Smart Growth: From Sprawl to Sustainability: 3 - Softcover

Reeds, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190032282X ISBN 13: 9781900322829

Publisher: Green Books, 2011

Synopsis

People who live in compact, traditional towns have far smaller environmental footprints than those who live in sprawling suburbs. So why are we in thrall to urban sprawl? Are there better ways of getting about than by car? And how can 60 million people crammed into a small island find ways of treating it with respect?

Urban sprawl is unsustainable in an age of climate change and peak oil. But for 100 years the UK’s planning policies have been based on ideals of low-density living and attitudes that favour the individual over community, creating car-dependent lifestyles and destroying the countryside we love. This book explains what we must do to improve the quality of life in our overcrowded land.

Smart Growth argues that we should look to America – a country that embraced urban sprawl and car dependency on a far grander scale than we ever did, and is now finding answers to the problem. Its ‘Smart Growth’ movement is steering a course towards better-designed, compact cities and rail-based transit systems, thereby restoring communities ruined by decades of suburban insularity.

About this title

About the Author

Jon Reeds is an environmental journalist who has worked alongside planners and transport planners for nearly 40 years and has observed their responses to the demands of modern environmentalism. In 2006 he helped found Smart Growth UK, a national coalition engaged in bringing a strong sustainable development ethos into the way we plan spatial development, transport and communities. He lives in London with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Smart Growth

From Sprawl to Sustainability

By Jon Reeds

Green Books Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Jon Reeds
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-900322-82-9

Contents

Introduction, 
Part I – How we got here, 
1 A squandered land,, 
2 The germination of a bad idea, 
3 Decline and sprawl – a century of spatial planning, 
4 The death and life of great British cities, 
5 Travelling hopelessly – a century of unsustainable transport, 
Part II – Where we are, 
6 An unsustainable communities plan, 
7 Climate change and other future challenges, 
8 America – land of dreams, 
Part III – Where we need to be, 
9 Care and maintenance for a small country – Smart Growth planning, 
10 Care and maintenance of the countryside, 
11 Smart Growth transport, 
12 From consumers to citizens, 
13 News from Somewhere: a Smart Growth vision, 
14 Conclusions: urban rides, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A squandered land

The preparations for this work have been suitable to the author's earnest concern for its usefulness.

Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain

Man and boy

One bright February morning in 1885, a stout, bearded man took a walk around the historic streets of Oxford before heading for Wadham College and the Holywell Music Room where he was to address a political meeting. It's just possible that his walk was witnessed by one of the city's younger citizens – a seven-year-old boy – although in fact he was probably attending the Church School in Cowley, close to where his father worked as a clerk. Our bearded man, a graduate of Exeter College, made several visits to the city at this period, and while it's possible that his and the boy's paths could have crossed, their very different social circumstances make it unlikely. Which is a pity, for here were two people whose ideas and activities profoundly influenced the way we lived throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and the thought of them occupying the same stretch of pavement is a curiously seductive one.

But the comings and goings of well-to-do gentlemen connected with the University probably occupied few of the younger man's thoughts as he grew up, for he was of a mechanical bent and in 1891 was apprenticed to a bicycle repairer. Yet their two paths may have crossed one last time, one wet October day in 1896, when the older man's funeral cortège paused at Oxford station to allow local people to pay their respects. No one from the University attended, for the deceased man had shocked its sensibilities a few years earlier with a harangue about his political beliefs. Once again, our young bicycle repairer, now four days short of his fourteenth birthday, might still have shown little interest in the eccentric and obviously artistic mourners or the beautifully carved coffin in the train's guard's van laid out like a chapel, unless someone had mentioned the name of the man within, for the name was his own.

It's easy to read too much into coincidence, but these two namesakes, despite their very different backgrounds, really did mould the physical shape of our country today. Although both men were philanthropists, both believed strongly in improving the lot of the poor and both were lovers of the countryside and historic buildings, they were very different. Yet their ideas and activities contributed so hugely to creating the car-dependent urban sprawl that passes for environment in the UK today that even such a coincidence is impossible to ignore. The name they shared was William Morris.

Mention of the name William Morris today is likely to bring to most people's minds the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; the passionate guild socialist; the inspired designer of fabrics, furnishings and furniture; the poet; the writer; the building conservationist and much else besides. Born in 1834, William Morris I (as I shall call him) was an extraordinary man, rightly revered today for his skill as a designer, his advocacy of handicrafts, his role in founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, his influence in developing Britain's socialism along a very different path from the one in those countries where Marx was revered, for his poetry, for his close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for much else.

Yet Victorian aesthetic values underwent a long eclipse in the mid-twentieth century, and mention of the name William Morris in that period would have brought to most people's minds an equally famous, but wholly different individual. William Morris II (1877-1963) was an engineering colossus who once stood at the peak of British manufacturing, earning him the title by which he's better remembered: Lord Nuffield. William II was responsible for introducing mass production methods to the British car industry and, within a couple of decades of his founding it, Morris Motors was by far the largest car manufacturer in the land. So successful was it that Morris was dubbed 'the British Henry Ford' and generations of motorists enjoyed their cheap but reliable 'bull-nosed' Morris, Morris 8, Morris Minor and Morris Oxford cars.

