Shopping in a shed

One thing town planners in England never seem to do is plan towns. Instead, their main task is to make recommendations to local councils to either approve, modify or reject proposals from private developers. But developers do not plan towns either. In most cases, developers wish to build estates of large ‘luxury executive’ homes on greenfield sites (preferably in the green belt) because this is where the profits are greatest. Their proposals (and therefore the proposals of town planners as well) are for suburbs: detached houses arranged in curving roads lined with fast-growing trees (usually silver birch). The exceptions are the so-called ‘affordable homes’ required by planning regulations, which are usually arranged in small terraces. Each private development of this kind is named after what it has destroyed: ‘Cherry Orchard’, ‘Hop Fields’ and the like.

There have of course been some new towns built in the UK from the 1950s onwards. But these too resemble large suburbs with no centre that can be recognised as such. Instead, what passes for a town centre is usually a suburban shopping mall. These are essentially large sheds, packed with the kind of chain stores that make every town centre look the same. Indeed, an idea for a new television series would be to blindfold someone and drop them in a suburban shopping mall and see how long it takes them to discover which town they are in purely on the basis of what they can see in front of them. Most of these sheds are utterly without character, although a few are spectactularly ugly: there has rarely been any building so vile as that built as the shopping centre in Cumbernauld ‘new town’.

We can compare shopping in a shed with a traditional high street in a town like Ludlow, Marlborough or Ledbury. These have a row of shops and restaurants, most of which are still owned by local people rather than chains. They therefore are more likely to sell the unexpected. Local butchers prepare and hang meat instead of serving it on plastic trays covered in cellophane. There are second-hand bookshops and shops selling art-works. The shops themselves are interesting and usually attractive buildings, sometimes reached through small lanes off the main high street. There is usually a market hall, in which local traders and farmers can sell their produce. It is possible to get a good cup of tea or coffee in a café not called ‘Costa’, ‘Nero’ or ‘Starbucks’. The traditional high street is also the centre of local life: it is near the parish church and there is a town hall, usually a rather grand building to express the pride townspeople in the past had in their community.

How could you build a new town that would be as pleasant? The first step would be to recognise that few English towns began as villages: most were designated as towns by the Crown or a local landowner, with aim of raising income from a market or for defending the frontier. The latter were walled and were usually planned on a grid of streets. An alternative was a town based on an important trade route, which became the high street. This would usually be widened about half-way along, to provide space for a market. In some cases, market traders would move to a covered market and an island of new buildings would appear in the space they had previously occupied in the high street. Along the high street, land would be sold or leased as ‘burgage plots’, often about ten metres wide, stretching back as much as 60 metres from the high street. Each plot would have been fronted by a building that would have been both a workshop for making and selling goods, and a residence. The rear of each plot would initially have been used to grow food or keep animals, but it was common for buildings to gradually extend backwards. There would often be access lanes between plots, and over time these developed into narrow shopping streets. This is not just a feature of a medieval town: Melbourne has delightful ‘laneways’ that make it one of the most attractive of the many towns and cities that were planned in the 19th Century.

In a future post, I will look at how we can follow the best practice of the past to create a new town that looks like a town.

How not to learn Spanish

At some point in the 1970s, I decided to learn Spanish. So I signed up for a weekly evening course at my local college, which at that time was in Livingstone in Scotland. The class was small, the set text (Teach Yourself Spanish) was awful, and the teacher was a Spaniard who grew increasingly frustrated with his students. His frustration was reasonable, because, between us, we demonstrated several ways how not to learn a foreign language.

I suspect that Spanish is probably the easiest language for an English-speaker to learn. Unlike French, spelling is phonetic - you can almost always say the word correctly if you understand the rules for pronunciation. There are few sounds that do not occur in English. The two main exceptions are the gutteral sound of the letter ‘j’ (or ‘g’ before ‘i’ or ‘e’) and the trilled ‘r’. Also unlike French (but like English), Spanish clearly stresses one syllable in each word. Once again, there are clear rules determined by which letters end a word, with exceptions indicated by an accent over the stressed syllable.

So it must have been particularly irritating for the teacher to find that several of his students utterly failed to follow these rules, however many times he explained them. Why did this happen? I observed three reasons:

1.    One man pronounced every Spanish word exactly as if it was English. The idea that different languages have their own system for pronunciation was clearly one he could not adapt to.

