Nicholas Boys Smith argues that the Athenian authorities should be bolder Life and a conference took me to Athens last week. Reader, it is true: international conferences are not quite a jolly, but they are jolly good fun. You get to say what you’ve said before to people who’ve not heard it before and, if […]
Samuel Hughes, argues that we should preserve the new liberty to create mansards that ‘fit in’. Mansard roofs are such a familiar feature of British streetscapes that most people barely notice them. A mansard is a double-pitch roof which creates usable living space over nearly the entire area of the building. They cost somewhat more […]
Nicholas Boys Smith summarises some high level points for creating and stewarding prosperous and sustainable places into the future I was recently invited by my good friend Carlos Moreno to talk about sustainable cities at a conference (the Redefining the Future Conference) in a rather sultry summer Athens. No slides. Only a few minutes. Not […]
Labour has often repeated its ambitions to build a generation of New Towns to deliver 1.5 million new homes. What might have escaped most people’s attention, however, was what these towns might actually be and look like. After all, there is a big difference between successful historic extensions to cities, such as Edinburgh’s New Town […]
A Coventry public official writes anonymously about the restitched future he would like for his city. I often ask myself, what might have been had Coventry taken a different planning approach after World War II. Where might we be now? How might we reverse some of the twentieth century’s planning decisions? It is a question […]
Nicholas Boys Smith asks how can Britain reinvigorate its ‘little platoons’ and restitch its social fabric, in a talk he gave to Onward at the Unherd Club in central London In advance of Create Streets’s major Restitch summit into how we reweave our social fabric, I was recently asked by the think tank Onward to […]
James Armitage talks about the proposals for Sandycote, a development of 44 new houses arranged around a village green. The project was undertaken in conjunction with Create Streets, for the developer Latis Group. The scheme has recently received planning permission and attracted much praise from the East Devon Planning Committee. Sandycote – the green We […]
The Phoenix, a low-car ‘gentle density’ development in East Sussex, presents a radical alternative to most development, but remains rooted in place, writes Human Nature’s Anthony Pearce At the pen of the visiting writer, places are often reduced to their most immediate and famous elements, creating imaginary neatness and homogeneity. In the case of Lewes, […]
We were recently approached by ADAM Architecture to launch a nationwide survey on street safety. The design of our streets & squares really influences where we choose to walk, cycle or spend time making them busy or empty. The #SafeStreets survey aims to identify streets and places where people do & don’t feel safe across […]
Leon Furkert of the Dresden Historical Society tells the story of Dresden’s renaissance At our recent Restitch conference in Coventry, Leon Furkert from the Dresden Historical Society, spoke movingly about ‘how the city was given its heart back’, about the citizen-led and locally popular rebuilding of Dresden’s Frauenkirche and old towns. An ‘optional extra’ during […]