Disease, Demolition and Developers

Typhoid grips a suburb, a prescient planner envisages the pedestrianised harbour we know today, and the Harbour Board's reclamations set the foundations for our commercial heart; fascinating nuggets revealed by some little-known maps from over a century ago.

Proposed Extension of the City of Wellington (1877)

In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym of 'Mr Darnoc' – drew up plans to transform Wellington’s waterfront. His imagination was fueled by a big reclamation a year earlier, which created 190,000m2 around the northern end of Featherston Street – almost a third of all Wellington’s man-made land.

Seidelin’s credentials had been established by his masterplanning the redesign of Copenhagen, where his scheme to demolish the city's walls won Denmark's Medal of Merit two decades earlier. Wellington was an ambitious city, and the Danish architect didn’t hold back, with designs straight out of the Renaissance urban planning playbook. Heavy on symmetry (a challenge given our terrain), the city’s centrepiece was to be a curved waterfront basin where Te Papa is located today, with tree-lined avenues drawing people to the waterfront.

The plan was a rejection of the closely packed laneways and squalor that characterized Te Aro. Seidelin's map left the ghostly outline of the recently completed Queens Wharf in his layout as a reminder that his vision was of a modern city, rather than a colonial outpost; public facilities and major businesses would have to make way. Ornamental gardens at Herd Street would have required the demolition of the recently opened Te Aro Baths, and warehouses around the northern end of Taranaki Street were to be replaced by a large piazza – a concept that has never really worked in New Zealand.

Wellington's city councillors sensibly considered the design impractical and expensive: curved docks and enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill-afford. The proposal was rejected, and expansion into the harbour continued piecemeal for the next 50 years – a situation not too dissimilar to Copenhagen's remodeling, where many of the ramparts and lakes Seidelin wanted removed were retained and are popular parts of the Danish capital today.

Seidelin’s vision is intriguing because it merges radical urban form with the streets we know today. The map was drawn before the railway arrived in the city, but the Government Building (opened in the previous year) is clearly identifiable the end of Lambton Quay. 

The idea of an accessible waterfront would have seemed fantastical in the latter part of the 19th Century – yet 150 years on visiting cafes at the water’s edge as envisaged is central to the Wellington experience.

Typhoid Area (1892)

Wellington’s emergence as a shipping hub facilitated the spread of diseases, with SS England bringing smallpox to the city in 1872. Surges in measles occurred every five years, and Pertussis (whooping cough) killed 24 people in 1891 alone. Typhoid first appeared in New Zealand as an epidemic disease in 1860, and the period between 1886 and 1891 became known as the ‘typhoid years’ with 548 Wellingtonians dying from bacterial infections (including cholera). 

Meanwhile the city grew from around 15,000 in 1875 to 49,344 in 1901. Densely packed Te Aro was particularly vulnerable, with infrastructure hopelessly unable to keep up. It was hardly surprising that many Wellington families fled to settlements like Karori, including the Beauchamps with their young daughter Kathleen (writer Katherine Mansfield), following the death of their baby Gwen from cholera in 1891.

William Chapple, a 28-year-old doctor fresh from his previous practice in Motueka, set about mapping the deaths in the tradition of English physician John Snow, who Chapple would have learned about as a student at King’s College London. Snow (one of the fathers of modern epidemiology) had pinpointed the source of a major cholera outbreak in London four decades previously by plotting the location of cases, and traced them eventually to a contaminated water pump at Broad Street.

Chapple quickly identified Holland Street as the centre of the Wellington outbreak, where he found blocked pipes and lavatories causing excrement to flow under the cottages’ floorboards, sewers venting directly into the houses, and residents without plumbed lavatories emptying their ‘night soil’ onto the street. Unsurprisingly an inspection of the hospital’s admission records showed typhoid cases soaring after heavy rainfall, when excrement sluiced into the harbour in rivulets around and under people’s homes.

None of this squalor is obvious in Chapple’s deceptively simple map. The colour of the dots reflect cholera’s ‘blue death’ nickname, with the victim’s skin turning bluish-grey from loss of fluids, their distribution reflecting the slums that lined Te Aro’s laneways.

Chapple recommended ‘a complete system of sewerage on modern principles’ to empty the city’s waste into Cook Strait, rather than Lambton Harbour, via a sewer tunnel under Mount Victoria. The cost was controversial (£165,000 – $35m today), but the incidence of sewage-related diseases treated at Wellington Hospital fell dramatically once the infrastructure was completed in 1899.

Chapple later became a prominent eugenics advocate (‘habitual drunkards and nocturnal house-breakers’ were included on his list of undesirables). He holds the unusual distinction of being elected to parliament in both New Zealand and the UK, and retained his New Zealand medical registration throughout, returning to work at Wellington Hospital as the Resident Casualty Officer in the 1930s – perhaps he regaled the junior doctors with accounts of the city as he recalled it four decades.

Plan of 12 Building Sections on the Te Aro Reclamation (1906)

Established in 1880, Wellington Harbour Board was tasked with operating and expanding the city’s port. Starting work three years after Seidelin’s master plan was rejected, the Harbour Board embarked on a programme of reclamations driven by Chief Engineer William Ferguson that laid the foundation for the inner city waterfront of today.

Ferguson aligned the new wharves so that the prevailing winds would help ships manoeuvre, and reduce the requirement for tugs to help vessels berth; he also drove investment in hydraulic cranes. The port was recognised as one of the best equipped in the Southern Hemisphere. Ferguson created a partnership with the government and City Council to deliver a series of new wharves and land reclamations – including the Taranaki Street Wharf development, completed in 1905.

The reclaimed land was ‘a magnificent block’, according to auctioneers George Thomas & Co. ahead of its sale in February 1906 – and for once the real estate hyperbole was justified. A flurry of investment had transformed the surrounding area since the turn of the century, with a new fire station (reassuring for commercial building owners) on Lower Cuba Street, opposite the City Council’s impressive new Town Hall which opened on December 7th 1904. Concert-goers arrived on the electric trams that had commenced service in the preceding months, and in the summer rowers in the Star Boating Club’s boathouse enjoyed music from a new bandstand on the Cuba Street side of Jervois Quay.

It was all remarkably modern. The map reassured buyers that the land on offer was anything but the Te Aro of the typhoid years; it even shows the Polhill Gully Watercourse (described by the Evening Post as ‘exceedingly offensive’ a decade earlier) now buried in a long culvert under the city’s streets. The map omitted the city’s waste incinerator at Chaffers Park; it was expanded shortly after the Taranaki Street reclamation was auctioned off – caveat emptor.

The sale was well attended and two buyers bought all but one of the allotments; the State Coal Department purchased the land south of Cable Street (a new road named after the Harbour Board’s outgoing Chairman William Cable). The modernist John Chambers Building was completed in 1918, and the smaller Inglis Brothers bicycle workshop occupied the Taranaki Street end of the block – the Wakefield Market food stalls was the building's final incarnation prior to its demolition in 2007.

The land to the north was purchased by timber merchants C & A Odlin’s. The company completed its eponymous building within 19 months of acquiring the site, with Shed 22 built as a wool store by the Harbour Board when Odlin’s moved its timber yard to Petone in the 1920s. In the mid-1990s there were plans to raze the empty buildings and replace them with a reviled casino-hotel, but resource consent was withheld when the extent of the public opposition became clear.