2.    Two young women pronounced Spanish exactly as if it was French. They must have learnt French at school, and decided that it was typical of all foreign languages, from Swahili to Lithuanian.

3.    One very respectable middle-aged woman refused to pronounce the Spanish ‘a’ sound (like a short ‘a’ in English) and insisted in pronouncing it ‘ah’. She had obviously learnt as a child that it was vulgar to take a bath, and that you should instead take a ‘baarth’. She simply could not demean herself to sound (as she would have regarded it) common.

These students had paid their own money and devoted time to come out on a cold Scottish winter evening to learn a language. They were failing despite their own best efforts and the best efforts of their teacher. What their failure shows is that before you can learn, you must first forget. Adopting a new skill or any kind requires the abandonment of the way you carried out this task before. This is particularly difficult when learning a foreign language because the dialogue in the class is still in your mother tongue and you cannot but help thinking in that language. This is why immersion in a foreign country away from people who speak your own language is usually the most effective way of learning. You then hear nothing but your new language, and are forced  to speak it to engage with daily activities like buying food and asking directions.

There is another, quite different, reason for failure to learn a foreign language: impatience. I became irritated by my fellow-students and gave up the course. I might study Spanish again one day.

Why we are going to pay more taxes

I have been watching an entertaining television programme called Inside the Factory. Two presenters (Greg Wallace and Cherry Healey) look at how popular foodstuffs and household goods are produced, packaged and distributed. It is striking that virtually all the factories they visit process huge quantities of sauces, fish fingers, sausages and so on with hardly a person in sight. There is usually one man or woman charged with keeping an eye on the machines, a man with a forklift truck loading a lorry in the packaging area, and (presumably) a man driving it away. Some factories do employ a few squads of people to sort and load foodstuffs, but it is surely just a matter of time before a new machine is devised to replace them.

This reminds us that mass production is no longer a method for producing cars, washing-machines and other goods, but has been extended to much of the economy. Steel mills, once full of moulders and stokers, now employ very few people. A new mill in Austria produces 500,000 tons of steel a year with just 14 employees. Dockyards  once employed hundreds of day labourers to unload ships with picks and shovels. Now  there are thousands of containers unloaded by giant cranes, each controlled by a single person. Once the containers have arrived in this country, they are transported to vast automated warehouses, usually located near motorway junctions.

Mass production combined with efficient distribution, nationally and internationally, has radically reduced the price of goods. It costs only £1000 to ship a 40-foot container from one side of the earth to the other, and a container can carry a lot of mobile phones and textiles. As a result, it costs less to transport goods from the Far East to your supermarket than the cost in petrol to get them from the supermarket to your home. Even that stage of distribution is changing, with the expansion of home delivery. In the near future, we will probably see most supermarkets closing their doors to the public and just functioning as bases for vans taking goods to peoples’ homes. The low cost of transporting goods internationally has resulted in fruit and vegetables from around the world becoming available out of season, and shops in Britain selling cheap clothes made by low-cost labour in China and Bangladesh.

But there are sectors in the economy where automation and the consequent gains in production per worker have had less effect. These are the personal services: work such as public order, teaching, healthcare and social care, and the various forms of bodily maintenance (hairdressers, nail-bars etc). Even with all the technological advances in healthcare, 40% of the NHS budget still is allocated to meet the cost of its staff. For residential and domiciliary care of the rapidly-increasing numbers of very old and disabled people, staff costs are probably a much higher proportion of expenditure.

In the past, many personal services were staffed by women, traditionally underpaid. But rises in the minimum wage, court rulings on payment for sleeping-in time, and the shortage of cheap immigrant labour which will follow Brexit all mean that staffing costs will rise in this sector of the economy. We also now have greater expectations of personal care. We no longer tolerate warehousing large numbers of elderly, disabled and mentally-ill people in large understaffed institutions. Better care here requires more staff, which in economic terms means falling productivity per employee. Unlike the production of textiles, this work can not be outsourced to the Far East (although it will no doubt eventually occur to some politician to reduce taxation by deporting the elderly to India). There is also a public demand for more policemen (particularly policemen that can be seen by the public) and smaller class sizes in schools. 

