Rising East Online

Urban Blight

Conserving Privilege: conservation areas and social equity

—James Stevens

The planning scholar Eric Reade once accused Government and planners of rarely subjecting the effect of their policies to detailed scrutiny. Having struck a corporatist bargain with government in the 1940s, which secured for the profession a leading role in the reconstruction of Britain, the planning profession has been reluctant ever since to jeopardise its status by articulating who gains, who loses, and by how much, from the operation of the planning system. It suffers from an ‘institutionalised coyness’ about exploring these questions in any depth (Reade, 1987).

One of the things planners have especially been reluctant to explore is the essentially conservationist ethos which underpins the whole planning system, where, according to Peter Hall and his colleagues, the growth of the city was deliberately inhibited in order to protect agricultural land, landscape and the setting of historic British towns and villages (Hall et al, 1973). The consequence has been to fix the physical geography of Britain in the 1930s.

This conservationist outlook has remained largely intact throughout the post-war period. It survives stronger than ever today in the form of Richard Rogers’s Towards an Urban Renaissance published in 1999 (Urban Task Force, 1999). The degree of continuity is really quite remarkable. Despite all the talk about this urban renaissance representing some radical new planning paradigm, its features are essentially those of the 1947 system: the prevention of sprawl; the protection of the countryside; the collection of people in clearly delineated communities; and the renewal, or as we call it today, the regeneration of urban areas - albeit reinvigorated by today’s language of environmentalism.

In short, we have gone from ‘urban containment’ to ‘urban renaissance’. I would suggest, however, that they amount to the same thing: the hostility of the authorities to the aspiration of the urban populace to secure for themselves a better and more spacious living environment.

I would like to illustrate this by taking a closer look at the role of heritage planning in this, but specifically one very important aspect: the conservation area.

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The conservation area concept

The conservation area concept was really devised as one more way of checking the movement and distribution of the people.

By the late 1950s a combination of rising population, prosperity and car ownership had rendered much of the original 1947 planning vision obsolete. Put simply, the people didn’t want to live in the areas proscribed for them by the authorities. The architects of the 1947, projecting pre-war social conditions into the future, imagined that the working-class would remain content with walking and cycling to work, living two-to-a-room and hammering out widgets for the rest of their lives. Much to their surprise (and to the surprise of priests, ministers and social workers ever since) they aspired to better homes and more space in suburbia. In particular the newly mobilised middle-classes – literally and socially – wanted to move house and were content to commute as they pursued their careers. This in turn created pressure for new housing in rural towns and villages in the hinterland of the metropolitan centres and planners fought a fierce rearguard action against these new demographic forces throughout the later half of the 20th century.

The conservation area concept was introduced by Duncan Sandys in 1967 via a private members bill, it was conceived to remove this new threat to rural villages and market towns as well as the more select areas of our bigger cities.

Sandys was very keen on keeping people out of certain places. A decade before, as Minister of Housing and Local Government, Sandy’s Green Belt circular had effectively stopped planned overspill into the rural counties. Taken together, both these measures could be read as the respective arms of a pincer movement: one, the Green Belt, conceived to prevent sprawl and the outward expansion of the people, and the other, the conservation area, to stop people from intruding into previously select middle-class areas in the villages and market towns of England.

The conservation area proved remarkably popular with planning authorities and local amenity groups. From 1,000 areas designated by the early 1970s (the majority of which were rural villages – precisely those areas most at risk from the influx of the new money) there are some nine and a half thousand today and with no sign of stopping.

No approval from Government is needed to designate. Any area, of any size, can be designated at any time. Overnight if need be. This often happens to frustrate development threats.

So useful and flexible was the concept that Michael Heseltine in 1979 encouraged its greater deployment. As the new Secretary of State for the Environment, Heseltine told the Royal Town Planning Institute that the protection of national parks, Green Belts and conservation areas was one of the key objectives of planning (Reade, 1987). Deregulation may have been considered the antidote for the problems facing Liverpool and London Docklands, but the elite made sure that the same laissez-faire principles were not going to be applied in its own backyards in Cheltenham and Windsor.

Ostensibly, conservation areas are meant to protect areas of architectural and historic significance. My own research, however, suggests that many attractive but otherwise unremarkable Victorian and Edwardian residential areas are being designated today. The majority of all the new conservation areas designated in the North West since 1999 are Victorian and Edwardian residential suburbs and rural villages. Interestingly, post-war developments are still considerably under-represented. This may be because such developments face problems of physical conservation, but it may also be because such areas offer local authorities the only scope they have to easily meet their housing targets.

