercial opportunities may be created, the challenge of foresight in designing these regulatory arrangements creates a risk of
unintended and potentially irreversible consequences. What could the next 25 years bring in this regard if left unchecked?
‘What will the long-term impacts be upon our urban centres, rural communities, business and retail parks, and residential areas of the various provisions now in place?’
Regulatory freedoms risk creating opportunities for short termism and even exploitation. During the Industrial Revolution, a regulatory vacuum enabled exploitation and resulted in the creation of slum housing. The TCPA was a key actor in addressing the consequences of this situation in its early years, and there is a parallel to this today. The emphasis upon housing numbers is not new, but the implication of the current regulatory and policy construct is that housing numbers should be achieved at almost any cost. In the most extreme manifestations of housing achieved via prior
Beacon House, Neasden, North West London
Peartree Business Centre, Harlow, Essex
Rob Clayton
Rob Clayton
approval, it is not inappropriate to use the language of slum housing to describe some of the conditions created. The TCPA’s powerful These are Homes photobook should be required reading for everyone involved in planning and development, politicians included.
The government responded to some of the most harmful aspects of Class MA¹ by introducing requirements for light and space standards, but the more such requirements are layered upon the prior approval process, the less able it is to deliver speed and freedom, and it still impacts negatively upon effective placemaking.
There is an under-representation of quality and of legacy in the current discourses concerning planning and housing despite the newer policy emphasis upon ‘beauty’. The prioritisation of numerical housing delivery permeates both regulatory and policy spaces. The UK has amongst the oldest mass-housing stock in Europe. House building is not a question of annual delivery alone –the homes we build now will exist for generations to come. Poor quality residential properties permitted now risk becoming a shameful legacy that we will still be responding to in 25 years’ time.
By the point of the 150th anniversary of the TCPA, we must hope that the planning and housing debate has been reframed with a genuine emphasis upon quality and long-term legacy, and that the regulatory and policy environment is reset to better focus upon creating quality, rather than numerical, outcomes. In the coming years, the regulatory construct needs resetting, with an informed and
evidence-based discussion concerning the balance of market forces against individual freedoms; state intervention, and management of place.
After this reset, a period of stability is needed. This stability will allow the TCPA to innovate and work with others positively, supporting sustainable and healthy new growth, without the distraction of challenging regulatory changes that detract, circumvent, undermine, compromise, and degrade effective placemaking. For this to occur, a shift is also needed in the political attitude towards planning. Planning is a creative, constructive, positive, enabling and solution-focused space. Political attitudes and voices, and policies, need to reflect this. A hope for 2049 must be that planning is better recognised, valued, resourced, and practiced as a creator and curator of better. At the heart of this, no doubt, will still be the TCPA.
Note
1 Class MA of Part 3 of Schedule 2 to The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015. Namely: ‘Development consisting of a change of use of a building and any land within its curtilage from a use falling within Class E (commercial, business and service) of Schedule 2 to the Use Classes Order to a use falling within Class C3 (dwellinghouses) of Schedule 1 to that Order’
Vantage House, Wimbledon Park, South West London
Rob Clayton
the shape of things to come
Prof. Barbara Norman is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Canberra, Australia. Barbara describes what life could be like in 25 years’ time. All views expressed are personal.
My autonomous vehicle has been a godsend, providing easy access to all I need and want. Not that it’s used much anymore as I do almost everything at my community housing centre. Long gone are the days of commuting to work, the mega shopping centre and the mindless traffic jams. All that space we gave to roads is now celebrated as reimagined greenspace to counter the urban island heat impacts of inbuilt climate change. Nature based solutions are mainstream, almost a throwback to the Garden City!
Of course, many communities have had to move and are now resettling into well located spaces, placing significant pressure on some urban communities. We knew this would happen 25 years ago, especially after the ‘black Friday’ fires in southern Australia that claimed our beautiful mudbrick holiday home. Soon after, my book Urban Planning for Climate Change outlined a pathway forward, in concert with many planners calling for change.
In 2050, climate resilient plans are now required for every urban community, minimising risk and ensuring that we do not add more greenhouse gases emissions to the nightmare unfolding. In my country, Australia, we have continued to experience extreme events and are certainly not building on the coastal edge or in flood prone regions anymore.
