It was easy to forget, in the middle of our super-heated summer, that cycling can be the coolest form of transport through the city. Fast too, but with the breeze blowing through a loose shirt, some relief, even in the midday sun. And so it was that I pedaled to a patch of Green Belt, previously strip-farmed market garden, latterly mined, then quarried and landfilled, and then a puzzle-piece in the increasingly fragmented green fringe of London. Standing deep in the long grass, amid purple mallow and perpetual sweet peas in grand bloom, pockets of planting bravely thrived in the hottest summer ever. Yet (as the news is of widescale fires raging on the Continent, Scotland & Dartmoor) this rough-kempt open land, scrubby and shrubby, thirsty and yellowed, had burned too– hardly a verdant natural place. We skirted blackened scooters and E-bikes and it felt a little dystopian. Is this where you’d want to live?
It’s not a question that comes with the privilege of choice these days. Council’s juggle land supply, housing needs, Government edict and a dwindling number of developers with the deep pockets to fund major schemes. Costs have soared. As has homelessness and a country-wide cohort who cannot afford to rent, let alone hope to be on the housing ladder. There are twenty or so of us sitting down later to discuss the merits of this place for housing, and how a proposal to build on ‘sacred’ land, might win favour. There is a different order of merit when we know we must push out nature for people in a place that we tried to preserve as a girdle of open space to prevent London sprawling out into the countryside. I imagine the 1934 idea of a girdle as modern Spanx dealing with a poor urban body-image. We grapple with the meaning of ‘quality’ that could differentiate these proposals from others on less constrained sites. It feels to me, however, that this Green Belt site provides exactly the grounds for debates we should be having about housing in every development. Perhaps this represents one of few real opportunities to influence (demand) housing with higher ideals than the standard typologies present.
We address key planning issues, but basically call for a scheme with more humanity, ambition, new technology, climate resilience, well-researched management plans up front, etc, etc. I am aware that I'm the landscape specialist on the panel and there to discuss ecology and open space: We insist that the scheme delivers more greenery into spaces and enrichs people's lives with this connection to nature. Fingers crossed. So much of what we do as landscape architects is really about time. Once described as a landscape futurist, I want to be optimistic about that future – so we have to judge designs by their ability to predict, to withstand and to endure. Unlike the architect whose job is largely done with the final brick in position, the end of the planting signals the very beginning of the life of the landscape. It may take some plants months to establish, while shrubs and trees take decades and the look and feel of the place that we've been assessing only begins to approach a resemblance to the CGI images many years after we've all gone away. So too is that landscape entirely dependent on the aftercare it receives. There is no such thing as a maintenance-free landscape! Yet I rarely hear how long a scheme will take from breaking ground to the end of the first phase, and for the first residents to move in. How long are they expected to live there and what is this place going to be like when their grandkids come to visit them there some 25 years later?
In those 25 years, oaks are still in their infancy. Where’s the long development timeline that extends to generations of people and plants? 21% of the population of the UK live in homes over built before 1919 yet nowhere in a planning application are you required to state how long you believe your buildings will last. Little wonder perhaps that we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the forces of nature and less resilient to the bruises inflicted by global markets not-of-our-control, when we don’t plan for longevity in the fabric of our buildings sited in landscapes that wither at the start of spring.
I am being shown parameter plans and my mind wanders to a country estate, the land productively supporting villages of densely packed cottages but the manor now a co-living with care home, nursery and local art school…I must have been invited to join a community like this on Instagram again this week…#save. From dystopia to Utopia, but wait, isn’t that half an idea for this place? A model of landscape built on continued stewardship and largely open access; a model of living built on mixed community. A sense too of a grandeur of vision – an acceptable grandeur that inspires affection and care and keeps new residents & visitors returning.
Back in the parched long grass the site tells its own story: open, public land but the tale is of neglect. Today’s tinder-box it more likely to show an abundance of fly-tipped sofas and fridges than rich biodiversity. It has an ecological classification but has not been monitored or managed. I wonder what this place could have been like if more value had been placed on it in the past…if it hadn’t be a tip, whose soils now need expensive decontamination that the cost of development must shoulder. And, societally-guilty of assuming that nature can take care of itself, we are now outraged by its collapse.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the projected population on site suggested that a daily 90,000 litres of almost-clean water (the sort we rinse our hands with or run down the sink whilst waiting for cooler water, or let flow whilst we brush our teeth) will flow through drains away from the site. That would irrigate a hectare of gardens, hedges and trees, which would shade and protect non-irrigated areas and people. Add in captured run-off and a solar driven filtration system and we start to imagine a place becoming sustainable, not so dependent on scarce and increasingly expensive resources. A big housing development is also a big infrastructure project, and buried in those big numbers there is a way of harnessing so much more benefit for each pound spent. Oh, and did I mention the inherent health benefits…
Returning to the scheme in the Autumn, I see again how the standard route taken to planning makes these beneficial circles difficult to plan and explain. There is a narrative problem. However, this time the Green Belt criteria allow ‘very special circumstances’ to be expressed. Here is the space to set out a vision for future development which starts a cascade of benefits for the new and existing communities of flora, fauna and people. ‘Landscape-led’, that much bandied phrase needs to be defined: the desire of the design and development team to leave a legacy of much loved and long-lasting buildings which are perfectly adapted to and contribute to their landscape setting, allowing nature and people to thrive together…something like that. Something that lets more long grass grow in decades to come.