Aside from those replaced by the One Market Lane development, the buildings that sprang up from the 1906 auction remain in situ, historic waterfront buildings that are fully renovated, earthquake strengthened, and home to blue-chip businesses like the Stock Exchange and architects Warren and Mahoney. A magnificent block – just as the auctioneer promised 115 years ago.

First published in Capital (Issue 81).

Wellington: an active earthquake engineering laboratory

Earthquakes may be a way of life for Wellingtonians, but the city has been home to cutting edge engineering developments since the 1960s that have helped keep us safe. So here are four buildings that stand out as globally significant seismic engineering designs – with the wider public that see them every day largely unaware of their significance.

Jerningham Apartments (1968)

First use of ‘capacity design’

Wellington’s post-war baby boom and predictions of enormous population growth unleashed a new generation of high-rise apartments. To the casual observer these 1960s behemoths look relatively indistinguishable, but in the world of seismic engineering the large block at 20 Oriental Terrace is a global icon.

Design work on Jerningham Apartments started in 1964, with the tall structure stepped back from the street to take maximum advantage of the town plan’s height limits. Developers Wilkins and Davies were experienced hands in the Wellington apartment market, having completed Wharenui further along Oriental Parade in 1960, and Hollings & Ferner (a relatively new Wellington engineering practice) was engaged as the project’s structural engineers.

John Hollings was interested in improving the performance of concrete frame buildings in earthquakes, which typically failed in a brittle manner as movement occurred in a single storey low down, ultimately risking a ‘pancake’ collapse. He envisaged the new development as a tall building with movement evenly distributed up the height of the structure, and flexing occurring in carefully specified areas, a concept he described as ‘lead hinges’ protecting the ‘glass-like columns’ from damage.

Jerningham’s concrete columns were strengthened considerably relative to the beams so they would not fail. The connection of the concrete beams to the columns including extra steel reinforcement to allow them to flex and dissipate energy without losing integrity during a big shake. The precision of the calculations in the era before calculators or computers was extraordinary, but Hollings was still not fully satisfied as to the performance of the junction between the floors and internal columns. He had his team build a full-scale rig at the building’s base to undertake testing at the start of construction – the design passed with flying colours.

Holling’s structure had significantly better seismic performance compared to the conventional approach proposed by the developer; it was also commercially more attractive. The revolutionary design reduced the scale of the foundations required, saving $100,000 on the original cost estimate (around $8 million today). And by opting for a low-profile floor system he had fitted in an extra level of apartments for the developer – all of which helped increase the affordability of the high-rise housing needed to accommodate Wellington’s steep population growth.

The strong columns, weak beams design philosophy sounds like common-sense now, but it was a revolutionary concept at the time. It was refined by the University of Canterbury to become known as ‘capacity design’, and is now a fundamental aspect of almost all seismic design codes around the world. Meanwhile recent property listings state Jerningham has been assessed as 84%NBS – better than some apartments a third of the building’s age.

The Beehive (1979)

First use of diagonally reinforced coupling beams

In 1951 a young refugee family arrived in Wellington, sponsored by Catholic students at Victoria University of Wellington. Tom Paulay, 27, had fled Hungary three years earlier, after his two years as a cavalry officer fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front had put him at odds with the new Communist regime in Budapest. Paulay completed his engineering degree in Christchurch and returned to Wellington, where he spent eight years as a consulting engineer, before taking a 35% pay cut to return to the University of Canterbury as a lecturer on structural design in 1961.

1960s New Zealand was a curious mix of forward-thinking confidence and lingering attachment to the Mother Country – epitomised by plans to replace the rat-infested, earthquake-prone 1871 Government Buildings at the southern end of the Parliamentary Estate. The Parliament Building’s incomplete Edwardian design was viewed as old-fashioned, and Britain’s star architect Sir Basil Spence was engaged to make the case for something more progressive. Construction on his circular, modernist tower (quickly dubbed ‘the Beehive’) started in 1969, just as Paulay was completing his doctorate on the vulnerabilities of interlinked shear walls during earthquakes.

Paulay’s research was perfectly timed: damage from the 1964 Alaska Earthquake had confirmed his hunch that the existing approach to reinforcing the beams coupling shear walls was inadequate, with the side-to-side rocking of the building stretching these links diagonally, producing large X-shaped cracks that significantly weakened the structure. The improvement Paulay landed on was simple: introduce steel reinforcement in an X-shape to mirror the stress from the building’s movement, and allow ductile steel to take the load, rather than brittle concrete.

New Zealand’s reputation for earthquake engineering was growing rapidly – Paulay’s peers would greet him at international conferences by crossing their arms over their heads, imitating his new design. A culture of co-operation between academia, the engineering profession and government was spurred on by the 1968 Inangahua Earthquake on the West Coast, the strongest felt in the capital since 1942, and encouraged by the Ministry of Work’s enthusiasm for seismic design innovation, under Chief Structural Engineer Otto Glogau.

It began a new period where we stopped copying what was coming from California and became an innovative world-leading laboratory for seismic design.The Ministry was overseeing the construction of Parliament’s new Executive Wing, and Glogau immediately requested that the new ‘diagonally reinforced coupling beams’ be included for the remainder of the building; the circular concrete lift core was modified to accommodate the new design from Level 5 upwards.

Half a century later, Paulay’s coupling beam reinforcement design is global standard practice. Yet with the steelwork encased in concrete it’s invisible to the general public: a hidden witness to the Beehive’s place in earthquake engineering history. 

The William Clayton Building (1982)

First use of lead rubber bearings

The Wellington Urban Motorway ripped a long gash though Thorndon when it was built in the 1960s. Whole streets disappeared following the government’s compulsory purchase of properties, leaving awkward slivers of land adjacent to the roaring traffic, and too far from the CBD to be attractive to commercial developers – but the perfect location for the new Ministry of Works headquarters, which was to be named after William Clayton, the architect of the 1876 Government Building at the other end of Molesworth Street.

The building was located on the site of May Street, a cul-de-sac off Tinakori Road lost under the motorway, and would have a long, low form sympathetic to the surrounding houses. It was also 100m away from the Wellington Fault – and an ideal candidate for Otto Glogau’s interest in seismic isolation. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Ivan Skinner devised sacrificial steel dampers: then a conversation in the staff tearoom prompted his metallurgist colleague Bill Robinson to hunt out a metal with better damping qualities. Two hours later Robinson had identified lead: its low melting point could turn pressure from an earthquake into heat, it had the right crystal structure to ensure ductile behaviour at low temperatures, and was cheap to buy at a high purity for consistent performance.

Robinson’s genius lay in using the combined properties of simple materials in his revolutionary ‘lead rubber bearing’, where a lead core is contained by a ‘spring’ formed by layers of rubber and steel, which allows lateral movement. The elastic properties of rubber isolate the building from the ground movement and return the bearing to its original position once shaking has stopped, the steel plates maintains the bearing’s shape, and the lead core damps the action.

The experimental bearings were tested by a second-hand Ministry of Works Caterpillar bulldozer that was modified to power a rig called ‘MASHER’ – the Machine for Simulating Earthquakes. By 1978 the concept had been proven, and 80 isolators were despatched to the construction site at the top of Molesworth Street. The building was something of a prototype, with an overly-strong structure in case the isolators didn’t work, and too little ‘rattle’ space for the building to move in a major shake (this was later rectified by Beca).