Along with artificial intelligence (AI), renewables and climate change, the other big change has been the shared economy. Shared housing, shared transport, shared community facilities, shared pets and equipment are the norm. No longer the desire or need to ‘own’ everything but a generational change through necessity and a change of values has had major implications for planning. With this the need for creative and adaptable neighbourhood centres, which are ever more the centre of human activity and connection. With digital tech and innovative neighbourhood hubs, community
planning is strong and brings with it the arts, music, fun and learning. What a refreshing change this has been for all.
A most welcome surprise has been the revaluing of planning for the common good. It seemed to be derailed for a while at the turn of the century. Cut the red and green tape – fast track – led to some inevitable disasters and most often a much slower track when remedial action was required. Constructing lots of housing in an area with no consideration of planning, community and climate change considerations had consequences! Now the emphasis is on the common good – a healthy planet and a healthy community.
Urbanisation in the global south has continued apace, so collaborative research in partnership through global planning networks has become ever more important, with developing urban communities leapfrogging the past mistakes of older cities with renewables and the shared economy (energy, materials, construction, transport) being the game changers.
The combination of AI, planning for climate change, housing options and a shared economy is enabling communities in the global north and south to collaborate and build more prosperous, sustainable and adaptable communities. In this respect the values of the TCPA have been lasting – inclusive, collaborative, practical, creative and bold. The missing element is the environment, so I would add ‘sustainable’.
As I often say, a healthy environment supports a healthy community which supports a healthy economy. That now frames urban research. And the new World Council has now agreed this approach for the planning of urban settlements across the globe!
breathing new life into rural planning: an agenda for 2050
Prof. Mark Scott is Professor of Planning and Dean of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy at University College, Dublin.
All views expressed are personal.
Many of the early pioneers of planning, particularly within the Anglo-American tradition, held a keen interest in rural people and places, with many foundational planning ideas focused on rural challenges.¹ This included Sir Ebenezer Howard and the TCPA, whose Garden Cities were to combine the best of town and country into cities surrounded by agricultural belts and greenspace.
Despite early progress in the rural planning field (e.g. establishing National Parks, access to the countryside and Green Belts), the post Second World War era was marked by an increasing focus upon urban debates within planning. Rural planning began to play a more marginal role within both the planning profession and academia.² For much of the 20th century, concerns about agricultural production have dominated rural places, whilst rural planning adopted a preservationist or ‘no development’ ethic to protect amenity values – often at the expense of social and economic welfare.
However, despite this rather unimaginative policy agenda, rural regions have experienced fundamental transformations over the course of the 21st century and will continue to do so over the next 25 years to 2050 and beyond. Alongside their traditional primary sector functions, rural regions have been increasingly shaped by new consumption patterns and the commodification of the countryside (through heritage, tradition, lifestyle, landscape, etc.), opening up opportunities to transform rural economies. Perhaps on a more fundamental level, rural regions provide the backcloth for a range of crucial planning issues,³ particularly regarding rural land use management. This includes, for example, rural places as significant sites for climate action (mitigation and
adaptation), addressing biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, energy and food security, water quality, and health and wellbeing.⁴
These challenges need careful deliberation. Over the course of 2024, for example, we have witnessed farmer protests across Europe – from Cardiff to Madrid, Paris and Brussels – as climate action and nature recovery have been interpreted by some stakeholders as agri-bashing or anti-rural. Therefore, demonstrating how addressing global imperatives can deliver benefits and economic opportunities for rural places is critical, alongside a ‘just transitions’ approach.
‘How can we plan for rural places in a way that maximises the potential of rural resources and people?’
These debates demand greater attention from planning practitioners, researchers and educators to ensure that planning can reclaim its position centre-stage in shaping rural futures by developing integrated land use policies from national to local scales that address these global concerns within the context of progressive, just and socially equitable outcomes.⁵
There is significant scope for reinvigorating rural planning. Traditional planning skills, such as spatial and integrative thinking, and place-making remain key. However, repositioning ‘rural’ as a core substantive concern for the planning profession and education is critical, not only to enhance rural places
Special section: 125 years of the TCPA – ‘personal provocations’
but to address wider societal and environmental challenges. This requires greater engagement with basic questions: what does rural mean? What are the constituent elements of rural places? How do we conceptualise the use of rural land as a fundamental resource to address global challenges? How can we plan for rural places in a way that maximises the potential of rural resources and people? And how do we build sustainable urbanrural relationships?
Let’s repurpose rural planning for 2050 and breathe new life into the ‘country’ dimension of town and country planning!