There are therefore two contradictory trends, with goods getting cheaper to produce and distribute and the personal services getting more costly to provide. This will tilt the balance of expenditure in the next few decades from goods and to personal services. Since many of these personal services are provided by government, this means that taxes will rise, and rise. Fortunately, most people will be able to afford this because they will be paying less for food, clothing and their motor cars.

The alternative to rising taxes is endless ‘austerity’. Governments which try to maintain taxes at their current level will only be able to achieve this by progressively reducing personal services, to an even greater degree than has been the case since 2010. This would inflict a steady deterioration in the quality of life of the great majority of citizens, with increasingly unsafe streets, poorer healthcare and personal bankruptcy as a consequence of having to pay for their parents’ personal care.

Planning sustainable communities

When I first started my career as an amateur neighbourhood planner, I was confused about the use of the word ‘sustainability’ in our local plan. I live in village of about a thousand people in South Worcestershire. The local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’) covers half the county and has a lot to say about sustainability. But it mysteriously attaches this term to its proposals to concentrate all new rural housing in what it terms ‘Category 1 villages’. These are larger villages which, like my own, have a shop and post office, a pub, and a village school. Category 1 villages come at the top of a hierarchy of rural settlements of decreasing size, with definitions of each successive category (2 to 4) included in the local plan.

Discussions of sustainable development usually begin by quoting the  UN report Our Common Future, which defines it as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since the population is growing, a key part of meeting future needs must include  feeding these extra mouths. How then could it be ‘sustainable’ to build large housing estates next to villages on fields which until then had been producing good crops of brassicas, potatoes and other vegetables? I discovered that developments of this kind were deemed ‘sustainable’ by the local plan because this supposedly reduced transport use compared with building on agricultural land in smaller villages. This idea of ‘transport sustainability’ seems to have originated from the 1990s, and appears in many local plans together with the related idea that there is a hierarchy of rural settlements.

I have never found any evidence to justify this idea of ‘transport sustainability’. It is instead probable that transport use is much the same in large and small villages: in both, almost all people commute to work by car, buy their groceries from urban supermarkets or on-line, and drive their children to school. But ‘transport sustainability’ is useful for developers because it provides a rationalisation for building high-priced housing estates of ‘luxury executive homes’ in larger villages within commuting range of cities. Needless to say, this policy is disliked by people who see their pleasant village turning into a suburban sprawl. But the policy is unpopular in many smaller villages too. This was confirmed for me when I went to a conference on neighbourhood planning. I found that half the attenders were from large villages that wished to prevent large housing estates being built, while the other half were from small villages that wanted more houses but were obstructed in this aim by their local plan. The people from small villages were concerned that without a small amount of new housing, they would be left with a declining and elderly population with minimum access to services. But all attenders at the conference agreed that what their communities needed was housing that met the specific needs of their community, particularly social rented or affordable houses to enable younger members of families to stay near their parents, and small manageable houses so that elderly people could move to smaller and more manageable houses within their own community.

Elderly and infirm people in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to another challenge: the decline of local services in villages, both large and small. The Rural Coalition has estimated that about a thousand village pubs and shops close each year in England. Even where shops remain, reductions in the remuneration of sub-postmasters is causing a decline in village postal services. Meanwhile, the Royal College of General Practitioners has predicted that many small (and therefore rural) GP practices will close because of changes in the NHS remuneration formula. In my own Category 1 village, a pub has recently closed, while the larger village up the road now lacks a shop and a post office. In other words, Category 1 villages are increasingly resembling category 2,3 and 4 villages.

This decline in services will have its greatest impact on the 10% of the rural population who lack their own transport - a group dominated by the very elderly. In the next 20 years, the ONS estimates that the number of people over the age of 80 in my part of Worcestershire will double. A high proportion of these will live alone and need support. It is unlikely that social care funding will rise to take account of this change. The burden of care will therefore, as now, fall on families and increasingly on local communities. This means that a major objective of neighbourhood planning must be to maintain social and family networks. New housebuilding in villages should therefore be of two kinds: smaller manageable houses so that very elderly people can downsize and remain within the communities where they have their friends and where they are known; and social rented housing so that the majority of young families who can not afford to buy a house can stay in their community close to their parents.

