“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 […]
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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 […]
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Since 2020 the team at Create Streets have been working with East Marsh United (EMU) – a community group in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire. EMU’s founder Dr Billy Dasein wrote this article in response to recent violence outside his front door, on Rutland street. The East Marsh is an area of multiple deprivation and could […]
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How should London physically commemorate Queen Elizabeth II? It’s a subject that will be widely and deeply discussed in the months, years and even decades to come. Here are some early thoughts that might guide our collective thinking. Firstly, commemoration should be significant and meaningful. The longevity of her reign and the significance of her […]
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Why Birmingham’s 2022 Commonwealth Games was all about getting about An American Perspective, by Jon Bibbins A native Virginian here, reporting from Birmingham, England not Birmingham, Alabama. The 2022 Commonwealth Games were a smashing success! I was blown away by the world-class quality of the event. ‘Brum’ transformed itself with a spectrum of colour splashed […]
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Create Streets’ director, Nicholas Boys Smith, reflects on our recent Restitch summit A few weeks’ ago with our friends at Onward, we ran the Restitch Summit in London and Halifax. It came at a crucial time. Political debate is fractious and mistrustful. Social fabric is fraying. Connections to people and place that have evolved over […]
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Transport for New Homes, an organisation that advocates for creating new homes designed around walking, cycling and public transport, have released a scathing report on the state of new housing developments in England declaring most unfit in our quest towards carbon net zero. It was not hugely surprising that most of the brownfield housing sites […]
Read more >The press has reported recently that residents in Poundbury want to install upvc windows rather than wooden ones because they are “greener.” But the idea that upvc windows are “greener” than wooden ones is for the birds. Sustainability works at three levels. Firstly, manufacturing. Wooden windows can readily be created from sustainable forests. Upvc ones are 43% oil and […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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