Notes
1 M Lapping, M Scott: ‘The evolution of rural planning in the Global North’. In: M Scott, N Gallent, M Gkartzios (Eds): The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning Routledge, 2019, pp.28-45
2 M Gkartzios, N Gallent, M Scott: Rural Places and Planning, Stories from the Global Countryside. Policy Press, 2022
3 M Hibbard, KI Frank: ‘Notes for a Substantive Theory of Rural Planning: Evidence from the US Experience’. Planning Theory & Practice, 2019, Vol. 20(3), 339-357. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2019.1627572
4 ‘Regenerative agriculture’. Webpage. Wikipedia®, 3 May 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_ agriculture
5 J Sturzaker, N Blair, A Burnett, A Bygrave, J Cecil, S Copsey, N Gallent, I Haminduddin, N Harris, M Juntti, L Mabon, I Mell, G Parker, M Scott: Rural Planning in the 2020s Main Report. RTPI Research Paper, July 2022. https://www.rtpi.org.uk/media/11955/rural-planning-inthe-2020s.pdf
How can we plan for rural places in a way that maximises the potential of rural resources and people?
peaceful paths to real reform?
Prof.
Stephen Potter is Emeritus Professor of Transport Strategy at The Open University and is a member of the Future Urban Environments research group. All views expressed are personal. Special section: 125 years of
The New Towns movement and the TCPA are rooted in Ebenezer Howard’s seminal book Garden Cities of To-morrow.¹ But that was not its original title – the 1898 book was entitled To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform.² That original title has a significance for the TCPA today. Howard was responding to the socio-political context of his time. a widening gulf between rich and poor, with potential for civil disorder; millions trapped in slums; rapidly emerging technologies upsetting the accepted order of things (cars, aeroplanes and electricity); the rise of socialism and autocracy; mass economic migration (to the USA) and growing political instability in Europe. Britain was involved in foreign wars and fears of a major European conflict abounded.
Doesn’t that sound rather like the here and now? Howard undertook a structural socio-technological analysis to provide an alternative approach to a key issue – Britain’s dysfunctional urban infrastructure. Let’s look at that title again.
Howard rejected the stance advocated by extremists for violent revolution or the total destruction of the existing order. He did not believe that this would produce ‘real reform’ (and history has proved him right in that). Instead, Howard sought a transition path that could be initiated within existing structures, institutions and economic relationships. Today we might call his approach ‘strategic niche management’,³ with Garden Cities used as models to perfect a new type of settlement so superior to traditional cities that they would initiate change to a more equitable blended town/ country settlement pattern. ‘Real reform’ was the destination to which the ‘peaceful path’ was to lead. The physical design of the Garden City was only one element – a key factor was the concept of land value being captured by a local community trust and used to fund infrastructure and affordable housing. The ‘real reform’ was the socio-economic development model underpinning the Garden City concept.
In the Future Urban Environments Group, we have been exploring the regime-transforming opportunities of new digital technologies. One example⁴ is the development of demand responsive transport across Milton Keynes. Our present transport systems have a number of problems. They consume vast amounts of non-renewable resources; engender unhealthy lifestyles and degrade air quality. So, we are exploring how to use new technologies, such as cleaner electric vehicles and driverless technologies, to stimulate new systems design rather than trying to patch up old systems with new technologies.
Let’s pick up Howard’s approach of identifying transition paths to a socio-technical regime change to identify how new technologies and business models can be applied to our urban systems and the institutional changes needed for transformative change. Trials, knowledge exchange and other learning opportunities can help to identify transition paths towards something that really will address the key challenges of the upcoming decades. Let’s find today’s ‘peaceful paths to real reform’.
Notes
1 E Howard: Garden Cities of To-morrow (being the second edition of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform). Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd, London, 1902.
2 E Howard: To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd, London, 1898. Full text available to view at: https://archive.org/details/ tomorrowpeaceful00howa/page/4/mode/2up
3 J Schot, FW Geels: ‘Niches in evolutionary theories of technical change’. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2007, Vol. 17, 605–622. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191007-0057-5
4 S Potter, M Valdez, M Enoch, M Cook: ‘Demandresponsive transport returns to Milton Keynes - lessons for a bus industry in crisis?’. Town & Country Planning, 2022, Vol. 91, Sep-Oct., 319-329
Special section: 125 years of the TCPA – ‘personal provocations’
the TCPA –counterpoint to fatalistic miserabilism
Professor Stephen V Ward received the International Planning History Society's Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement in Planning History, 2022 and is based at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University. All views expressed are personal.