The differences between the two are marked. William I came from a well-to-do background and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, despite which he became a passionate socialist. William II came from a humble background and became a hugely successful and wealthy industrialist and, although he liked to describe himself as 'apolitical', he flirted with fascism in the early 1930s (to his subsequent regret – he later gave generously to charities helping Jewish refugees from Europe). Both, as befits men with a good Oxfordshire surname, were associated with Oxford for part or much of their lives, but although William I was a graduate he fell out with the University after delivering his tub-thumping socialist polemic to its worthies. William II wasn't a graduate, but held the University in such high regard that he endowed Nuffield College, which he intended should become predominantly an undergraduate engineering college. The University was so grateful it made it a postgraduate social science college.

Both men loved Oxford's historic buildings and both owned substantial homes in the Oxfordshire countryside, but their influence took very different forms. William I inspired a new generation of architects and planners with a view of simple rural idylls for all, which led to an explosion of suburbia that he would no doubt have deplored. William II brought cheap mass motoring to the people at large, enabling them to pursue this rural/suburban dream. The result of a century of practising these ideals is a ruined environment and a country hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the challenge of climate change.

If that seems harsh, particularly on William I, then bear with me. This will be a tale of idealism gone wrong and greed got right, of the things we craved and the things we continue to crave. It will describe where we went wrong and how we continue to get things wrong. It will look at how we can challenge these failings with ideas from the country where they were most enthusiastically, successfully and damagingly embraced. It will try – and fail – to avoid the seductive trap that most environmental books fall into, of saying 'we need to do things differently', because we do, and urgently. But worry not: a great deal of what we need to do is rediscover old ways of doing things, and in seeking inspiration we will merely need to do what we frequently do but may be reluctant to admit. We will have to look for inspiration across the Atlantic.

Travelling hopefully

This book is partly about history, partly about the present and partly about the future, but even I haven't been around for much of the history I cover. Luckily I have a string of volunteers to help describe these changes from a first-person viewpoint, and it was extremely good of Britain's domestic travel writers over the last 800 years to cooperate in this way. For, among our many eccentricities as a nation, we are spectacularly prone to blunder our way around our islands and publish an account of our travels. Some of these are insightful, some obscure and some completely lunatic, but many give us first-hand views of what went on, what's going on and, in a few amazing cases (including one by William Morris I), what's going to go on. This is especially useful, as my publishers have turned down my entirely reasonable request for an enormously expensive but state-of-the-art time machine, as a luxury an environmental writer should learn to do without.

And it really is over 800 years since the Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis – 'Gerald of Wales' – mounted his horse to produce his Topographia Hibernica (1188), Itinerarirum Cambriae (1191) and Descriptio Cambriae(1194). Giraldus became chaplain to Henry II, a hazardous occupation if you remember what happened to Thomas Beckett, and accompanied Prince John and the Archbishop of Canterbury on tours of Ireland and Wales.

Giraldus lived at a time when the population was expanding rapidly, and no doubt urban sprawl was too. Scholars still argue about medieval demographics, but it seems likely the population of England was around a million in 1066 but had grown to anything between four and six million by 1300. But early in the fourteenth century Europe was hit by famine and then by the Black Death and subsequent plagues, though the population may have been already in decline before these events, and although historians argue over the reasons – overpopulation, increasing wealth inequality and poverty, food shortages and consequent reduced resistance to disease – the period provides a salutary reminder that we ignore our impact on the environment at our peril.

Plagues were to trouble us for another four centuries and population probably continued to decline into the fifteenth century and didn't begin to grow again until the early sixteenth, but even pestilence, the awful standard of the inns and the state of the nation's roads (no change there) failed to deter the Renaissance, or even the renaissance of UK travel writing. The Tudor period saw populations starting to grow again and travel writers saddling up and sharpening their quills. During the sixteenth century the population of England grew rapidly from a little more than two million to almost four, and in Queen Elizabeth I's reign a statute was passed to prevent London spreading into the productive horticultural land around it, as food security was as concerning then as it was until the Common Agricultural Policy made us worried about surpluses – for a while.

The Tudor travel writers such as John Leland, William Camden, Edward Chamberlain and Edward Blome were concerned with topography, in its broadest sense, with Camden setting himself the colossal task, given the communications of his time, of describing the entire island from the Scillies to the Shetlands. Had he succeeded he would have been able to describe a country with a rapidly rising population.

The seventeenth century saw the growth of interest in antiquities, but this was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment and even the antiquarian writers of the day showed a keen interest in science and technology. Many travelled to the Fens, where drainage was hitting its stride and helping to feed an English population grown to perhaps five million, despite the onset of the 'Little Ice Age'. Climate change, whether man-made or natural, is something we ignore at extreme risk; we assume that the comfortable temperate weather we've enjoyed for the last couple of centuries or so will continue.

