ARTS
Learning the art of living
Naomi Ridley, a 25-year-old councillor in Slough, chained herself to the railings outside the town hall last week in protest against the council's granting permission for 1,000 new houses to be built on the edge of the town. Would John Betjeman, who made Slough the unfortunate victim of his satire in the 1930s (`Come friendly bombs .. .'), have laughed or cried? Sel- dom has so much noise been created by an environmental issue as that over the build- ing of new houses in recent weeks, but the confused thinking on the matter is, regret- tably, entirely normal.
At first sight, the scale of the demand is disturbing. Is it 4.4 million, or is it already more? We know what they will look like, these sullen little boxes, crammed together like people in a lift, none looking at anoth- er or quite touching each other, and the thought is frightening. For this is a one-way ticket for rural England, and, as Betjeman rightly observed, only catastrophe will ever give us back the fields.
Before looking deeper into those faces in the lift, let us ask on what basis we mourn the loss of our emotively described 'green- field sites' (not to be confused with Green Belt, the specially protected green fields around major cities). British agriculture is M a disastrous state, demoralised by the subsidy regime and the demands of buyers, to the point where farmers wishing to pro- duce food have very little freedom of action or choice. Is it really worth saving these acres of over-cultivated soil which have already lost most of their scenic or ecological value? Only house-building, it seems, is a worse fate although, because of the scarcity of development permissions, the sale of a few acres of agricultural land to grow a one-off crop of houses is enough for any farmer to retire on comfortably. As the architect Robert Adam, who chairs the Popular Housing Forum, explains, such high land prices are a sufficient explanation for the depressingly predictable nature of the housing product. The developer has no margin to experiment, even if he wanted to. The introduction of a tax on greenfield development will only make it seem more desirable, and squeeze down the quality of the product still further.
But hark! The brownfield cavalry are rid- ing to the rescue! Woodman, spare that tree and turn away that JCB! All over Eng- land ex-industrial sites stand ripe for devel- opment, but these pockets of land are not going to acquire the glamour of Clerken- vvell loft conversions overnight, and neither the fashionable architects advocating dense urban living, nor the House Building Industry planting more of its standard product will make them desirable places. The greenfield versus brownfield argu- ment is a red herring. If, as it seems, the house builders are only capable of produc- ing the same kind of development in either place, there is little to choose between one kind of built wilderness and another. Peo- ple's anxiety about house building is entire- ly justified, but none of the possible remedies seems to get to the root of the problem.
Not surprisingly, house builders are attracted to build in towns and villages which already have a high value as places to live. Inevitably, there is a law of dimin- ishing returns, since the additional houses almost inevitably detract from the quality of the place. The Countryside Commission has launched a Village Design Initiative, `making character count in new develop- ment', involving local people in drawing up design guidelines for new houses. The out- come can be a 'village design statement', which becomes part of the local planning Development by Maurice Naunton and George Garrard, Crouch Street, Noak Bridge process. Exemplary bottom-up democracy? The problem with this deductive method is that it is only capable of replicating aspects of what is already there. A series of mirrors is set up, resulting in a dim and poorly focused image of a bright original, an example of what the poet Rumi called 'try- ing to reach the milk by way of the cheese'.
Amateurs with local knowledge are a valuable source of ideas, but the problem is the lack of appropriate professionals able to raise the level of house building. In fail- ing to discover adequately the nature of the problem, architects have a lot to answer for. Too often, the issue has been turned into an opposition of style between tradi- tion and modernism, an impasse in that the market clearly prefers something which is (usually falsely) presented as tradition. The urban versus suburb/village argument is a similarly two-dimensional restatement of the same problem. Neither can be demonised to uphold the other, for their merits are relative to other factors. The planning profession ought in theory to step outside this closed circle and initiate bene- ficial change, but they have been cast as the policemen rather than the creative direc- tors. The Essex Design Guide, first issued by the county planners in 1973 and unfairly blamed for 25 years of kitsch, showed a grasp of good general principles in reaction to the new town prairie style, but it is beyond the scope of a single book of any persuasion to solve the problem.
What is needed before education in how to build houses is education in how to live. This is the milk, as it were, from which the cheese of houses is produced. Are classes in happiness on the National Curriculum? We are inclined to talk of houses as if they were only another commodity, rather than being ideograms of our lives. The art of liv- ing involves not just a certain enclosure of space, but a web of relationships between things which holds the contrariety of life in balance — privacy and community, old and new, nature and culture. It is something that can be worked out in bricks and mor- tar, with lines on the ground, but to achieve anything like the subtlety we admire (and pay good money to possess) in old settle- ments requires a rethinking of the problem in the round, with methods adaptable to differing situations.
The picturesque movement of the Regency period, which is often blamed for the sentimental, chalk nor cheese, indeter- minacy of the suburbs, was a revolutionary and particularly English reconfiguration of knowledge, marrying the inner world of experience to the outer world of manifestation. It produced an invigorating new understanding of space which could help us in our present predicament.
To understand what this means requires a visit to Basildon, where a district called Noak Bridge was developed between 1975 and 1985 by two architects from the New Town Development Corporation, Maurice Naunton and George Garrard. They are the unsung heroes of housing who achieved the making of a beautiful and completely new place and remain almost unknown. It was not at all easy to accomplish, for all the regulations were against their desire for a place they themselves would want to inhab- it, but it survived a transfer from the public to the private sector and, although far from being a middle-class ghetto, has house prices well above average. Their self- imposed brief was very like that for Pound- bury, and, by comparison, one can see the advantages of obscurity for getting the job done. Neither is it easy to explain why Noak Bridge works so well, least of all with photographs, for it is the handling of third dimension of space, as a social factor not just a visual one, which underlies the suc- cess and this has little intrinsic dependence on the regional vernacular style of the houses, although this is better handled than almost anywhere else. If the ideogram of the modern world is the infinitely extendible Cartesian grid, then Naunton and Garrard understood instinctively that quality of place and affinity to nature depend on a disciplined looseness. Verdant developments like this would challenge the fields of agribusiness to offer us a better use of land, and would prevent brown fields just becoming grey.
An exhibition of paintings by Auriol Innes can be seen at Cadogan Contemporary, 108 Draycott Avenue, London SW3, including 'Ash Tree and Kitchen Garden' (above). Also on show is a collection of contemporary furniture by Rupert Thistlethwayte. Both exhibitions continue until 14 February.
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