Philip Stephenson-Oliver: We have the plans to do density well, let’s copy them
This deserves loud pushback.
Philip Stephenson-Oliver is the current Association Chairman of the Queen’s Park and Maida Vale Conservatives (formerly Westminster North). He serves as a soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company and has worked in the wine trade for over ten years.
As I drove up to Norfolk for Christmas, I was struck by how relentlessly the countryside has been consumed by new housing estates. Through Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and into Norfolk, the same developments appeared again and again: vast tracts of identikit homes, thrown up at speed, devoid of character, and rooted in the cheapest possible design philosophy.
This is housing as a numbers exercise, not as a place to live. Indeed, one of Angela Rayner’s first acts as Secretary of State for Housing was to remove any notion of a ‘right to beauty’ as a guiding principle in housing development.
These estates are the very definition of lazy architecture. They are built to satisfy short-term targets rather than long-term communities. And as the late Donald Rumsfeld observed, there are ‘known-unknowns”. One such known-unknown is this: somewhere within many of these developments lies a poorly built, over-regulated design flaw that will reveal itself in twenty or thirty years. When it does, these houses will not merely lose value; they will become prisons for their owners, costly to maintain, difficult to sell, and politically toxic to repair.
It does not have to be this way.
If planners, officials, and ministers were serious about solving the housing crisis properly — not just hitting annual completion figures — they would look to a tried and tested model of urban development. They should look at Maida Vale in West London.
For the past eight years, I have been happy to call Maida Vale home. It is a near-perfect example of Victorian urban planning at its finest. Across the ward stand rows of handsome red-brick mansion blocks, typically seven or eight storeys high, elegantly proportioned and thoughtfully laid out. While individual flats are not always large by modern standards, they benefit from high ceilings and generous windows, creating a genuine sense of light and space that modern developments consistently fail to replicate.
But Maida Vale’s real secret is this: it is one of the most densely populated areas not just in London, but in the entire country — and you would never know it.
On paper, the ward has a population density of around 18,000 people per square kilometre. Yet that figure understates the reality. Nearly a third of the area is taken up by Paddington Recreation Ground, a large and much-loved public park. Remove that from the calculation, and the true density rises to something closer to 25,000 people per square kilometre. To put this into perspective, the City of London has a population …
Philip Stephenson-Oliver: We have the plans to do density well, let’s copy them
This deserves loud pushback.
Philip Stephenson-Oliver is the current Association Chairman of the Queen’s Park and Maida Vale Conservatives (formerly Westminster North). He serves as a soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company and has worked in the wine trade for over ten years.
As I drove up to Norfolk for Christmas, I was struck by how relentlessly the countryside has been consumed by new housing estates. Through Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and into Norfolk, the same developments appeared again and again: vast tracts of identikit homes, thrown up at speed, devoid of character, and rooted in the cheapest possible design philosophy.
This is housing as a numbers exercise, not as a place to live. Indeed, one of Angela Rayner’s first acts as Secretary of State for Housing was to remove any notion of a ‘right to beauty’ as a guiding principle in housing development.
These estates are the very definition of lazy architecture. They are built to satisfy short-term targets rather than long-term communities. And as the late Donald Rumsfeld observed, there are ‘known-unknowns”. One such known-unknown is this: somewhere within many of these developments lies a poorly built, over-regulated design flaw that will reveal itself in twenty or thirty years. When it does, these houses will not merely lose value; they will become prisons for their owners, costly to maintain, difficult to sell, and politically toxic to repair.
It does not have to be this way.
If planners, officials, and ministers were serious about solving the housing crisis properly — not just hitting annual completion figures — they would look to a tried and tested model of urban development. They should look at Maida Vale in West London.
For the past eight years, I have been happy to call Maida Vale home. It is a near-perfect example of Victorian urban planning at its finest. Across the ward stand rows of handsome red-brick mansion blocks, typically seven or eight storeys high, elegantly proportioned and thoughtfully laid out. While individual flats are not always large by modern standards, they benefit from high ceilings and generous windows, creating a genuine sense of light and space that modern developments consistently fail to replicate.
But Maida Vale’s real secret is this: it is one of the most densely populated areas not just in London, but in the entire country — and you would never know it.
On paper, the ward has a population density of around 18,000 people per square kilometre. Yet that figure understates the reality. Nearly a third of the area is taken up by Paddington Recreation Ground, a large and much-loved public park. Remove that from the calculation, and the true density rises to something closer to 25,000 people per square kilometre. To put this into perspective, the City of London has a population …
