Prioritising our Priorities in Street Design

by Oliver Davey, Co-Founder + Projects Director

Having seen all of the films, read about half of the books and just got back from the studio tour, I think my children have now reached ‘Peak Harry Potter’. I suspect that this is a fairly common journey for many families (certainly going by the popularity of the studio tour) and, truth be told, I’ve quite enjoyed it all. 
 
Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s that I think there’s an important lesson in these stories that we should be mindful of when it comes to the design of our streets, especially in relation to new developments.
 
In every single one of the stories, Harry, Ron and Hermione appear to always end up wrestling with the challenge of knowing when they should break ‘The Rules’. Usually prompted by Hermione, the trio’s stickler for good behaviour, there’s always a point where the three of them pause for a moment to discuss whether their next move will risk potential expulsion. What makes this noteworthy, for me, is that they’re never thinking of breaking rules just to cause mischief, but are nearly always contemplating breaking one rule only in order to uphold another. 
 
This aspect is perhaps made most explicit in the fifth book, The Order of the Phoenix, when the fantastically dislikeable Dolores Umbridge briefly becomes head of Hogwarts School. Her most significant intervention is to choose not to teach any of the practical skills normally taught as part of the ‘defence against the dark arts’ subject. It is at this point that Harry and his friends feel that they have been left with no choice other than to defy their teacher by learning these practical skills in secret, so that they might have the necessary abilities to take on the most powerful and dangerous dark wizard of all time and Harry’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort. Essentially breaking one rule (you should always obey your teachers and others in authority) in order to uphold another rule (we must all do what we can to defend what is right).
 
So, what does this have to do with streets? Well, the list of key policy objectives that our streets can and should address is wonderfully long and broad: promoting public health and combatting sedentary lifestyles; improving air quality and addressing the causes of climate change; supporting struggling high streets; providing better access to well-paying, meaningful work; and enabling an ageing population to live independent lives with dignity for as long as possible. For the built environment to deliver on these policy objectives, I believe that good urban form – the creation of attractive, functional and sustainable places that are easy to navigate, diverse, and adaptable to changing needs – is fundamental. But this can often be at odds with other objectives. So, what happens when achieving one good thing comes at the expense of achieving another good thing?
 
It’s at such points that we need to have a grown-up conversation about which of our urban design rules we’re going to break. Part of the problem with this is that many of these ‘rules’ are unwritten, and another part is that we rarely acknowledge that they can be in conflict with one another, so we’re not very good at having these conversations.
 
This issue has come into particularly sharp focus as part of a planning application that we are working on for a new housing development on the edge of a medium-sized town (which, all else being equal, is already better than building it on an old military base or airfield in the middle of nowhere). The site is currently a grassy paddock and the boundary treatment, with the roads along two of its four sides, comprises well-established hedges that are also home to a species of rodent protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. Accordingly, it seems that the hedgerow must be essentially untouched, with the development sympathetically designed around it. 
 
It is at this point that I will now ask the difficult question, ‘But at what cost?’ 
 
Retention of the hedge will mean that the development’s new buildings cannot address the street, that they will be situated behind a hedge and, worse still, that they will face into the site rather than towards the surrounding streets (notwithstanding that these ‘streets’ are currently more like lanes, and not yet what would normally be expected in built-up areas). Furthermore, due to retaining the hedgerows, either the site will now be less dense due to the reduction in developable area, or the buildings will need to be taller than is really appropriate for this context.
 
All of which creates an urban form that will now be compromised in terms of its definition between public and private space, ease of movement, perceptions of personal security, legibility, reflection of the town’s character or any adaptability over time. Despite the very best of intentions, the resulting development is in danger of repeating a great many of the mistakes of every poor development in the UK from the last 30 years whilst ignoring all of the lessons that we have learned about good urban form. Even if this time around it’s for a worthy cause.
 
I do not deny that this is a difficult situation, and one that will continue to be repeated across the country at an accelerating rate if the Government is to meet its housing targets. Perhaps, on balance, the hedge should be retained. Or maybe it should go. But it’s a conversation we’re currently not having. For what it’s worth I believe that good urban form must be the foundation of good development, making so many other desirable things possible. But how do we balance this against the need to protect and retain ecological assets? Or, for that matter, many other worthy policy objectives. Like Harry, Ron and Hermione, we need to start acknowledging where we might break our own rules for the greater good.
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