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, […]
Toby Lloyd, Create Streets fellow, considers an option for intensification of inter war housing estates. Finding a way to add new homes into low density suburbs has long been a holy grail of housing and planning policy. Lacking a decent model for suburban densification we are instead forced to fight ever more acrimonious planning battles […]
Have you ever heard of Toulouse as a city centre whose improved street design is revolutionising local prosperity, benefiting from and in turn further catalysing the region’s booming economy? Probably not. It is not normally lauded as a case study. But the quality of Toulouse’s street design is staggering. The results are stunning. Walking round […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]