How we create new places and steward old ones to be beautiful and durable, happy and healthy
On Thursday, 5 June 2025, a carefully selected, invitation only group of landowners, council leaders, investors, architects and advisors gathered at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, in one of England’s most lovely places. We were the guests of Lord Salisbury and the Gascoyne Estate. We were there as part of the Create Streets Foundation’s Hatfield Symposium into how we build for generations. How can we create new places and steward old ones to be beautiful and durable, happy and healthy? One speaker kindly called our day, ‘a really really important event.’
Here is our founder, Nicholas Boys Smith’s ‘dispatch from Hatfield’ summarising some of the day’s key themes.
1. A Quiet Revolution is taking place in the quality and humanity of new developments. Although we are still pouring concrete and scarring our towns and countryside with ugly and unendurable places much of the time, more and more new places are humane, lovable and walkable. We are unlearning the mistakes of traffic modernism. Something has changed.
2. This is not just a Western conversation. There are mesmerising examples from Africa and from India of conversations about durability, sustainability, landscape management and urban health and beauty converging.
3. Place matters to economist and investors, not just designers. This is not just a conversation about architecture and urban design.
4. However, just because something is possible does not mean that it is easy. There remain many challenges of economics and of planning to creating better and more valuable ‘gentle density’ places. The prize is worth it but not always easy to obtain.
5. Trust the people to define place and identity. One theme that swam through the entire day was ‘trust the community.’ Everywhere we see a similar phenomenon. If you ask people proper questions about how people actually wish to live, you get very clear answers.
6. Promote stewardship. And move from housebuilding to place-making. If we want people to ‘fall back in love with the future’ then new development should not make old places worse. Right now most think it does and will.
7. New towns or intensification? There was support for new towns, a desire to embed stewardship landownership models holding public land in their creation but also a concern that they would not be quick.
8. We know how to do this in principle. The range of patterns that make it easier to create valuable and popular places is well established and evidenced now.
9. It’s time for trams: transport matters. For larger or more urban developments particularly, public transport (and active travel) is crucial for creating sufficient homes at Gentle Density.
10. Above all, place matters. Place matters to our sense of ourselves. It affects everything from the air that we breathe to our sense of safety and purpose as we go around our daily lives. We want to feel proud of our homes. We need to. Billy Dasein, Chief Everything Officer of East Marsh United, spoke movingly of Grimsby and the pride that he and his neighbours take in improving their slice of England: ‘this places is our place.. we did this. We put the trees in.’ Amen to that.
You can read the full dispatch here.
Thank you to everyone at Hatfield for making the Building for Generations Symposium possible. Thank you to the Create Streets Foundation’s kind sponsors (Lightwood, C.G. Fry, Pinsent Masons and Brooks Murray Architects) without whom it could not have happened.