Lots of people - some we like, some we don’t - are getting very excited by this idea of a new planned suburb for Cambridge. We have to tell everyone that this is, sadly but predictably, a disaster of the usual planners’ mistake. One description is that planners don’t know enough to be able to plan. Another is that well, planning, eh? But the problem is summed up in the question of, well, great, but where are all the country cottages going to go?
The background to this is that housing is a technology. A technology is just a way of doing things using a wide definition. So, how we do housing is a technology, it’s a way of doing that thing. But the crucial thing about a technology is that you need all the moving bits to make it work. A steam engine that’s just a pot of boiling water drains no mines, propels no trains. Our long funded cucumber house warming system won’t work without the sunshine as an original input. We must have all the bits of the technology for it to work.
Perhaps it’s growing up in Bath that makes this obvious to this particular eye. But all those images and talks are about building townhouses and mansion flats. Lovely things both of them - but the difference between a townhouse and a house, in English English, is usually the provision of a garden or not. Townhouses don’t need them - because the inhabitants have somewhere else, out in the country, which is their garden. That’s rather why they’re called townhouses, to distinguish them from those proper places out on the rolling acres.
We are, after all, plains apes and like to have a stretch of turf to lay about in. Which is why that townhouse, without the garden, has always been rich man’s housing in this country. Rich enough to have, or at least gain access to, another place out there with that garden. No, parks, communal areas, they’re not the same. This also carries over to those Edwardian mansion flats in London and some other larger cities. Delightful things to live in, absolutely - but they’re not for 100% of living time.
This has been a long running problem with housing planning in Britain. At least 80 years, David Kynaston’s books surrounding Mass Observation contain the same argument. The planners talking about how everyone should live in flats, the actual people asking for the des res with front and back garden, thank you very much. A detached would be nice, a semi is acceptable, a terrace if we must, but front and back please, a place for the roses and one for the kids’ bouncy castle.
To which the planners’ claim has always been that Europeans live in flats, so why not the British. Which is where the painful ignorance comes in. The Europeans do not live in flats. They live in two places. In Russian it’s a dacha, in Polish a dacza, Czech a chalupa. In Southern Europe - places which came off the land much more recently - perhaps a quarter or eighth share in Granny’s cottage out in the boonies. No one observing the periphique on Tuesday is going to suggest that Parisians live only in Paris.
Europeans might live, for much of the time, in a flat. But they near all have access, perhaps in the extended family but still, to that place in the country.
There are those two technologies for housing, each with their own moving parts. Each technology only working if it is complete. The British one, that house with garden. The continental with a flat and that shack - if nothing better - out there in rurale profonde. Yes, even German cities are surrounded by a green belt (no, not Green Belt) of shacks and summer houses.
This new thing in Cambridge. It’s those planners all over again, not grasping the basic technology they’re dealing with. If it’s all going to be town houses and flats then where are those country cottages going to be? And if it’s not flats and townhouses then where are the gardens?
All of which is, of course, the problem with having planners doing this sort of thing. Given that they’re ignorant of what they’re trying to plan the plan isn’t going to be very good, is it?
The actual answer is simply to allow builders to build houses (or flats!) that Britons want to live in where Britons wish to live. This will shock, annoy and outrage the upper middle classes at The Guardian. But what’s the point of a life without a little fun and enjoyment in it?