Before we get acquainted with Nicholas Boys Smith, here’s an excerpt from Lynsey Hanley’s fine and famous book Estates:
There is one phrase in the English language that has come to be larded with even more negative meaning than “council estate” and that is “tower block”...Tower blocks, in the public mind, represent all that is worst about the welfare state: the failure to provide the kind of housing that most people regard as a prerequisite for a happy family life; lack of choice; dependence and isolation; bureaucracy prioritized over standards; individuals placed at the mercy of a faceless local authority that seems to maintain or leave to rot its housing on a whim. And concrete. Ugly concrete.
If you replaced such tower blocks with residential streets - broadly, what are thought of as traditional London terraces - how much of the bad stuff would go away? Constrained choice and bureaucracy might be immune, though perhaps the isolation would be less. The ugly concrete would surely go. And the item on Hanley’s list that Boys Smith might light on first is the one about families and happiness. Peoples’ preference for streets over blocks is a bedrock reason he gives for why Create Streets, the organisation he founded, exists.
The public genesis of Create Streets was a report compiled in conjunction with the free market think tank Policy Exchange, published in January 2013. It argued that if all the municipal tower blocks and other large estates built in London between the 1950s and early 1980s were knocked down and replaced with the sort of housing Create Streets champions, the quality of the homes and the lives of their inhabitants would improve. At the same time, the number of dwellings in the space the estates had taken up would greatly increase, largely by building on communal areas which residents may not greatly use.
This advocacy blueprint for “tight, terraced housing” what would be “tailored to how people want to live” included some provisional but detailed maths. Boys Smith and his co-author Alex Morton estimated that London’s undesirable and undesired estates contain about 360,000 homes. They reckoned that if their approach was followed that number could be increased by 260,000. Importantly, they argued that the economics of the project would mean there need be no loss of social rented homes on the sites concerned - a sharp, theoretical contrast with several, high profile, real life estate regenerations where the amount of on-site social housing and, sometimes, “affordable” homes of all kinds, has ended up substantially reduced. The paper even specifies that the London Plan should “clearly set out that social tenants will not be required to move or see changes to their tenancies as a result of redevelopment”.
Is the Create Streets vision plausible? Is it, to use a contentious term, viable? Most of all, is it believable? From the left of the political spectrum, I hear doubts. This comes as no surprise. In an earlier Policy Exchange paper Morton had advocated accelerating the sale of social housing in expensive areas, attracting charges that this would facilitate the removal of poor to the periphery of London, aping the disastrous banlieues of Paris. He now works at Number 10 as a special adviser on housing and planning policy. Boys Smith himself is a Cambridge-educated, Conservative Home-contributing former major bank director who advised bone-dry Peter Lilley when he was social security secretary under John Major and has worked on tax reform ideas for George Osborne.
On paper, then, he’s the complete True Blue beast. In person, though, he makes a poor job of living up to such a billing. An admirer places him in the tradition of the great Victorian social reformers. And he says his personal confidence in the Create Streets project - perhaps “mission” would be a better word - stems from a private conversation he had with tenants of a large, council-owned south London housing estate.
“It was with a bunch of, very largely, Eritrean and Somali mums and a very experienced urban designer,’ he recalls. “There were plans to regenerate the estate and we’d been asked in by a local community organiser to help residents to start thinking about what they would like done.” The residents were shown pictures of housing in New York, Paris and elsewhere which was at higher densities than those of the estate and yet much more low rise and connected with the wider neighbourhood. Boys Smith and the group of mums were from different worlds. But, he says, architecture bridged the divide. “The strength of their emotional reaction in favour of that built form was very, very powerful,” he says. “It gave me confidence to think, ‘This isn’t nuts’. Without that meeting, I wouldn’t have had the guts to go on.”
Create Streets describes itself as a “non-partisan social enterprise and independent research institute”. It argues, it advises, it engages in debate and it wants to get involved with actual housing development too. Last year, it made a large impact on the instructive controversy over the Mount Pleasant Royal Mail sorting office site in Clerkenwell. Working with the local residents of the Mount Pleasant Association, it produced an alternative proposal for developing the land to the one that eventually received planning permission from Boris Johnson after he over-rode the various objections of Camden and Islington councils.