Bill Robinson died in 2011 having spent most of his working life in Wellington. Robinson Seismic (still based in Lower Hutt) is a global leader in seismic protection devices, with their lead rubber bearings (like those visible underneath Te Papa) manufactured under licence around the world; their effectiveness has been proven by countless earthquakes. The William Clayton building was refurbished and extended five years ago: one of its 1970s vintage isolators as removed for testing by Robinson Seismic and performed like it’d just rolled off the production line.

8 Willis Street (1987 / 2021)

Breakthrough in modelling fluid viscous dampers

Older Wellingtonians will remember the partially completed steelwork of the BNZ Tower (dubbed ‘Darth Vader’s pencil box’ by Ian Athfield) during the late 1970s. The Boilermakers’ Union’s strikes turned a 48 month construction programme into 11 years, and drove up costs fourfold by the time the building was completed in 1984.

The saga contributed to the Lange Government’s labour market reforms, which in turn fuelled an economic boom. Understandably the 1980s property developers weren’t keen on steel, opting for precast concrete floors made with non-union labour. Quick to install, they were manufactured offsite, lifted into place by crane, and held in situ by the adjacent beams and the building’s structural frame – like very rigid sardines in a tin.

Today central Wellington has dozens of buildings with precast concrete floors. The 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake’s long, powerful shaking hit these structures particularly hard, with flexing in the buildings’ frames damaging the edges of the concrete units. Built in 1987 on rock and to higher ‘investment grade’ standards as Trust Bank’s new home, 8 Willis Street – opposite the BNZ Tower (now the Aon Centre) fared better than many of the CBD’s buildings from the 80s and 90s, and came through the shake undamaged.

So what makes the building next to Stewart Dawson’s Corner so interesting? Many of the structural upgrades incorporated reflect lessons learned from the Kaikoura shake – more concrete to stiffen the building, and improvements to the floor units’ seating. However the building’s new tenants will quickly spot large pistons running diagonally from floor to ceiling. These ‘fluid viscous dampers’ were first developed for NASA’s Apollo moon landers, and work like giant versions of the shock absorbers in a car, stiffening the building when it starts to move.

Compared with the simple concept of base isolation, configuring the optimum damper arrangement in a relatively tall structure like 8 Willis Street is complex. Install too many dampers and you risk creating unwanted forces in the structure; too few will leave the building vulnerable during a large shake.

Previously the modelling approach would have been trial-and-error: running different configurations through a range of historical earthquakes, adjusting the damper arrangement, and rerunning the tests. The breakthrough is engineering firm Beca’s work to automate the process to determine the best damper layout – which is then tested against dozens of historic earthquake models. This world-leading approach enables a level of evaluation that would previously have been impracticable.

The optimised damper configuration means the building, now rated at 130%NBS (IL2), has significantly increased resilience to shaking than conventional strengthening work, without the complexities of costly retrospective base isolation – unrealistic for many of Wellington’s tightly packed buildings. It has also paid a large sustainability dividend, with the materials used in construction substantially reduced and thousands of tons of concrete retained, rather than sent to landfill – demonstrating a low carbon way of delivering high performance structural retrofits.

First published in Capital (Issue 77). Illustrations by Kumiko Matsumoto.

Concrete dreams

The rise of private car ownership, the baby-boom and post-war reconstruction were catalysts for drastic urban planning interventions around the world, a fashion that inevitably reached New Zealand. Metropolitan Wellington’s population increased by 63% in the space of two decades from 1945 – and was projected to reach 398,000 in 1981 (wildly inaccurate – this did not happen until 2014).

This growth, largely concentrated in the Hutt Valley and Porirua, was a headache for planners, but it also gave the civic leadership confidence to invest. It stimulated a decade of radical proposals for the capital, and came close to destroying much of what Wellingtonians now love about the city.

Comprehensive Transport Plan for Wellington (1963 / 1966)

By the late 1950s rapidly increasing traffic volumes on the Hutt Road (comparable to Adelaide Road today) caused a fear of gridlock, and work on the first part of the Urban Motorway from Ngauranga to Aotea Quay started in 1959.

There was bitter debate about the next phase of the road, between a ‘foothills motorway’ route through Thorndon, and one along the waterfront – the latter preferred by the City Engineer and the Ministry of Works. In 1960 American transport consultant De Leuw, Cather & Company was commissioned by the Wellington Regional Planning Authority (a predecessor of the Regional Council) to resolve the matter and create Wellington’s first Transportation Master Plan.

Despite its being the cheaper option (at £13,000,000 cost – close to $570 million today) the initial report in 1963 made the waterfront route look as unpalatable as possible. Projected traffic volumes would require ‘a double-decked structure approximately 40 feet [four storeys] in height with three lanes in each direction’. This would have run from Bunny Street to Cable Street, with offramps required at Kings Wharf, Post Office Square and Mercer Street. The report warned of conflict between the motorway and what was still a working inner harbour, and the impact on the amenity of the waterfront, pointing out how quickly San Francisco’s officials had come to regret building their new freeway above the Embarcadero.

The foothills route was duly recommended, even though it was projected to cost almost 50% more and need streets of houses demolished, with the Mount Victoria tunnel to be duplicated during the first phase of works. The time required to dig the Terrace Tunnel meant Te Aro would need a one-way system to speed up traffic (half a century later the Council has voted to slow traffic down), with southbound vehicles routed up Cuba Street.

Public transport was also considered, with a recommendation that once the motorway was completed the railway should be extended in a 3km subway to the end of Courtenay Place – with underground stations at Parliament, Lambton (located under Boulcott Street), Cuba Street and Courtenay Place – all for £11,000,000 ($480 million in 2020).

As proposed the complete the motorway would have buried half the Basin Reserve under motorway offramps, a deep trench cut across the top of Te Aro and a ‘full-diamond interchange’ at Taranaki Street – designs familiar to Wellingtonians who successfully defeated the Tunnel Link proposals a quarter of a century later.

The focus on roads alarmed Wellington’s retailers. They feared that greater mobility would send shoppers to more convenient destinations outside the city, and commissioned a rival proposal from architects Gabites and Beard. ‘Precinct Planning for Wellington’ (released in 1965) had some bold predictions, with ‘public transport vehicles running on air cushions rather than rails’ and ‘combined air and ground vehicles in general use’ by the year 2000. But the pedestrianisation of large parts of the CBD, rather than a focus on cars, proved popular with Wellingtonians, and this influenced the final version of the Comprehensive Transport Plan in 1966, including retaining the Basin Reserve.

Draft Town Plan (1965)

With the transport masterplan complete the City Council was free to focus on transforming the CBD. In 1957 Robert (‘Terry’) Kennedy arrived at University of Auckland to take the first Chair of Town Planning. He was retained as a consultant by Wellington City Council from 1965-75, and the 1965 Draft Town Plan clearly reflected his previous job remodelling Britain’s blitzed cities.

Some ideas were developed from the De Leuw report and ‘Precinct Planning’, including Cuba Mall, and the Farish Street Extension which pushed Victoria Street through to the top of Te Aro – to feed a future Western Suburbs motorway running through a tunnel from the top of Aro Street to Karori.

The plan was also critical of central Wellington’s small commercial plots and streets laid out for the era of deliveries by horse-drawn vehicles, now resulting in increasing conflict between vehicles and pedestrians. European cities were able to ‘take advantage of’ extensive bomb damage to unleash ambitious redevelopments – and Wellington was to follow suit with the ‘Willis Street redevelopment area’, a three tier ‘superblock’ similar to London’s Barbican, to tackle ‘the bottleneck between Stewart Dawson’s corner and the sea’.