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Does it matter if conservation areas increase?

Does any of this matter? Well, I think it does for the following reasons:

1. Conservation area designations are continuing to rise and this has implications for land supply in England, not least the achievement of the Government’s brownfield development objectives;
2. it is my contention that conservation areas are used increasingly to safeguard more middle-class districts from the impact of brownfield development policies; and
3. that this in turn is channelling development away from these more select areas into lower status ones giving rise to town cramming with the inequitable consequences that follow from this: namely, that lower status areas will increasingly have to bear the brunt of the Government’s environmentally motivated brownfield development objectives.

I would like to illustrate this with some findings from my own research from last year.

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Extent of conservation area coverage in England

There were 9,437 conservation areas in England in 2005 (the official figure quoted by English Heritage is 9,374, though I this is most likely to be a typographical error). Figures since 2005 have not yet been published.

Sources: English Heritage Monitor, Heritage Monitor, State of the Historic Environment and Heritage Counts reports published annually since 1984

Does anyone know how much land they cover? You would think the Government would be eager to find out considering the implications this may have for the achievement of its housing and infrastructure objectives. But no proper attempt has been made to quantify the extent of conservation designations. So I’ve attempted it.

Fortunately, I was helped by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) which in 2000 calculated that the average size of each conservation area outside of London was 25.7 hectares. If this seems overly large, one should recall that the centres of many of our historic towns and cities are extensively designated. This raises the overall average. For example the Tunbridge Wells conservation area is 375.84 hectares in size. Bath is a huge 1,486 hectares. Some 90% of the Borough of Westminster is designated as a conservation area (this may explain why it has to export its social housing provision to neighbouring boroughs). Most other London boroughs are also very extensively designated (for example 75% of Kensington & Chelsea is designated; 70% of Richmond; and 50% of Camden).

By multiplying the average size of 25.7ha. by 9437 - the total number of conservation areas – we arrive at a figure of 242 thousand, 530 hectares., or nearly quarter of a million hectares worth of conservation areas in England.

Given that the conservation area is designed as a specifically an urban protectionist measure I have calculated that this is equivalent to 12.4% of the overall urbanised area of England, or 2% of land area of England.

Source: English Heritage, Heritage Counts 2005 except * which is the researcher’s own calculation based on CIPFA data.

If we then add 370,000 or so listed buildings, one and half thousand parks and gardens, nearly 20,000 scheduled monuments, 37 battlefields and 17 World Heritage Sites - all of which will significantly inhibit development, especially if it is held to be incommensurate with the character and setting of these assets – then our heritage designations cast a very long shadow indeed over our towns and cities.

London, the South East and the North West regions are experiencing the highest rates of new designations.

Sources: Annual Heritage Monitor and Heritage Counts reports published annually between 1999 and 2005.

The South East, perhaps unsurprisingly, has the most designations: some 2132. The region now accounts for a quarter of all designations in England.

Again if we multiply the number of conservation areas in the South East (2132) by the average size - 25.7 hectares, this would mean that conservation areas in the South East account for nearly 55 thousand (54, 792ha), or a quarter of the total urbanised area of the region.

Given that 40% of the region is also protected by other protectionist designations, quite apart from land set-aside for agriculture, is it any wonder that most development in that region is now taking place in people’s back-gardens? It is not unreasonable to suggest a connection between designation and local opposition to development.

Source: The Times, Friday 7 July 2006, based on DCLG data

Within the North West region, the region experiencing the third highest rate of new designations, I have estimated that conservation areas may now account for some 13.25% of the total urban and suburban area of the North West region.

According to data from DEFRA http://defra.gov.uk/erdf/docs/nwchapter the North West region totals 1,416,500 hectares. There are 825 conservation areas across the whole North West. Again, if we take the figure of 25.7ha as the average size of each conservation area outside of London then this gives a figure of 21,202.5 ha of conservation areas in the North West.

Data from DEFRA reveals that the North West has 160,000 hectares of urban and suburban land (see www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/progress/regional/summaries ). 21,202.5 ha of conservation areas thus represents 13.25% of the total urban area.

Subjecting 12.4% of the total urban area of England (estimated to be approximately 12% of the total land area) to this special protection measure represents a considerable additional squeeze on the supply of previously developed, or brownfield land, which is where the Government wants to build 60% of its new housing and infrastructure (see for example the recent Communities and Local Government Green Paper on Housing: Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable).

