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 […]
“Look left, look right, the hills are bright” This is south Shropshire, perhaps not a twee emblem of Britain like The Cotswolds, but blessed by more rugged combinations of hill, river and light. A.E. Housman was preoccupied by their interplay in this agricultural Midlands county, and his line above, taken from A Shropshire Lad, is […]
Create Streets’ senior architectural designer, Robert Kwolek, describes a visit to Hampstead Garden Suburb and explains what we can learn from the North London early 20th century community, revolutionary in its time and with plenty of lessons for us today. You can read the full essay here. You don’t have to visit many new housing […]
After all the hot take in the first 24 hours, here’s a more considered take from Toby Lloyd, the Chair of the Create Streets Foundation’s No Place Left Behind Commission.” The sceptical take on last week’s long awaited Levelling Up White Paper it is that it’s largely a rehash of existing policies and initiatives, loosely bound […]
Bristol’s former mayor and former RIBA President, George Ferguson, asks if Bristol is returning to the age of destructive planning. Bristol’s history, special character and environment are under assault from more damaging development than we have experienced in the past 50 years, but we are in danger of sleep walking through it. Soon after I […]
Do filmmakers and set designers understand architecture better than architects? My study of the 11 Star Wars films released over 44 years suggests that they do. I examined 12 Star Wars locations (some cities, some villages, some spaceships, some individual buildings). I categorised them as either: ‘Good.’ The home of innocents, harmless but kind planet-dwellers, […]
Create Streets Head of Research Ben Southwood explains why street votes goes with the grain of British care for place and neighbourhood. Place is emotional and rightly so. Britons are conservative about their neighbourhoods. They take pride in them. They wish them to remain green and pleasant. Many planning reformers have failed because they misunderstood […]