Beyond 'Peak Tarmac'?

I’ve been sharing some thoughts here recently about the lamentable quality of streetscape design in most new housing. In the comments, a number of house-builders felt I was being harsh on them, saying that the root of the problem was risk-averse and cash-strapped highways departments and district councils. To be fair, I think there are signs of movement in the opposite direction. We may in fact already be past ‘peak tarmac’.

This time last year I finally made time to properly explore a large extension of the market town where I live, master-planned over a decade ago and now about three-quarters built out. From the outside it looks very much like most of the other large new estates in the area – standard-issue volume housebuilder product (Bovis, Taylor Wimpey, Hopkins) – but I was pleasantly surprised by the extent and scale of the green-spaces threaded through it. These were almost exclusively the swales and infiltration/attenuation basis forming the site’s extensive sustainable drainage system (SuDS). They had clearly been planned around a number of retained mature trees, and are crossed in places by simple but rather attractive timber footbridges. The former gravel pits at the heart of the site (where I mucked about in my youth) have been relandscaped as a wildlife pond with board-walk access around its reeded perimeter. The whole system provides an attractive green armature for the development, which would otherwise have little to distinguish it from the others around the town. As often happens on my sight-seeing tours, I was accosted by a resident, pottering in front of his newly completed house, and curious to know what I was up to. The ensuing conversation was very illuminating.

It seems the local authority has refused to adopt most of the SuDS infrastructure. It is currently retained by the consortium of housebuilders and once the project is complete it will be transferred into the ownership of a residents’ management company (RMC). I am mostly involved in the design of smaller-scale housing projects, but over the past couple of years we have noticed the increasingly elaborate SuDS systems demanded by local flood authorities, and the increasing reluctance of local authorities to adopt them. In my last article I signposted a really useful report from the Competition & Markets Authority on the private management of public amenities on housing estates, and it confirms this is indeed a long-term trend. Around 40% of new homes built in the last five years make use of some form of private estate management.

The CMA report was published in the context of the widespread and well-document abuse of leasehold tenure by the larger housebuilders in recent years, with unwary purchasers complaining of exorbitant and unchallengeable rises in service charges. In contrast to the horror-stories outlined in the CMA report, my new friend was pretty well informed about the ownership and future management of the greenspaces on the estate, including the fact that the landscape maintenance contractor appointed by the developer could eventually be replaced by the RMC if their performance or charges weren’t up to scratch. My new friend was a little hazy on the fine detail, but was a bit concerned that he was already better informed than may of his neighbours…which is perhaps not surprising, given that he moved here from New Ash Green in Kent, a ‘SPAN’ development from the 1960s where communally owned and managed landscape is an essential part of the proposition. He made some interesting observations about the similarities and differences of the SPAN approach and its modern equivalent. I will share these soon.

The enhanced landscaping of these modern developments is probably regarded as a necessary evil by the housebuilders, but with private estate management becoming increasingly normal it’s perhaps only a change of mindset that would allow them to emulate the achievements of the builder-developers of Georgian, London, Edinburgh and Bath – creating ‘great estates’ not just housing estates.