The development would have been enormous, stretching between the top of Plimmer Steps and the waterfront. The existing street layout was to be maintained but built over, with garaging and warehouses at ground level, and car parking above them, accessed via ramps from Jervois Quay and a Willis Street flyover connecting Victoria and Boulcott streets. Above that to be a pedestrian deck, with shops, offices and hotels.

The sheer chutzpah of the Town Planning Committee’s report was admirable: the Willis Street superblock was ‘economically feasible’ and would ‘rehabilitate the centre of Wellington’ in combination with the proposed Civic Centre and new Cuba Mall. The City Engineer pointed out to doubters ‘this sort of integrated development is already taking place in larger cities overseas’.

The project stumbled at the first hurdle: the population growth projection was criticised as overly optimistic (a failing among Council officials), and the indicative £50,000,000 cost ($2.1bn in 2020) was seen as wildly unaffordable. Councillor Turk called the proposal ‘a Utopian flight of fantasy’ – and by the mid-1970s Kennedy’s departure from WCC’s payroll and the city’s stagnation meant the idea mercifully faded into the long list of municipal what ifs.

Report and Development Plan for the Wellington City Council Civic Centre (1974)

The idea of a municipal precinct dates back to the 1942 Wairarapa Earthquake, which led to the demolition of the old city library building and technical college buildings on Wakefield Street – now the site of the Council’s closed Civic Administration Building and empty Municipal Office Building (or MOB). Work started on MOB in 1946, and the popular lawn in front of the building was referred to as the Civic Centre.

The Council had gradually acquired land at the harbour end of Cuba Street from the 1960s, and the section of Mercer Street between the Town Hall and Central Library was often closed for civic festivities, so it was a small leap of imagination to pedestrianize the space. Terry Kennedy and Ken Clarke (the council’s City Planner) embarked on a scheme to banish vehicles and create a ‘true and pleasant centre of the City of Wellington’.

The masterplan that emerged had all the hallmarks of European post-war design. The demolition of the seismically prone Town Hall would clear the way for a decidedly Soviet looking 10,000m² office building; a conference facility was to be built on the corner of Harris Street and Jervois Quay; and pedestrian subways would give access to the waterfront and the new shopping arcade that was to be built over Mercer Street through to Willis Street. Kennedy realised changes in opinion and finances would alter the plan, but he suggested a 15 year development programme – the new library and conference centre were to have been completed by 1986.

Instead Mayor Michael Fowler championed the construction of the new concert hall: it was commissioned in 1975, but the challenging ground conditions delayed work. The building was opened in 1983, by which time campaigns to promote the heritage and acoustic value of the old Town Hall had made its removal untenantable, leaving the two buildings uncomfortably close to each other. The waterfront had been transformed from potential motorway route to an increasingly popular open public space – and a rethink for the precinct was required.

While the development Kennedy proposed would have been built at the height of Brutalism in New Zealand, some of the core ideas from the 1974 masterplan shaped today’s Civic Square, including turning the 1937 library building into a ‘City Gallery’. This stimulated the council in 1980 to create exhibition space at 65 Victoria Street, before demolishing the building and using the site for the new Central Library (another Kennedy recommendation). Interconnected elevated walkways linked the library and council buildings – until they were deemed seismic risks earlier this decade – and the space enjoys good sunlight.

Kennedy died in 1997, with his superblock vision for Wellington’s civic precinct largely realised, and especially the underground parking and wide pedestrian expanses. With the Civic Administration Building likely to be demolished, perhaps the lawn in front of the municipal offices which coined the precinct’s name could be restored – bringing the Civic Centre concept full-circle?

First published in the Summer 2021 issue of Capital.

Cutting shapes: the three infrastructure projects that made modern Wellington

“God made New Zealand,” said Sir John-Pearce Luke (Mayor of Wellington from 1913-1921). “But engineers made Wellington”.

Wellington's steep terrain, regular earthquakes and ferocious weather have been constant challenges, and Sir John knew good infrastructure was critical to making our city a success. Modern sewers helped rid the city of typhoid in the 1890s, trams and tunnels opened up new suburbs after the 1900s, and the urban motorway catered for the boom in car ownership in the 1960s. But three infrastructure projects – above all others – stand out as pivotal in shaping our city.

Queens Wharf (1860s)
The wharf enables the government to move to the city after two devastating earthquakes

As SS Airedale steamed into Lambton Harbour late in the summer of 1863 the noise of is engines subsided, and sailors high in the rigging furled the canvas. Passengers eagerly lined the handrails for their first glimpse of Wellington, and the brand new Government Wharf – its reddish brown timber yet to be bleached by the sun.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Eight years earlier the Wairarapa earthquake had created a three-metre tsunami, which smashed ships onto the harbour floor and washed out low-lying properties along Lambton Quay. When the waves subsided, the seabed had risen two metres, ruining access to the quays. Tectonic uplift and the destruction of wharves meant goods had to be ferried ashore by lighters – very time consuming, and the rapidly increasing size of ships visiting Wellington meant they had to anchor further and further out.

So Queens Wharf was driven by a desire to play down Wellington’s shaky start. The devastating earthquakes of 1848 and 1855 could have been fatal for the young city’s reputation, particularly given Britannia, the New Zealand Company’s original settlement at Petone had been abandoned 14 years previously because of the Hutt River’s tendency to flood. The Chamber of Commerce (then as now an advocate for infrastructure spending) campaigned for a new deepwater wharf – considered ‘a universally recognised want’, with the surviving private jetties hopelessly too small.

The new 122m-long ‘double T’ Government Wharf was a mixture of ironwork imported from Britain and totara from Foxton. Storms delayed the supply of timber and the wharf opened three months late. Stretching out from the city’s first major land reclamation around what is now Post Office Square, it quickly became known as ‘Queens Wharf’ – not in celebration of Queen Victoria’s 25 years as monarch (the first silver jubilee celebrated Kaiser Wilhelm I and was in 1886), but more likely because of its location adjacent to Queens Bond Store.

Queens Wharf was a huge vote of confidence in the 6,000-strong settlement, and a shot in the arm for business, as commercial developments rapidly filled the reclamation. It was seen as ‘a symbol that Wellington was becoming a port rather than merely a harbour,’ said Wellington Maritime Trust D Johnson, and proved so popular the ‘T’s were immediately extended to cope with the explosion of traffic.

The new wharf impressed the Australian Commissioners who visited Wellington in 1864 searching for Parliament’s new home. MPs travelled to their electorates by steamship, and our central location and modern infrastructure proved compelling: the capital moved a year later.


Tawa Flat Deviation (1930s)
Modern electric trains opened up the northern suburbs to created metropolitan 'Greater Wellington’

In the 1920s Wellingtonians enjoyed a comprehensive electric tram network connecting the city’s inner suburbs, but access from the north was far more challenging. Settlements at Johnsonville and Tawa were served by the Wellington & Manawatu Railway Company’s steep single-track railway, with steam engines wheezing through numerous tunnels as they hauled passengers up the gradients on the mainline north.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

For a nation with more than 28 million railway journeys each year (according to Te Ara) the trip into Wellington must have been an embarrassment. There had been little progress since the line’s construction in 1885, and the railway was a chronic bottleneck in the capital’s growth. Rail travel was critical to New Zealanders wishing to travel around the country, and arriving in the capital via a steep single track mixed up with livestock movements did not send the right signals.

