There was nothing wrong with Pavilion Road ten years ago, a mews just off Sloane Square. On the other hand, there was little assertively right about it: a potpourri of converted Victorian stables, parked cars, crude tarmac and some charmless but inoffensive 1960s flats. PG Wodehouse once wrote of a similar (fictional) street off Leicester […]
A note on our winning street by Create Streets Director, Nicholas Boys Smith Streets have this habit of hanging about, the most ancient and timeless features of our urban infrastructure. However, Peter Pan-like, they are also forever young. For whereas their routes may be their original routes, the actual experience of moving down them is […]
The death has just been announced of Professor Alice Coleman whose controversial 1985 study, Utopia on Trial, infuriated the architectural establishment and helped change housing policy in the 1980s. Many, though not all, of her findings have correlated with many subsequent studies of relationships between urban morphology and design with wellbeing and prosperity. In 2014 […]
It was very thought-provoking and enjoyable to be part of our Sad Streets webinar on Monday 15 May. Can places make you sad or happy we asked ? Not being a neuroscientist, I made my contribution early and kept it short and sharp. I told the story of how over ten years ago, as I […]
Alexander Boys Smith applies the theory of Christopher Alexander’s pattern language to the architecture of Leafcutter Ants. In 1977 the architect and theorist Christopher Alexander published his seminal work, A Pattern Language. It set out 253 “patterns”, physical ways in which humanity tends to solve the perennial problem of how to live alongside others in […]
Tom Bage is a Bow resident. The inclusion of a paragraph on mansard roofs in the new NPPF is welcome news for the millions of people living in pre-1918 properties who would like a little more space or a greener home. I live in Bow, where different groups of residents have spent nearly a decade […]
Create Streets’ senior architectural designer, Robert Kwolek, considers how important a strong character and identity is to beautiful places with which residents and visitors can fall in love. We tend to like places with a unique identity, those places with a strong, easily recognisable character. Think about the most beautiful places in the world. Usually […]
Our director, Nicholas Boys Smith’s defence of fifteen minute cities was recently published in Conservative Home. The text was edited down for reasons of space. Here is the full text. Would you like to live in a more prosperous place? A neighbourhood where there are more local businesses, where shops do better, where the air […]
A senior leader in housing development argues that beautiful streets matter too but highways officials and budgets are blocking them Michael Gove MP said last year that he wants new buildings to be more beautiful. However all too often streets get wrapped up into ‘placemaking’ rather than dealt with as a separate space that needs […]
Councils nationwide have signed up to climate emergency charters. So far so good. Yet all too often we find that sustainability targets and ambitions to support active travel are undermined by a narrow traffic-oriented approach to design. Many designers are used to working in a world where streets are for vehicular movement and nothing else, […]