Against the estate that could be anywhere

You have seen it from the ring road of almost every town in England. A field, a hoarding, and then a few hundred houses that could have been dropped in from anywhere. The same handful of standard types in a beige-and-brick palette, set along looping cul-de-sacs named after the hedgerow that was grubbed out to build them. In ten years the saplings will have grown and it will look settled enough. But it will never quite be a place. It will be an estate.

We want to be clear where we stand, because it is easily misread. We are not against building. The country is short of homes by any honest measure. Prices and rents have locked a generation out, and the case for building more is beyond argument. What we are against is building badly, and pretending the two questions are the same one. They are not. You can be wholeheartedly in favour of new homes and still think most of what gets built is a wasted opportunity.

Why the anywhere-estate happens

Placelessness is not an accident of taste. It is what the incentives produce.

Start with how most large sites reach a housebuilder. Land is tied up years in advance on terms that reward the buyer for paying the landowner as little as possible. By the time spades go in, the numbers have been squeezed at every stage, and the parts of a scheme that make somewhere feel cared for, the generous street, the real square, the proper planting, the building that is not off the standard pattern book, are exactly the parts that get value-engineered out first. They cost money and they do not obviously sell an extra unit.

Then there is standardisation. A national house type built ten thousand times a year is cheaper and faster than one designed for its actual setting. That logic is understandable, and up to a point it is even sensible. Pushed too far it gives you the same three-bed detached in a Cotswold valley and a Cheshire flood plain, indifferent to both.

And there is land banking, the quiet scandal beneath the loud one. Good, well-located, consentable land can sit held and undeveloped for years while it appreciates, because holding it is more profitable than building on it. So we get the worst of both worlds: not enough homes, and the ones we do get too often on the sites that were easiest to assemble rather than the ones that were right.

Building well is not a luxury

The usual objection is that good design is a middle-class indulgence we cannot afford in a housing crisis. We think that gets it exactly backwards.

The homes we build now will stand for a hundred years or more. The difference between a street people are glad to live on and one they leave as soon as they can is not marginal, and it is not expensive relative to the whole cost of a scheme. It is mostly a matter of care taken early: how the land is read, how the scheme is laid out, what is kept and what is planted, whether the place connects to the town next to it or turns its back on it. Get those right at the promotion stage, before a single house type is chosen, and good design costs very little. Get them wrong and no amount of later polish will fix it.

Good places also hold their value and weather better, and they cause fewer of the problems that make communities resist the next application. Building well is not the opposite of building a lot. Over any real timescale it is how you get to build a lot without the whole country digging in against you.

What we try to do instead

We are a land promoter, so our part of this is specific and we will not overclaim it. We do not build the houses. But we choose which land to promote, we shape the case that goes to the planning system, and we decide who we are willing to sell a consented site to. Those choices set the ceiling on everything that follows.

So we promote sites that should be built on: well-located land where new homes strengthen a place rather than sprawl away from it. Design and setting go into the scheme from the first walk of the land, not as a decoration added at the end. Then, when a site is consented and sold, we care who buys it, because a good permission handed to the wrong builder still ends up as the estate that could be anywhere.

None of this is charity. Landowners do better when their land becomes somewhere people actually want. Communities object less to development they can see the sense of, and the country gets homes that are still worth living in long after the hoardings have come down. Being pro-building and anti-placeless is not a contradiction; it is the only version of house-building that lasts.