The Public Works Department formed a team in 1927 under railway surveyor Arnold Downer to build an express railway over 13km long, with 5.6km of double track tunnels. Downer later led the Mt Victoria tunnel project – his name lives on in the eponymous construction company.

The Tawa Flat Deviation was completed in 1935, and allowed a major overhaul of the Johnsonville line, where cutting-edge English Electric trains were launched with fanfare (and ten speeches from the dignitaries assembled) in July 1938. The ‘delightfully smooth’ journey was completed in 16 minutes – considerably faster than today’s scheduled services. Tawa got its electric trains a couple of years later.

Eyes were firmly on the Mother Country, and the electric railway bears strikingly similarities to the ‘Metroland’ developments that turned the countryside north-west of London into prime commuter belt. Tawa’s new station offered a heated waiting room, and male and female lavatories. It was a big improvement for the passengers, and was the catalyst for the suburb’s population growth from a few hundred in 1930 to just over 3,000 shortly after the war. Johnsonville was transformed from a sleepy agricultural centre nicknamed ‘Cowtown’ to a suburb with booming property prices and a population growing at double the city’s average. Meanwhile Wellington’s neo-Georgian station, opened in 1937, bustled with passengers obtaining news from press-the-button information machines, vying for pies at the highspeed cafeteria and taking nicely-framed pictures of themselves at a shilling a shot. News, pies and selfies – nothing changes.

Enormous pride was taken in showing we could match the Empire’s best, and the Tawa Flat Deviation, track electrification, new rolling stock and the gigantic Gray Young terminus were ambitious undertakings that laid the foundation for today’s Greater Wellington conurbation.

Rongotai airport (1950s)
International connections direct to the heart of the city after removing a hill

Charles Kingsford Smith's first view of Wellington was from the cockpit of ‘Southern Cross’, his Fokker Trimotor aeroplane. The Australian circled above the city at dawn on September 11th 1928, having left Sydney 13 hours earlier, but ended his trailblazing journey in Christchurch: Wellington had nowhere suitable to land.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Kingsford Smith secured his place in history by making the first international flight to New Zealand. Aged 31, he told the crowds his ambition was simply to become the world’s oldest aviator. When he finally made it to Wellington (by ship) he advised Mayor Troup – another aviation enthusiast – that Lyall Bay would be perfect for Wellington’s main aerodrome. A basic airstrip opened in 1929, which often closed over winter when the grass runway became too boggy.

Rongotai was talked about as the ideal location for our city’s main airport for years after Kingsford Smith’s untimely death in 1935, but nearby facilities proved more popular: Trentham’s airstrip handled early mail flights, the Air Force operated seaplanes from its base at Shelly Bay, and by the late 1930s Imperial Airways’ Empire flying boats were a regular sight at Evans Bay. These were the height of luxury, and passengers were often warned not to rush to the lavatories at the rear to plunder the toiletries lest the plane slid backwards out of the sky.

Meanwhile Paraparaumu became New Zealand’s busiest airport in 1949: Rongotai airport had been forced to close two years earlier as the grass runway didn’t comply with safety standards. And Tasman Empire Airways Ltd flew flying boats a four days a week to Sydney from Evans Bay in the early 1950s. The airline’s terminal at Greta Point was decidedly ad-hoc, with garages under the Casa Del Mar apartments on Evans Bay Parade used by Customs to process passengers.

Wellington was missing out. Prime Minister Peter Fraser announced in 1948 that a modern airport would be built at Rongotai, but construction took 11 long years. Passengers onboard the flying boats attempting to land when Evans Bay was choppy must have looked at the building work with longing – waves under two metres high were acceptable landing conditions.

The new Rongotai Airport necessitated moving 3,000,000m3 of earth, and reclaiming 55 hectares of land to create Cobham Drive and the new runway (which was further extended in the 1970s to accommodate passenger jets). The earthworks were impressive, but the new facilities weren’t: the 1937 De Havilland factory was repurposed as a stopgap terminal, which was intended to be replaced by the 1960s. Inevitably the corrugated shed served Wellingtonians until 1999. But the building didn’t matter – we finally had a sealed runway capable of handling the latest aircraft like the Lockheed Electra that flew the Beatles in from Sydney.

Today the decision to build a modern airport 15 minutes from the heart of the city plays a big part in the compact urban form loved by locals and visitors alike – and is every bit as transformational as the Queens Wharf and railway upgrades in previous decades.

First published in the December 2019 issue of Capital magazine

Putting Wellington on the map

Barnett’s 1826 marine survey of Port Nicholson

Wellington has a rich history of maps for a young city, although our location – tucked away at the back of the harbour – meant early explorers left the bottom of the North Island as a blank. The oldest Maori geographical record on paper, a 1769 map by Tuki Te Terenui Whare Pirau’s had little detail south of Taranaki; James Cook’s famous chart of New Zealand (drafted just months later) showed Wellington’s south coast but nothing beyond the harbour entrance.

Maps are first and foremost tools; so logically enough the first paper representations of Wellington were nautical charts. Captain Thomas Barnett’s 1826 marine survey of Port Nicholson showed invaluable details for early settlers: not just latitude and longitude, suitable anchorages and water depth, but also information like the pa sites (at what’s now called Palmer Head), the Maori village (Worser Bay), and locations of fresh water (Miramar, Evan’s Bay, Petone and Ngauranga) – crucial information for survival after months at sea.

New Zealand’s hinterland was uncharted until the late 1830s, when the arrival of Wellington’s first European settlers resulted in an explosion of mapping, driven by the pressing need to divvy up the land. The weather was challenging, with the New Zealand Company’s Surveyor-General William Mein Smith complaining “I have not the means of protecting either my instruments or plans from the wet”. It was tough work, with Māori employed as survey hands to help determine the size of the parcels of land being sold.

Cobham's 1839 plan for 'Britannia'

An alternative approach was to draw up plans for the settlement in the comfort of distant London, away from Wellington’s testing climate. Which explains why Samuel Cobham’s beautiful 1839 plan for ‘Britannia’ (now Petone) straddling the Hutt River looks so ludicrous: the carefully drawn locations of government offices, public baths, museum, barracks and a college of surgeons had missed one important detail: the extent of the river’s flooding. 

So in 1840 the settlers decamped to Te Aro, keeping the grid layout of streets, although plans to use familiar London names like Covent Garden and Billingsgate Fish Market didn’t survive the move. 

Surveyor-general Mein Smith drafted the settlement’s first maps, which the New Zealand Company quickly turned into advertising tools for driving interest in colonial life back in the ‘Mother Country’. Its ‘Plan of the Town of Wellington’ – printed in London in 1840 – was deceptively elaborate: most streets were still covered in bush, and the legal title of the land hadn’t been secured from the locals – when surveyors marked out the new town at Te Aro the local Māori pulled up survey pegs, protesting they hadn’t actually sold the land.

The New Zealand Company's 1840 map of Wellington

Prospective settlers were led to believe otherwise, bewitched by the combination of bold colours, clear street layout and the company’s crest – along with the assurance settlers would be moving to the “first and principal settlement of the New Zealand Company”. It was a moderately successful tactic, but sowed the seeds of the company’s downfall: London speculators bought parcels of Wellington land, without any intention of migrating. Fortunately 15,000 (mainly labourers) did make the voyage from London, before the company went bust in 1858.