At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries two of our greatest travel writers dismounted from their horses and reached for their quills. Celia Fiennes spent 20 years recording her impressions of a country where population growth had been stalled by civil war, religious conflict and climate problems. A little later the 'hack journalist' Daniel Defoe (nothing wrong with hack journalists thank you very much) made his own journeys. Both shed a great deal of ink recording the way people grew their corn or earned it and how they lived.

By the early eighteenth century the English population had grown to around six million, and antiquarian writers such as William Stukeley and wealthy men like the Hon. John Byng left accounts of their travels and their stays with the local aristocracy, who seemed to offer a sort of hostel service for the rich.

As the century went on and the agrarian revolution gathered pace, writers such as Arthur Young took particular interest in farming, and by the time the nineteenth century arrived, with the population of Great Britain swollen beyond 10 million and people flocking to industrial towns, it was still possible for the great William Cobbett to record his passionate interest in the working of the land, in rare intervals between raging about his age's social and economic injustices. How we use the land – one way or another – is what this book is about.

In the two centuries that followed Cobbett there was an initial eclipse in travel writing while the birth of the railways shrank Britain's size drastically, even as its population exploded. By 1841 the population had grown to 15.9 million, by 1851 it was 17.9 million, in 1861 it passed 20 million, in 1871 it was 22.7 million, in 1881 25.9 million, in 1891 29 million and in 1901 it was 32.5 million, more than triple what it had been a century earlier. The growth was driven by advances in public health, the beginnings of mechanisation in agriculture and the ability to buy in food, thanks to the wealth created by the industrial revolution. This period also saw people flocking to the industrial cities. It took a world war and a depression to see the reflowering of travel writing. H. V. Morton harked back to a time in the eighteenth century when topography and antiquarianism was in vogue and sparked a rebirth of the travel book about nice places. And in the inter-war period two other writers of genius, George Orwell and J. B. Priestley, opened the eyes of their compatriots to the misery and squalor of the poverty in their midst, which rekindled the travel writing genre about not-so-nice places that has also seen a recent reflowering. By 1931 the UK population was still rising, but the growth was concentrated into southern England and the Midlands; the older industrial areas were stagnant or beginning long periods of decline. In the inter-war period another UK travel genre emerged – the traveller using a strange form of transport. D. H. Lawrence described Walter Wilkinson's first book The Peep Show as revealing "England better than 20 novels by clever young ladies and gentlemen". This was no mean achievement given that Wilkinson's chosen mode of travel around the hazardous motor roads of the 1920s and 1930s was a hand-cart carrying his own Punch & Judy show.

After the Second World War came another hiatus in travel writing, but from the 1960s, with the UK population up to 50 million, writers such as John Hillaby and Roger Higham began to revive the genre. Since then the literature has, like the population, just grown and grown, with writers anxious to share their accounts of travels on foot, by bike, on horseback, by punt or, for all I know, by wheelbarrow or pogo stick. A more recent development since the mid-1990s has been explorations of our growing social dystopia. By the end of the century, with the UK population past 60 million, these were coming thick and fast, as were accounts of travel by train, car and even, in more than one case, in the footsteps of H. V. Morton. Today, travelogues are pouring out at a huge rate.

Decline and sprawl

One of the very gloomiest travelogues of the last 800 years is Iain Sinclair'sLondon Orbital, an account of how he and his friends walked around London's M25 country, and it proved to be every bit as horrifying as you might imagine. The book would be a strong contender for Most Depressing Environmental Book of the Year Award, if you could create such a thing. Bizarrely, in the book's blurb, one reviewer describes it as "a hoot".

But the only real hoots within pages describing our ruined, dysfunctional Home Counties are the ones coming from motor horns. One of the book's most demoralising chapters describes that slice of south Hertfordshire where so many trunk-roads wipe the filth off their feet before diving across the M25 into the capital.

At the poor old village of South Mimms, now totally surrounded by trunk-roads, Sinclair picked his way through the "interlinked spirals, under and over, the multi-choice channels at Junction 23 of the M25" and achieved the not-inconsiderable feat of arriving at the Forte Posthouse Motel on foot.

"Before it was a service station, South Mimms (Myms) was a hilltop village with church and notable funerary monument for the Austen family," notes Sinclair.

And within the dust of its churchyard lie one or two of my own very distant ancestors, their sleep disturbed by the incessant conversion of fossil carbon into CO2. Poor old South Mimms: half a century ago it was just squeezed between the A6 and A1; now it's had London's concrete garrotte, the M25, applied and the A1 has become a motorway.

Sinclair pressed on, to Shenley. "The village of Shenley is green belt, South Mimms is not," he noted. But green belt designation has not saved Shenley. Its former psychiatric hospital, closed after 'care in the community' began life as 'neglect in the neighbourhood', was being turned into a housing estate – 'the Pavilions, Shenley' – at the time of Sinclair's visit.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Smart Growth by Jon Reeds. Copyright © 2011 Jon Reeds. Excerpted by permission of Green Books Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Green Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 190032282X
• ISBN 13: 9781900322829
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296