Housing built on post-industrial riverside land in London, an example of how long it can take for visions to be transformed into reality
Special section: 125 years of the TCPA – ‘personal provocations’
It is difficult to be other than pessimistic about what the next quarter century might hold for the world or the concerns that the TCPA holds dear. Whether on the national, continental or global stage, we see precious little happening on a scale large enough to lift the spirits. The great problems facing humankind – including spiralling climate change, serious environmental degradation, mounting geopolitical tensions, surging migration pressures from people seeking a better life or just escaping an intolerable one – cry out for global (or at least international) scale actions. Yet the very institutional frameworks for such actions are themselves being currently weakened and replaced by the populist pipedreams of a new generation of nationalist, demagogic and authoritarian leaders. The contemporary, American-led global capitalist order that so recently seemed to promise so much – peace, widespread prosperity, a democratic ascendancy and rapid worldwide access to the latest ideas and practices – now looks rather frayed at the edges.
And, if we shift our gaze to what, for most readers, is our own country, the UK, the impression is little better. Poverty is increasing, life expectancy declining, public services seemingly set to wither away, the housing crisis worsening and the promise of levelling-up unfulfilled. The erstwhile promise of how much things would improve after Brexit now prompts only cynical laughter, even from many of its once most ardent supporters. Leaving aside a few fantasists, today’s strategic political choices seem to involve minimal change that will not frighten the financial markets. Space for genuinely progressive radicalism has been squeezed.
Yet the key question is whether we must simply succumb to this fatalistic miserabilism. Here, perhaps, the history of the TCPA offers more hopeful lessons. The forebear of the TCPA, the Garden City Association, was born at the same time that the British-led 19th century world economic and geopolitical system – ‘Victorian globalisation’ – had begun to unravel. New rivals to the established national and imperial entities were ascending, feeding tensions that ultimately triggered hugely destructive conflicts. Yet the creative, progressive ideals, albeit only partly realised, that emerged during that Victorian global order continued to resonate and evolve over ensuing decades. They included elective democracy, progressive social reformism and liberal internationalism. The same was true for the more specific dreams and practices that took root in the fertile soil of those ideals. Amongst them were the specific concepts that comprised the Garden City
vision and the wider international urban planning movement of which they soon became an important part.
‘The great problems facing humankind – including spiralling climate change, serious environmental degradation, mounting geopolitical tensions, surging migration pressures from people seeking a better life or just escaping an intolerable one – cry out for global (or at least international) scale actions’
The Association, of course, played a vital role in promoting, realising, elaborating and circulating the Garden City vision and the practical promises of planning over the difficult decades that followed its creation. The moral to take from this experience for today is that, even when larger circumstances offer little cause for optimism, it remains crucial to keep today’s unfulfilled dreams alive, to ensure that they keep their vitality and relevance for a changing society’s needs. History shows that opportunities to realise visions may come along well after, and in different circumstances to, the point in time when those visions were first conceived. If, by 2049, the TCPA can find the resolve to keep to what has been its historic mission to keep those unrealised visions alive, it may meet greater success than today seems possible.
Tomorrow 125: Rediscovering the roots of a new society
This report from the TCPA reflects on how the Garden City idea remains a powerful and hopeful blueprint for creating thriving communities
In 2021, the TCPA’s ‘Tomorrow 125’ project began with the aim of understanding how the Garden City idea could help the nation construct a pathway to a hopeful future based on a fairer society.
Using the 125th anniversary of Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow a peaceful path to real reform as a catalyst, the Association commenced a three-year project exploring the background and practical application of the Garden City idea today.
‘Tomorrow 125’ allowed us to better understand the thoughts of the Garden City pioneers, confront the myths and misuse of the idea over time, and understand better how the Garden City idea fits within the wider ecosystem of organisations and activities in the pursuit of social and environmental justice.
The project has left the Association with a renewed sense of urgency and confidence in the role of the Garden City idea in addressing modern challenges and a new way of organising the way we create and nurture our homes and communities. Most importantly, it has enabled us to apply these ideas in real places in the spirit of practical idealism.
This final report provides a summary of activities and outputs from ‘Tomorrow 125’ and sets out opportunities and next steps for the ideas and concepts explored through the project. It forms part of a suite of project outputs which is available on the TCPA’s website.
Hear a reading of the poem commissioned for the Tomorrow 125 project 'Housing with a heart' by Eileen Gbagbo: https://www.tcpa.org.uk/resources/housing-with-a-heart/