Wellington’s maps are easy to date because of the slow creep of land reclamation into Port Nicholson harbour. The city’s growth soon demanded larger wharves, and land reclamation became a priority, made all the more pressing by the 1855 earthquake that left the jetties unusable. Queen’s Wharf was the first to be built (1864), and it was long; around three times today’s length, stretching over to Customhouse Quay. 

Seidelin's 1877 proposed redesign of Wellington's waterfront

The incorporation of Wellington City Council in 1870 heralded a huge increase in land reclamations, but the most dramatic planned alteration never materialised. In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym of ‘Mr Darnoc’ – drew up plans to transform the waterfront. Seidelin’s credentials had been established in the redesign of Copenhagen, where his proposal to demolish the city’s walls won Denmark’s Medal of Merit two decades earlier. 

Alas Wellington’s city councillors considered Seidelin’s suggestions impractical and expensive: curved docks and enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill-afford. Seidelin died in Dunedin a year later; long forgotten in New Zealand, although his impact on Copenhagen’s design can still be seen today.

My letter to Professor Arthur, Provost at UCL

Dear Professor Arthur,

I am a UCL Geography graduate, and loved my time at University College. London is an expensive place to be a student, but the biggest single help in managing my finances was riding my bicycle to university every day, rather than being stung by public transport costs.

You may have seen that the Mayor has launched an ambitious programme of segregated cycle lanes in Central London. This has been opposed by a few powerful business groups, and UCL is a member of one of these – London First. However if you've followed the issue you'll also have noticed that top graduate employers are backing the new cycle infrastructure. Deloitte says "cycle highways will help us attract & retain the people our business needs to thrive", while Simon & Schuster says "a growing number of our employees cycle to work. More would if they felt safer on the road".

I realise UCL's membership of London First goes way beyond cycling infrastructure, but I know I speak for my classmates in encouraging you to distance UCL from their hostility towards the new bike lanes. Will you publicly throw UCL's weight behind the Mayor's plans for improving the lot of London's cyclists – many of whom are your students and staff?

Best wishes,


Matthew Plummer

---

POSTSCRIPT (6th November, 2014) Success! UCL has just announced full support for the Mayor's new bike infrastructure – see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/greenucl/greenucl-news-publication/ucl-backs-proposed-cycle-superhighway

A gigantic shunting of workers

Last week the Office for National Statistics published research that found commuters who spend between 60 and 120 minutes travelling to work have lower life satisfaction, see their employment as less worthwhile, have lower happiness levels and greater anxiety. This in itself is hardly surprising, but it is useful to be reminded by hard data that ‘commuting is clearly and negatively associated with personal well-being’. Unsurprisingly the research suggested that people who work from home as the happiest: I’m self-employed, and the rare occasions I’m rammed into a rush-hour Northern Line train remind me just how lucky I am to avoid the daily grind on the underground.

Commuter at Waterloo

Our enthusiasm for commuting over long distances owes much to our historically excellent infrastructure, but also the failure to make modern city life accord with modern needs – not my words, but those of The Spectator back in 1964, which recognised that the ‘gigantic shunting of workers across the London conurbation’ was batty. This is particularly so when you recognise that drivers pay hefty fuel bills and require government to build costly roads, and that railway commuters need billions spent on capacity solutions like Crossrail (and Crossrail 2) while paying eye-watering amounts for season tickets. If your daily commute is an hour each way every day of the week, come Friday you’ll have lost a cumulative working day paying for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam with cyclists whizzing past you. Personally I’d rather spend my time with my family and friends, rather than listening to Southern tell me that yet again they ‘are’ sorry to announce that blah, blah, blah.

For many people the daily pilgrimage to work is an unwitting yet rational response to decades of poor urban planning. Escaping to the countryside to exercise what Nick Boles describes as ‘a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ is perfectly reasonable given some of the shocking housing built across the country in recent decades. After all, if your home is little more than a shoebox, having a garden for your children to play in is very sensible!

Yet ripping up the green belt to build garden cities simply compounds the cost and misery of commuting. Instead we need higher-quality housing in London and our other urban areas that entices people into living closer to where they work, and to challenge what the ONS describes as ‘inertia’ towards our rigid commuting patterns. Historically Britain’s inner city areas were much more densely populated than the leafy outer suburbs: today the reverse is true.

Fortunately there is hope. New homes are being built at sites like Battersea Power Station to higher design standards, and there is a renewed interest in promoting walking and cycling to work. And adopting new guidelines like ‘Building for Life 12′ means that for the first time in decades we are taking significant steps to avoid blighting lives at the planning stage with the expense and wasted hours of traffic updates and platform announcements – with which the inhabitants of our existing garden cities are only too familiar.

First published by Platform 10 on February 19th, 2014

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. I was encouraged to see the company's new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space.

The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube travel and packed conditions. So Crown knows that letting its buildings means accommodating the rocketing numbers of people who ride to work.

But, as we discussed the Haymarket redevelopment over coffee, I realised that the challenge facing Crown is that while car use is falling, budget freezes mean parking revenue has become much more important to the balance sheets of London’s inner city authorities. This is problematic for new cycling infrastructure, as installing bike lanes comes at the expense of income-generating street parking.

Catering for cars might superficially help local authorities’ coffers, but a string of studies have shown that bike lanes, locking points, etc. give huge boosts to local businesses: New York City’s recent flagship bike lane on 8th and 9th Avenues led to local shops enjoying a 49% increase in sales. Saving the £1,216 cost of a Zone 2 annual travelcard frees up money to spend in the local economy, and gets people off our overcrowded tubes and trains during rush hour.

None of this washes with Westminster City Council (Crown’s local authority counterpart). The council would be hauled in front of the Competition Commission if its parking business model was the product of anything other than geography – incidentally only a third of Westminster’s households have access to a car. Sadly, as things stand, it’s difficult enough trying to find somewhere to lock up a bike before going shopping in the West End, wasting valuable time that could be spent in the shops and cafes that pay the council’s rates.

The recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads is, obviously, terrible news. But I fear that the cycle lobby’s focus on fixing the Mayor’s flagship Cycle Superhighways misses a deeper problem: how we get the various tiers of local government to confront the sustained change in our transport use. The private sector manifestly gets where the market is at, as was clear when I saw Crown’s magnificent cycling facilities. Unfortunately, our politicians are stuck making rational decisions based on the perverse incentives of the city’s disjointed government structure. With London’s population gaining an extra 600,000 by 2020, this muddled approach is clearly unsustainable. Bold decisions are required.

First published by Coffee House on November 19th, 2013

Nimbyism? That’s not even the half of it.

Pity the poor Nimbys. Not only has the government’s horrible new planning regime come into force, but last week we heard the pro-HS2 lobbyists describing them as ‘posh people standing in the way of working-class people getting jobs’. Even Isabel blames them for wanting to preserve the idyllic views from their breakfast room window. Being a nimby is so last century.

Alas, calling the naysayers nimbys simply glosses over one of the biggest problems facing our society, namely how government deals with the built environment. This has little to do with preserving greenfields, areas of outstanding natural beauty, Jerusalem – or indeed nimbyism. It is simply that building houses in the countryside inherently designs significant expense into people’s lives. Little consideration is being given to how people are meant to travel to work, with developments usually far away from the local railway station, and money available for local infrastructure from Section 106 levies woefully inadequate.

