RDA on Labour’s definition of ‘Georgian architecture’

Keir Starmer’s Labour administration has shifted the benchmark for UK Government housing targets, making a commitment to constructing 1.5 million homes over the next five years. The focus of press attention has been on proposals to release poor-quality greenfield sites such as car parks and scrubland for regeneration, and on the potential implications for the political standing of the party in these locations. However, the nature and quality of residential development is likely to change, as ‘building beautiful’ criteria introduced under the Tories is superseded by a new framework which emphasise traditional materials, ‘gentle density’, and respect for local heritage.

Where some campaigners have seen this as a retreat from the Poundburyesque vision endorsed by Michael Gove and his supporters, others have interpreted this change as a more sustainable and creative route to the walkable urbanism popularised by the Georgians, reconceptualised by the Victorians, and eroded in the years since.
The Telegraph’s John Grindrod recently penned an article on the subject, ‘Like Bridgerton without the sex: inside Keir Starmer’s neo-Georgian housing revolution’. Adam Forrest of The Independent led with the headline, ‘Labour will build new towns and Georgian housing’. Both were critical of aspects of the latest policy developments, and sceptical about the likely scale and scope of their application, but these papers of different political persuasions were equally confident that there was something to be said of an approach which prescribes plan form over design.

Rather than imitate the form of Georgian architecture in the context of a car-centric suburban housing estate, the new guidance would appear to favour more contemporary architecture arranged in dense, tightly packed streets within walking distance of the shops. It promotes a balance between medium-rise apartments and well-built townhouses in a multiplicity of architectural styles. The fifteen-minute city concept which draws essential services into the orbit of all new urban housing developments is back on the agenda, and appears to be here to stay.

Rodić Davidson’s first instinct is to welcome the proposal as an important development in the history of urban planning and to recommend that Labour’s homes of the future are not only built with sustainable materials, but developed with consideration for the sustainability of the end-users’ way of life. A passage from Howards End comes to mind, more pertinent now than it was in 1910, when the motorcar first started to make its mark on urban planning. ‘She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed’.