Size Does Matter : The Garden Controversy 1918 to 2000
Gold Medal for Leyhill Prison: I choked on the retelling of the joy expressed by the prisoners about the simple activity of gardening. Leyhill takes its gardening very seriously with over 100 men, many on very long sentences, producing £2.5m of food for the prison service every year. The aspect that concerned me as a planner was the clear aspiration of these prisoners to continue with their passion after their release.
Opinion pollsters tell us that two out of three people describe gardening as their favourite pastime. What we need to be sure about is that the opportunity is there for the down trodden and socially excluded to enjoy this hobby and that access is not crudely controlled by wealth. If this is, or remains the case, then those released from Leyhill may need to commit GBH to regain access to a garden, albeit the other side of the “iron curtain”.
If it is true that the planning profession is on a bandwagon, hell-bent on applying policies on housing densities which will reduce the potential of released prisoners to continue with their gardening on the outside, then we should look very hard at whether these policies have any, or sufficient benefits, to justify such very serious consequences.
The controversy about gardens goes back at least as far as the period after the first world war when Lloyd George announced a programme of “Homes for Heroes – each with its own garden, surrounded by trees and hedges, and equipped internally with the amenities of a middle-class home.”.
The term "garden controversy”, was coined in a study carried out from Wye College as a response to concerns that the provision of homes and gardesn to at least middle class space standards would seriously diminish the countryside. One of the early myths about the change from agriculture to garden use was that this would result in a loss of productive capacity. This was countered by evidence that the relative productivity of the suburban garden could actually be greater than that of the original farmland. Taking into account the fabled expertise of the gardeners of a generation honed on the imperative to dig for victory, and the relative “inefficiency” of agriculture in the 1940s and 50s, the land lost no productivity through being “developed” to house families at densities of around 8 dwellings per acre. While the equation may have changed, the efficiency of modern farming is being challenged by extensive and organic methods and those denied garden space cannot be impressed by the thousands of acres of “set-aside”.
In a report of 1942 to the Ministry of Health, the Institute of Landscape Architects advised that a garden was a “profound requirement” which could change a dwelling into a home. They advised the Minister that there was a “psychological basis for the need to till the soil, to tend plants and to contemplate their growth.”. The report recommended that all homes should, at the very least, have a garden which would count as an “outdoor room” but, for family housing, that there was a requirement for gardens of 500sq yds for lawns and flowers and an additional 300 sq yds for vegetables. The calculation was based not on what could be spared from the precious countryside, but the area which could be easily managed in the householder’s spare time. In the years before the 36hr week and the Flymo, this is testimony to the energy, skill levels and commitment of a previous generation of gardeners. Although this land requirement translates to densities of about 6 “homes” per acre, the report had the prescience to note that there was still no advantage in detached houses, as linking the buildings, would create the necessary shelter for the “outdoor room” of each dwelling.
In Land Use and Living Space published in 1981, Dr Robin Best pleaded that, “…the Country is certainly not so short of land that inferior space standards for housing or other urban uses should be imposed on any sector of the community. There is enough room available, provided it is allocated sensibly, to allow every family that requires it a moderately spacious house plot without detriment to agriculture or the countryside in general”. Given the relative lack of skills, a preponderance of lawns and amateurish use of chemicals the question arises as to whether sharing of this outside room would make better use of this space.
Of course we have an inheritance of many areas where there are adequate space standards. However, move from leafy suburbs, where planners and politicians are most likely to live, to the inner city or peripheral estates, and the effect of urban containment on the space standards available to the poor are hard to overlook. At the risk of stating the obvious, both the demand for and acquisition of living space increases with affluence. While the planning system strictly limits the land made available for housing, this is a zero sum game where land appropriated by the rich is effectively denied to the poor. The “second home” is an obvious extension of this principle, but even those of us without such ambitions, will find that more money will buy more space both in and outside the dwelling. Generally, the more spacious the neighbourhood, the more expensive the houses. My focus on prisoners is not to make a case that the socially excluded have any greater need for space than the stressed-out banker or solicitor. However, there could be evidence of more dissent from land use planners operating the current system where the disadvantaged simply end up with less space. The 1/6 acre plot was justified on psychological and functional grounds, but now the space which money can buy seems to be more to do with status and privacy. The housing market will make it difficult for the probationer from Leyhill (except as jobbing gerdeners?) to claim a large garden and social housing providers operate under constraints where low densities will be the exception.
We may believe that we live in a small and overcrowded island, but our urban space provision per head is less than in the Netherlands. I am not aware that the quality of life is any lower there than in the UK. It seems that urban density is a matter of politics and that those with an agreeable amount of space, both in and outside their one or more homes, are quite prepared to deny this to a relatively powerless minority. If, as is possible, there is a particularly strong tradition, if not psychological need, in this country, for a reasonable garden area to get our teeth into, it may be that we are among the least suitable people to be subject to a campaign and practice of imposing higher densities. Dr Best doubts that we can adapt to high density living and says, that, “Whatever the apparent sophistication of modern communities, the superficial veneer of civilisation and wealth barely hide a basically unchanged human nature adapted to a spacious environment.”