Presented as “a case study of how streets are more popular, more prosperous and a better investment”, its aesthetics inspired a rave review in the Evening Standard from the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, a former deputy chairman of English Heritage, while its financial calculations offered more affordable housing, including for social rent, than was being proposed by the Royal Mail Group (RMG) at the time.
The study also elaborated the Create Streets view that housing and streetscapes of the types it recommends align better social outcomes with superior “long-term value-generation for landowners.” In other words, as well as being nicer for human beings, “traditional” or “conventional” developments make more money than sky-pricking megaliths in the end, partly because they are less expensive to build and to maintain and partly because people want them more. Furthermore, it demonstrates that high density housing does not have to be either high rise or inelegant and a recipe for urban decay. It is often forgotten that the highest density housing in London is in Chelsea and Notting Hill.
Any takers for this win-win pitch? Well, the mayor, even while approving the RMG’s strongly-opposed application for Mount Pleasant, described the Create Streets counter bid as “beautiful” and encouraged its supporters to turn it into a rival application. Labour mayoral pretender David Lammy gave Create Streets a favourable mention in his housing crisis report. A regeneration fund announced in last year’s budget may be for a pretty insignificant £150m but its prospectus took up a number of Create Streets ideas. Also last spring, the government asked Savills to assess the potential of them. Before that, Create Streets was favourably cited in a state-of-play summation of “built environment” architecture commissioned by culture minister Ed Vaizey and led by Sir Terry Farrell.
So Boys Smith and co are on some significant peoples’ radars. They do, though, have big battles to win if their view of how a future London should look and feel is to take shape in reality. The other week, Create Streets hosted a workshop debate entitled “Can streets solve the London housing crisis”? The panelists included Max Farrell, Sir Terry’s son and a partner in his firm, who said the Farrells masterplan for Earls Court reflected Create Street aspirations.
Excuse me, but my ass. The Earls Court Project might one day produce a few noueau garden squares, but everything else about it represents the precise opposite of what Create Street promotes. It is a top down, mostly high rise, greed-driven enterprise which proposes a pitiful amount of additional affordable housing on the strength of a strongly challenged viability assessment which had to be forced into the open and reduces “regeneration” to a euphemism for colonisation. Local people oppose it overwhelmingly. Max seemed like a nice chap. Perhaps he was just badly briefed.
Boys Smith says there are already some examples of estate rebuilds that he admires: he is especially keen on the tenure-blind, total retro transformation of the Packington estate in Islington by the Hyde Group housing association. But Create Streets will not only have to win arguments about financing, design and genuine local consultation if their principles are to be widely applied. They need more flexibility in planning regulations too, so that houses can be narrower, but with fewer bathrooms and more slender corridors to enable good-sized rooms. This would mean, for example, having the flexibility to by-pass elements of the Greater London Authority’s lifetime homes standards, brought in in 2004 to make homes adaptable to the mobility needs of disabled people.
Such trade-offs would come with the territory. So would all the others that any type of estate regeneration entails, such as the mixing of tenure types - Boys Smith, by the way, says that private rented homes would now also come into his equation - years of dust, disturbance and possible “decanting”, the seemingly inevitable revisions and sometimes disastrous delays, the unravelling of informal yet often precious community networks, and, of course, the need for people to part company with homes they may have lived in and loved for years, even if they were badly built “slums in the sky” on what some might deride as “sink” estates.
Boys Smith stresses his sympathy with the common complaint that too many regeneration consultations are, as he puts it, “post hoc exercises run by PR agencies to hide dissent”. The Create Streets method, he says, would see architects assembling plans based on what the people who would be most affected by them wanted, rather than the other way round. For Boys Smith’s supporters, that is a hallmark the nobleness of his quest. For doubters, it is the acid test he’d most need to pass.