If we insist on containing development within our existing urban boundaries, it is my conjecture that, because of the extent of the various heritage protection designations in place today, this will impact most heavily on least affluent districts. In effect there will be ‘brownfield’ land which is deemed necessary to protect in the national interest on heritage grounds, and there will be land which has the potential for re-development. This is what I would like to turn to now.

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Dual standards?

One of the things I quickly detected during the course of my research was a system of double-standards in operation concerning where development should be concentrated.

Many planners and conservation officers feel it is entirely acceptable to densify poorer areas. This practice tends to go by the name of regeneration. Invariably this means the demolition of sometimes unattractive, poorly built, but otherwise quite spacious homes and the construction of smaller ones in their place. Usually these new homes are built without the benefit of gardens or car-parking space (and often with some rather patronising or infantile public art thrown in for good measure). Gardens are ruled out because the planners believe that they consume valuable space, and anyway, like other social commentators, they probably think that the public must be levered out of their homes and made to socialise in the local park. Meanwhile within planning circles it is considered a perfectly legitimate objective of planning to protect the spacious amenity of more exclusive areas (see for example Suburbs and the Historic Environment, English Heritage, 2007).

Increasingly the protection of spacious suburbia is argued on environmental grounds: to protect bio-diversity; to serve as green lungs; to counteract rising urban temperatures (exacerbated by building more densely!) and so on. These are all legitimate arguments, but they should also be applied to poorer areas when these come to be re-built. Yet such arguments calling for the construction of lower density homes in the inner-city are never deployed. Here, the Richard Rogers and Anne Power formula of high densities applies, justified as necessary to avoid green field consumption and to reduce car-travel: all necessary in the fight against climate change (Rogers and Power, 2000).

The feeling I detected among those whom I interviewed as part of my research was that poorer areas lend themselves more readily to urban renaissance style make-over, usually because planners encounter less resistance in areas of council housing because the residents have no real say in what happen to them. As one Conservation Officer in an outer London borough candidly observed to me:

‘I just think there is that generalised idea that a poor quality of environment provides more flexibility. First of all there’s less likely to be resistance in those sort of areas, and generally, in conservation areas you get far more vocal residents than you do elsewhere…Equally in areas of council housing, where people don’t own their own property, if you don’t own your property, how much of a voice do you have?’

Southwark, for example, is seeking to accommodate most of its new housing in the already densely developed northern (Bermondsey, Borough and Rotherhithe) part of the borough where its council housing is most heavily concentrated.

Housing policy 1.7 of Southwark’s Unitary Development Plan (UDP) characterises this area as appropriate for higher density development because it is an area “unsuitable for houses with gardens because of environmental conditions” - in other words, because it is already densely developed the residents probably won’t notice if we cram in some more flats.

The residents may beg to differ with the planners about their needs and I suspect if we asked them they probably would like homes with gardens just like the residents of Dulwich Village down the road. Interestingly, areas like the very exclusive Dulwich Village, are spared the urban renaissance density circus. Southwark’s policy 5.31 explains how high density infill schemes in areas of ‘special character’ (a term that encompasses both conservation areas and attractive, leafy, but otherwise non-designated areas) are “rarely an appropriate consideration” (Southwark, 1995, policy 5.31). Since infill is often the most that can be achieved in such areas this effectively rules out the development of lower-cost market housing. The creation of ‘mixed’ and ‘vibrant’ communities – the cri de coeur of contemporary planning policy – only travels in one direction, it would seem.

Southwark’s Housing Policy 1.7 further justifies high-density development on the grounds that “there is no established residential character” (Southwark, 1995, policy 1.7). Indeed. The area has been on the receiving end of endless architectural experimentation for decades. Maybe now is the time for us to create some residential character by listening to the people and building the type of homes they want. Not so. One family, who will be decanted from their spacious maisonette on the Heygate Estate at the Elephant & Castle (an estate often used to symbolise all that went wrong with 1960s social architecture) into smaller accommodation in the nearby Wansey Street development, are reported to have had this to say about their new, socially inclusive, environmentally friendly and regenerative home: “The new flats are disgusting and tiny compared to what I have” (Housebuilder, April 2007).

But another expression of these dual standards was the response of the heritage sector to the Treasury’s recent suggestion that it might levy a higher rate of council tax on the residents of conservation areas. There was an angry reaction from heritage bodies who argued that this would discourage people from buying historic homes.