Another objective should be to maintain and expand voluntary support. Of course, many services operated by volunteers exist already in rural areas. In my area, several villages co-operate in running a day centre for the elderly, which draws attenders from 25 villages, brought to the centre by a large team of volunteer drivers. Many villages also have clubs and coffee-mornings which provide social links for very elderly people. But there are great variations between villages in the availability of volunteers and the organisational skills to develop their own local services. The people who contribute most to local organisations are generally those who identify strongly with their community and have a sense of mutual obligation to each other. This in turn seems to arise from the sense that they live in a special and unique place. This sense of place is undermined when villages are expanded with identikit housing estates, which make everywhere look alike. Where this happens, the mutual support characteristic of English villages gradually declines to the level found in our more impersonal suburbs.

So a major aim of planning in future should be create and maintain sustainable communities rather than ‘sustainable transport’. This would involve looking at each village not as a depository for luxury executive homes built to meet centrally-determined housing targets, but as a place in its own right, with its own need for particular kinds of housing. In many villages, this would probably include housing to enable families to live in proximity to provide support to each other, and housing to let elderly people move to more manageable dwellings within their own community.  

Valediction for my mother

My mother died on 4th February 2018. This is the valediction speech I gave at her funeral.

"How is it possible to summarise in just a few minutes a life of 98 years and what it means?

My mother was born in 1919 in a house long-since demolished, just across the road from this Church. She went to the St James’ primary school a few yards away, and spent the rest of her life in Shirley. She remembered that when she was a child,  Shirley was an attractive village surrounded by woods and meadows full of wild flowers. Water came from a well, and you lit a candle to go to your bedroom at night.

Mom was one of five children, in a family that became increasingly impoverished after the prolonged illness and death of her father when she was still a child. I once asked her for her father’s Christian name, and she said ‘Daddy’, as a child would. The family was held together by her formidable mother, who somehow fed and clothed her children on a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week. Like all her brothers and sisters, Mom left school at 14 to contribute to the family’s income.

At some point in her teenage years, Mom started ‘courting’ (as they said in those days) my father. Unfortunately, marriage was opposed by her mother on the surprising grounds that my father was too short. My mother therefore had to wait until she was 21 to be able to marry without parental consent. The marriage took place in Solihull Registry Office in December 1940, and was immediately followed by the sound of air raid sirens. So my parents first night of marital bliss was spent in an air-raid shelter.

Marriage was followed by wartime factory work, with my mother working on day shifts and my father on nights. This may be one reason why the birth of my brother and me was delayed until after the war. My parents had a happy marriage, in which they seem to have done almost everything together. Mom and Dad were united by their commitment to politics, to cricket, to gardening and to the education of their children. They saw education as the road to a better life for their sons, but also as something worth having for its own sake. Both were essentially self-educated and loved reading.

My mother had a deep love not just for her own husband, children and grandchildren, but also a strong affection for her many nieces and nephews. She enjoyed attending their weddings and celebrations, which she saw as an opportunity to get what she called a ‘new outfit’. She had a love of cooking, which was somewhat handicapped by my father’s refusal to eat any meat other than sausages or indeed any food other than sausages and two veg followed by pudding and custard. My mother provided loving nursing care for my father when he was severely ill towards the end of his life.

My mother was a person of great honesty, to the extent of sometimes being outspoken, and she had enormous optimism, including about her own ability as a driver. This was curtailed somewhat when she drove from a standing start into a shopfront. Fortunately, no-one was hurt and the shop conveniently turned out to be an insurance broker.

She had enormous energy and a love of life. This was despite a failed operation which left her almost blind in the last few years of her life, and the increasing debility to be expected of someone a few years short of a century. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until May of last year.

But when I think of Mom, I smile. I remember not the frail old woman who died last month, nearly blind and struggling to breathe, but instead think of the young vigorous mother I knew as a child, who played with my brother and me with fun and imagination. My mother taught me, by her example, that raising children is the most important thing you do in your life, and that you do so by stimulating their imagination, promoting their desire to learn, and helping them make their own decisions to become thoughtful, caring and independent adults.

I hope that when you think of my mother, you will smile as well".

NOTE: the photograph was taken in 1989 and shows my mother with her five granchildren.