So the lovely garden that the nice Nick Boles wants families to believe is their right has a nasty price tag attached ever so discreetly: the cost of a season ticket on our state subsidised railways and running two cars on our congested roads, with the cumulative loss of more than a working day a week in the commuting grind rubbing salt into the wound. We’re placing ridiculous and entirely avoidable stress on families, and commuting is penalising people for poorly designed cities.

The good news is that we already have lots of houses fit for families; the bad news is that they’ve mostly been subdivided into flats, a perfectly rational market response to the changing shape of British society. Of course we haven’t built enough houses, and yes, immigration has seen demand soar. But Britons are also leading different sorts of lives from a few decades ago: we marry later, and are more likely to divorce, meaning that fewer people are interested in the old concept of a ‘family home’. We’ve failed to build accommodation in line with the demands of 21st Century life, and the result is soaring rates of flatsharing in poorly converted apartments. Incidentally most young professionals must look at the protests over the bedroom tax with disbelief – in the private rented sector spare rooms get filled very quickly, and sharing your home is common if you’re young and saving for a mortgage deposit.

Frustratingly house building companies – almost uniquely – deliver products that the market doesn’t want. Unlike cars, cameras and computers where ‘new’ is aspirational, the building industry is churning out a product that only a quarter of home buyers would actively consider, a damning indictment that you’d think would merit a stiffer response than the Government merely ‘telling them to think a bit about it’. RIBA has already pointed out how bad regulations are for new homes, with people having to store food in their cars as kitchens haven’t been properly designed. Tragically the new planning regime will merely compound these failings, with swathes of new houses financed by state credit, built in the wrong place and for the wrong target market, and the opposition brushed off as heartless to the challenge of the ‘yet-to-haves’.

First published by Coffee House on April 11th, 2013

Pig ugly thinking

I’m reluctant to admit it, but it took me a few days to build up the courage to watch Nick Boles’ planning piece on Wednesday’s Newsnight. In my defence I’d read a great deal of the ensuing coverage, but my gut reaction was similar to hearing that Lindsay Lohan is back in the papers: trepidation combined with an awful feeling that it almost certainly isn’t good news.

Firstly, the positives. In an age where the perception is one of politicians not being in touch with the general public, Boles demonstrated a sound understanding that home ownership is still the foundation of people’s aspiration. And he is spot on in identifying immigration and slow house-building rates as a terrible combination – something that the previous Labour government completely dropped the ball on. He also realises that developers are failing to build homes that excite, with only 25% of buyers interested in new build properties.

Unfortunately talk of people’s rights to a ‘home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ breezily dismisses some rather more fundamental difficulties. Paxman’s questioning was incisive, particularly in pressing Boles as to what his proposal actually meant. Developing 3% of the countryside doesn’t sound much, but talk of building over countryside equivalent in area to two new Londons in the next twenty years is far less appealing, particularly when you consider that many of the fields being sacrificed are in the already densely populated south east, where the demand for housing is highest and the roads already heavily congested. Boles could have fired up the public’s imagination by declaring war on the swathes of vacant houses, or the brownfield sites that are capable of taking half a million homes in southern England alone. Mind you, it's a great time to be a farmer – the fields you and your predecessors have worked for centuries don't amount to much in the Planning Minister's eyes, and are best sold to the friendly developer who is enthusiastically waving his chequebook at your land.

Poundbury fire station
(2009 finalist for the Carbuncle Cup) 

Likewise Boles’ description of ‘pig ugly’ architecture smacked of the Prince of Wales’ taste in buildings. Unashamedly traditional Poundbury hasn’t been a success, despite a concern for beauty, and it is simplistic to point to old buildings and argue that we need to take style lessons from the history books.’Old’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’, as anyone who remembers the properties demolished during the slum clearances will remind you. If Boles is serious about sorting out the housing problem in the next two decades, he should concentrate less on aesthetics, and more on raising design and build standards, as buyers will sacrifice the romance of a 100+ year old building for the ease of living in well designed, energy efficient homes that the government can deliver by imposing tougher building regulations. I lived in Stockholm for a year, where bringing up children in a central city apartment is the norm: having a family means finding a larger apartment nearby, rather than the London trend of fleeing to the suburbs.

What I found most troubling though was the notion that people had a right to some sort of suburban idyll. This is patronising tosh and intellectually lightweight. Boles’ notion of a right to a house with a garden is merely a prescription for how he thinks we should live our lives: I’d feel far more comfortable taking to Paxman about spacious, warm homes that are cheap to run and relatively close to the economic hub than some twee notion that harks back to pre-industrial Britain. One of the residents interviewed helpfully pointed out that we don’t live in an ideal world, advice that Boles would be wise to take onboard. Such a world would iron out many of the competing work / life tensions that determine where we live, but is also inherently impossible – my personal ‘ideal’ would be a lovely little cottage with an Aga, ten minutes bike ride from the centre of London, and next to ancient woodland.

Inevitably I have to compromise, as do millions of others, as the failure to build decent one and two bedroom apartments in the hearts of our cities has seen market forces driving the conversion of many family homes into sub-standard flats. This in turn reinforces the British public’s perception that what they really want is a cottage as far away as possible from our poorly designed urban areas, and discovering when they get there the misery of long commutes, high fuel prices, expensive season tickets and a feeling that the garden nice Mr. Boles gave them might not have been the quality of life game changer they’d quite expected.

First published by Platform 10 on December 6th, 2012

In praise of red tape

Two small stories made the news last month. The first was a report by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Institute of British Architects, which found that many of the UK’s new-build homes are poorly designed, with chaotic living spaces for the families that the large housebuilders seduced into buying them. Complaints abounded of homes without internal storage for everyday things like vacuum cleaners, and rooms fitted with the legal minimum number of power sockets, despite this being the age of the iPad and countless other electronic gadgets. Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page was damning about the quality of the homes being built in the UK, stating that the report ‘shows just how cramped and poorly planned much of our housing is today, and the extraordinary lengths people go to cope with it.’ RIBA rightly pointed out that our building regulations are in desperate need of modernisation.

The second story concerned the latest in the Coalition’s ongoing efforts to address the UK’s housing shortage. You can debate whether this is because of the banks’ lending policies, the Labour government’s immigration policy, raw material costs, etc. ad finitum: the simple reality is that we need more homes. The government announced that a new body has been tasked with looking at how housing standards could be simplified, and aims to tackle what (then Housing Minister) Grant Shapps dubbed the ‘alphabet soup’ that is the building code. Which sounds like the positive action we want from politicians, until you realise that it isn’t a bonfire of regulations that is needed, but the somewhat more painstaking job of tightening and fine-tuning our minimum standards for the new wave of homebuilding that the Government wants to unleash.

None of this is news to our leaders. Back in 2007 the Shadow Cabinet was presented with the far-sighted 'Blueprint for a Green Economy', which recognised that ‘building control and planning systems should be more closely integrated as they are in fact two sides of the same coin’. The demands we place on our living spaces haven’t changed much since then, and it is worth considering that the current offering from the building industry isn’t exactly popular. Currently only one in four home buyers would consider a new-build property, so clearly something isn’t right, as consumers generally prefer new things. If the government merely decides to axe energy efficiency requirements and other quality of life regulations in an effort to get house building going at the lowest possible price, they will be making a bad situation a whole lot worse. Why should the striving classes who will have to live in these new properties face needlessly high heating bills and cowboy home design? I prefer to be optimistic though: there is now a golden opportunity to ensure that new homes are built with sustainable systems like rainwater harvesting, which offers a return on investment well before the halfway point in a 25 year mortgage and reduces the need for costly utilities infrastructure in years to come.