The problem for the heritage sector is that for years it has argued about the financial benefits which will accrue from investing in historic houses. For example, in order to encourage a more conservationist outlook among the public, English Heritage has long argued that residential conservation areas can increase the value of a home by some 10%. Homes in such protected areas do tend to experience much higher rates of capital appreciation than those in other areas. However, I would suggest this may primarily be because such areas stop the intrusion of unwanted development, not because of any aesthetic benefit, though I would not dismiss this altogether as an important factor. The conservation area could be a victim of its own success (there has, however, as yet been no sign from the Treasury that it will implement this policy).

Having once argued the financial benefits, the heritage sector now performs a volte-face, arguing that such a policy would discourage people buying homes in conservation areas. Caroline Spelman, the then Tory shadow secretary of state, described the proposal as: “an anti-green stealth tax, punishing local residents for protecting their environment and for fighting back against over-development.”

It now seems that residing in a well maintained, often spacious and leafy conservation area is a selfless act of public service. I suspect those living in cramped, overcrowded, gardenless dwellings in the inner cities may view this differently. Recently the Conservatives have upped the ante and launched a campaign of protect gardens from development by removing these from within the definition of ‘brownfield’ sites (see Labour’s Garden Grab. www.conservatives.com). Needless to say, the Tories are silent about what the consequences of this campaign might be since, like Labour, they support the retention of the Green Belt and resist development on greenfield sites. The consequence can only be the further intensification of lower status areas.

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Conclusion

I would suggest that the current focus on brownfield development may well be driving up the number of conservation area designations as people seek to protect their neighbourhoods from over-development. As I have described, we are already witnessing high numbers of new designations in the development pressurised regions of London, the South East and the North West (although challenging this hypothesis one might point to the smaller number of new designations in the development pressurised Eastern region). Moreover, the number and extent of these designations, by constraining the overall availability of brownfield land, will, with some inevitability, have the effect of concentrating higher densities development in more disadvantaged districts: areas which already suffer from an under-provision of private gardens and public green space.

This gives lie to the arguments of social equity in the environmentalist ‘discourse’ for it is these lower status areas which will bear the brunt of much of the Government’s brownfield agenda. Meanwhile the residents of affluent areas are busy excusing themselves from the impact of policies of their own making.

This is not intended as a polemic against conservation areas, or indeed those who for understandable reasons try to defend homes from back-garden development. Instead I would argue that the sensitive conservation of the historic environment can only seriously be entertained if we reduce the development pressure on our existing built areas. We can only do this by releasing more rural land for development.

While higher densities in some central urban areas may be inevitable and desirable in a country with a growing population and a growing number of households (for the young will want to socialise together and others will want to be able to live near work, friends, families and professional networks) a more relaxed approach would nevertheless allow for the peripheral expansion of some settlements and the rebuilding of parts of the inner-city at lower densities, and the creation of new parks, wild-life areas and farms – as suggested by Alan Evans and Oliver Marc Hartwich in their book for the Policy Exchange (Evans and Hartwich, 2005).

Unless planning abandons its obsession with containment and embraces more dispersed and lower density settlement form for all, we face the prospect of a deteriorating environment for most citizens. Instead planners should return to a more purposive model of planning which aims for the construction of homes and settlements that respond to the aspirations of the public and hopefully delight them too.

I would suggest that conservation areas could provide the template for these new settlements: low density Arts and Crafts style villages; Unwin and Parker garden suburbs; Victorian and Edwardian detached houses on large plots. These are homes that have proved popular with the public over the century and are likely to remain so given the tiny homes being built today.

As the great garden-city planner Raymond Unwin once wrote: there’s nothing to be gained from overcrowding.

James Stevens recently left English Heritage and now works for the Home Builders Federation as regional planner for London. The views expressed in the above article are those of the author and do not represent the views of either of these organisations.

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Bibliography

• Communities and Local Government, Department of (2007) Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable London: CLG
• English Heritage (2007) Suburbs and the Historic Environment London: English Heritage
• Evans, A. W. and Hartwich, O. M. (2005) Unaffordable Housing: Fables and Myths London: Policy Exchange
• Hall, P., Drewett, R., Gracey, H., and Thomas, R. (1973) The Containment of Urban England 2 volumes. London: PEP/Allen & Unwin and Sage Publications
• Housebuilder (2007) ‘Elephant Tracks’ April 2007, pp 36-39
• Reade, E. (1987) British Town and Country Planning Milton Keynes: Open University Press
• Rogers, R and Power, A (2000) Cities for a Small Planet London: Faber and Faber
• Southwark, London Borough of(1995) Unitary Development Plan London: Southwark Council Accessed at www.southwark.gov.uk on 10 July 2006
• Urban Taskforce (1999) Towards an Urban Renaissance – Final Report of the Urban Task Force London: Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions

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