A walk around the (mostly ex) council estates built in the 1920s and 1930s reveals a generosity of space for front and back gardens few could only dream of today. The ‘cottage estates’ were garden-suburb-lite mass-housing versions of the Edwardian planned communities found at Blackheath, Dulwich and Hampstead. Among the most famous are Dagenham, Wythenshawe and the Whitley Estate in Reading (ahem). During the postwar housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the heady days when politicians promised 300,000 new homes per year, and delivered on that promise, gardens were still of a decent size.
Not so today. Whether for home ownership, private rental or for social housing, new homes are crammed into much tinier plots with the consequence that gardens are much smaller. Some are barely bigger than large balconies found in more upscale blocks of apartments. The accompanying photo is from a social housing development in the North Cotswolds, completed this summer.
The causes of this are many and varied. Land costs are higher, so developers cram more homes onto the land they purchased to maximise profits. Since the New Labour government from 1997, and the ghastly Towards an Urban Renaissance report by Lord Rogers of Riverside, housing and planning policies basically ignored the English garden. The consequences of his call for cities and towns to be ‘crammed’ with flats can be seen all over the country. Many apartments don’t even have a balcony. This is a deterioration of access to outdoor private space.
New Urbanism has a lot to answer for. The drive to increase densities in existing suburbs by retrofitting, or building on large gardens and nearby spaces, has led to an untidy suburban landscape with more homes and buildings pushed into existing gardens and pocket parks. In addition, hard fronting for parking has killed off many once attractive front gardens. New suburban estates, moreover, are no longer designed and built with the generosity afforded by what is now called ‘mid-century’ housing. This type of new build is typical: www.bovishomes.co.uk
But the majority of English people still love gardens and outdoor spaces. Garden centres are hugely popular, and most larger supermarkets now have a good selection of plants, flowers and bulbs outside their doors. And the beauty or neatness of the majority of back gardens, and some front gardens, is also testimony to the skill and enthusiasm of millions of home-loving Brits. If people just want to use their back gardens for barbecues rather than gardening, great! They still afford more fun and freedom for families than a balcony.
So it’s not really the decline of English back gardens, but the decline in the size of them that really irritates. I’m guessing many brownfield-fixated academics, architects and planners who promote yet more flats and continental-style living based on trams despise the English gardening scene. Websites like Createstreets promote Poundbury-style town houses with handkerchief-size green spaces, or none, at the front and rear of the dwellings. Createstreets prides itself on ‘small courtyard gardens’ in new housing developments: Vision and master-plan, Sandycote Devon – Create Streets
This is little more than contempt for suburban new estates of houses with gardens, so popular with a majority of English people since the Second World War. Eco-zealots like Chris Packham despise anything that looks like a suburban new estate being built on greenfield. (This is the same Chris Packham who used to drive to his second home in France from his house in the New Forest.)
Those with less money in their pockets are discriminated against. Developers should provide for much bigger gardens for the smallest homes for purchase, and Housing Associations providing social housing could be more generous in their provision of outdoor spaces. They would undoubtedly continue to be the most popular housing form, just as the interwar semi has long been. And those who frame urban and planning policies know that, and do everything they can to prevent it. Ultimately, if you live in new social housing, or can afford to buy the smallest of the new-builds on a housing, your garden will be small at best. And that’s what the professional ‘planning class’ want. Shame on them.