I mention this episode merely because the War On Red Tape™ is back in full swing this week, with the announcement that the planning appeals process is to be streamlined. The PM is 'getting a grip' on the issue, and the government’s narrative sets the frustrated developers who wish to drive the nation’s growth forward against the Nimbyism and regulatory fat that is clogging up the economy. Cutting regulations makes for a good sound bite, and shows politicians as battling the morass of building paperwork that stands in the way of the slow march to economic recovery.

Except this simply isn’t true. Ignore the fallacy that home-building delivers economic growth (it does, but only in the very short term, with the main beneficiaries being the shareholders of the large housebuilding companies, the farmers keen to cash in and flog their productive lands, and the migrant EU workforce needed to deliver the boom in construction). Appealing planning decisions is incredibly important to sustainable, harmonious communities.

For example, Conservative Wandsworth (my local authority) is an exemplar council: its reputation for competence regularly sees wards that vote Labour at general elections returning a full complement of Tory councillors at the local elections. Wandsworth has campaigned tirelessly against a 1,200 home development located well beyond reasonable walking distance to our local railway stations, with the local road network already desperately congested, as anyone who has battled their way down Trinity Road knows only too well. The appeals process has allowed Wandsworth Council to whittle down the ambitions of the developer to less disastrous levels, and highlights the importance of letting communities put their case and balancing the steamroller effect of the big developers’ deep pockets. Often projects are improved as designs are scrutinised, with the final blueprints gaining far greater acceptance from all sections of society – and surely this is a good thing?

There is also a broader, more philosophical point. We Conservatives believe in the power of the individual and society, not the blunt tools wielded by the big state, which is fortunate as the number of applications for judicial review in planning cases has dropped since 2006 – the rocketing 11,000 applications figure mentioned by the PM in his speech driven by immigration, that other political bête noire. Cherrypicking statistics belies the reality, and writing in Monday’s Guardian, Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC hailed the evolution of British administrative law since 1945 as a major achievement, and one that is in fine health today. Compare this to the confidence in our political system, which many of the public feel increasingly estranged from.

So here lies the danger. How much more alienated will the ‘little people’ far removed from Westminster or even just their local town hall feel when the government has lengthened the odds in their fight against the ruthless calculations of the circling developers? Regulation might feel like a brake on our economy, but it is the price we pay for people believing that they are part of an inclusive society. The general public’s simmering fury over the fast tax practices of Amazon, Starbucks, and other big businesses is a warning that politicians can ill afford to ignore.

First published by Platform 10 on November 22nd, 2012

Blindly protecting the countryside is not sustainable

The development of our green belt and countryside areas is back on the table, as the government casts around for ways to kick new life into 'Plan A'.

I grew up in prime green belt country on the Kent and Sussex border, and loved escaping from school to explore the rolling hills and woodland that characterises the High Weald. Twenty years on, I still find myself jumping on the train out of London at the drop of a hat. Alighting at stations like Cowden, with its narrow country lane the sole connection to the outside world, is a magical experience for reluctant city dwellers like me.

Sentiment should not guide policy, however. Our rural areas must help deliver the growth we need, and being precious about blindly protecting the countryside is itself hardly sustainable. Indeed the word ‘Weald’ means woodland in Old English, yet today many of the most scenic vistas are open heath, the area’s trees felled long ago to fuel furnaces that smelted iron ore dug up from deep holes. Four hundred years later these pits have become tranquil ponds. The few remaining woods became the setting for Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures, innocently belying the area’s history as the centre of the English arms industry.

So my frustration at how easily the development of our countryside has slid back onto the growth agenda is not based on a simple aesthetic objection to concreting the urban hinterland. It lies in the ongoing failure to understand the intrinsic value of protecting the green spaces around our cities and further afield, and our inability to look into the future and picture the sort of country we want to live in.

CPRE’s name – the Campaign to Protect Rural England – hints at the nature of the problem. Protecting the countryside would be a great deal easier if people understood the fundamental reasons that make the organisation’s work so important. At the risk of sounding glib, the organisation’s cause might be stronger if they were the Campaign to Value Rural England. As anyone who has been arguing for protecting school playing fields will know, once the worth of something has been shown, the local community tends to be pretty strident in its desire to defend it. Unfortunately the general public’s understanding of countryside has for too long been tied to “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and the like, which does little to stem the remorseless march of the developer.

And so we need to make the argument that green belt land is fundamentally good for the economy, and counter the plethora of misguided headlines for the so-called growth agenda. Limiting urban sprawl focuses capital on regenerating existing land in our cities, which would otherwise require clumsy state intervention, or be left to fester as unsightly wasteland. The countryside also gives much needed space for cityfolk to blow off steam, go rambling, have pub lunches, and so on. And it provides livelihoods for people in agriculture who feed us, which is important given the looming global food security challenge – something those pushing the growth panic button seem to have forgotten. We need to remind the public of these arguments because there is an awfully large amount of money and time being spent to ensure people are persuaded otherwise. The litmus test is whether we can reconnect people who live inside the M25 and M60 with the green areas immediately around them.

Which brings me to the future, and – I suppose – the past. There is huge pressure on the government to unleash a wave of new house building, and the narrative being spun ties this firmly together with economic growth: the prospect of a house building windfall already has landowners and home-builders licking their lips with unseemly fervour at the profits to be made. By now you will be unsurprised to know that green belt land is being considered for much of this, with 11,000 new homes on the North West green belt that lies around Liverpool and Manchester. 7,500 houses are to be built on protected land around Bristol and Bath, and the picture for the rest of the country is equally discouraging: Surrey is unlucky enough to be getting yet another wretched hotel and golf course development.

The problem Britain faces is that our experience of house building has been scarred by some of the terrible projects that were constructed in the mad dash to replace housing stock lost to the Luftwaffe and post-WW2 slum clearances. Shoddy housing schemes like Ronan Point and the Hulme Crescents mean we are not keen on the idea of dense urban living – hence the spread outwards. Fortunately the postwar municipal disasters are balanced by countless Peabody housing associations that demonstrate how successful communities have been created by good Victorian design, and even North Kensington’s notorious 1960s Trellick Tower has been recently redeemed. Yet the damage has been done. Politically the vision of compact urban living would appear to be a much harder sell than the ubiquitous two up/two down semi complete with double garage – which sits in complete contrast to the apartment lifestyle so popular on the Continent.

Changing the British perception of housing and the environment will take time – something that the Downing Street strategists probably don’t have a great deal of. But if we fail to recognise the value of greenbelt land and develop it for short term economic gain we are simply placing people further away from the city centre, and expecting them to pay extortionate prices for petrol or a season ticket – as well as waste their lives with the unnecessary grind of commuting. We are designing pointless expense and untold misery into people’s lives, and consigning the taxpayer to decades of road widening and dual carriageway improvements. That’s not a Britain that I want to live in, and looking at my fellow travellers on the rare occasions I take the train early in the morning, I know many would agree with me.

First published by Platform 10 on September 3rd, 2012