In the forward to the 1952 publication The Density of Residential Areas, Harold Macmillan said, “It is essential that the amount of land taken (for development) should be kept as small as possible.” Nearly 50 years later Nicky Gavron, (formerly London Planning Advisory Committee Chair), on taking up the position of London Deputy Mayor, said that London suburbs are not sustainable and advocated higher suburban densities. The DETR publication “Towards an Urban Renaissance”(July 1999), begins with the statement that, “Achieving this target (that is the aspirational 60% of the 4m homes required in the next 25 years on brownfield sites) is fundamental to the health of society. Failure to do so will lead to fragmentation of the city and erosion of the countryside. It will also increase traffic congestion and air pollution, accelerate the depletion of natural resources, damage bio-diversity and increase social deprivation.” There may be more truth and a much more powerful message in the humble aspiration of the Leyhill gardeners, that on their release, they may have the use of an adequate garden, than in this over-stated justification for an urban renaissance.
It is important to expose the myths about the protection of the countryside and the health of our cities. Perhaps the greatest myth is that they are related in any real way. It was with considerable alarm that the photograph of the launch of “Towards an Urban Renaissance” showed that Labour Peer Lord Rogers, the high priest of sophisticated urban living (recently appointed as planning adviser to Ken Livingstone and Nicky Gavron), shared the platform with Tony Burton from the CPRE. This is a marriage of convenience and it essential that it is seen as such. It is convenient to both these city and countryside lobbyists that higher urban densities obviously mean less land take. However, if towns and cities are to be made more livable it may actually mean lower and not higher densities. It may mean using brownfield sites for urban purposes other than housing (rure in urbs). Nor will an urban renaissance, embracing higher densities, have any effect on the issues of traffic, access, or sustainability, which is all part of another fiction about city life. Living closer together does not, in our private and restless society reduce the propensity to move around. Unless we can gain sustenance from our immediate surroundings, we can only be expected to go in search. Higher densities with no reduction in movement means more congestion. Of course it is possible that at higher densities it is both less necessary and less easy to use the motor car as we know it, but taming the motor car can and will be achieved in many less oppressive ways than jamming people’s homes together to squeeze out garden space.
“Towards an Urban Renaissance”, recommended the Government to “Amend planning and funding guidance to improve the use of density standards and to prevent urban densities too low to support a sustainable and viable mixed use environment.” It is PPG3, published in March 2000 which actually encourages densities of 12 and 20 dwellings per acre. The issue of unsustainably low urban densities will rarely, if, ever arise in practice in existing urban areas, as new development takes place as additions to and replacements of, the existing urban fabric and not in whole neighbourhood size chunks.
The argument about the sustainability of lower density housing could become relevant when looking at new settlements and in assessments of the size at which they seem to achieve some level of self-containment, being able to offer their resident population sufficient accessible attractions so as to reduce the level of extraneous travel. This is an interesting topic but new and expanded towns are certainly not on the agenda of the Urban Task Force, and are not encouraged by PPG3.
The harm caused by our propensity to travel in order to make up the missing ingredients from our home environments, affects the town and the country. If we so impoverish the home environment there will be an unrelieved restlessness in the urban population seeking out those elements which are absent from the home. In fact an urban renaissance does not depend on limiting development in the countryside, but by enriching the urban realm. Visiting the countryside is popular but not as popular as gardening, and they should not be mutually exclusive activities.
Although the advice was said to apply to “rural areas”, the author of PPG3 Housing (1992) provided relief from the tirade of those seeking to preserve the green and pleasant land if only “for its own sake”. Paragraph 22 stated that, “…It is no longer necessary to insist in packing new houses in at 20 or 30 to the acre which can result in a very urban or raw appearance, with little scope for the softening effect of landscaping or even the successful efforts of the diligent gardener.” The author of the PPG could not avoid the obvious corollary, that lower densities would lead to higher prices for the even fewer, larger houses which would be built on the miserly land releases in rural areas. The paragraph goes on to say that “Provision for affordable housing may call for relatively higher densities.”
Para 22 of PPG3 1992 encapsulates the way in which land is distributed through our planning system. Land reform is what happens in other countries, however, short of a revolution, there is little or no prospect of any fundamental change to the current system through which space can be purchased as a commodity, the supply of which is deliberately rationed. The health of neither our cities nor our countryside is dependent on new housing being provided at higher densities and it is the job of the planners in town and country, cities and regions, to avoid becoming part of this conspiracy and to concentrate on the real ingredients of an urban renaissance and the ways in which the accessibility, beauty, economy and bio-diversity of the countryside can be improved.
Garden size may appear to be a matter of peripheral or secondary interest to those concerned about homelessness and the reluctance of some regions to plan to supply the numbers of new dwellings which the demographers say will be needed. The supply of new homes may indeed be a more important issue, but while at least some new homes are being provided, it is important that those involved in this process do their very best for the future occupiers. For the Leyhill prisoner, who is just a convenient example of the very large numbers of the underprivileged in our society looking for suitable housing, it may be that he will have to wait for a PPG which says that housing for a sophisticated, middle class, urban population should be at higher densities (although such hardship would too often be set off against a second home in the country or abroad), whereas the densities for affordable or social housing should be provided at no more than 8 dwellings per acre.
Land Use and Living Space, Dr Robin Best ,Methuen, 1981
Garden Space in Relation to Housing, Institute of Landscape Architects, 1942
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