2012 and All That

If you are a football fan of a certain age you might remember this classic Nike advert.

This came to my mind when trying to think of a clever, eye-catching way to start a blog about the significance of 2012 to planning in England and collective attitudes towards the countryside and developments past, present and future.

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was published in March 2012 and consolidated within 50 new pages over 1300 previous pages of policy and guidance. Perhaps most significantly it stated that local planning authorities should plan positively for new development in their area and ‘approve all individual proposals wherever possible’. The NPPF introduced a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ to be applied where a local plan is ‘absent or unclear’, or ‘where relevant planning policies are out of date’, which, for applications involving the provision of housing, included an inability to demonstrate a five year supply of deliverable housing sites.

This was a significant boon to the nascent land promotion sector, which, whilst extremely important in bringing a supply of land to the housebuilding market, did so by relying, by and large, on the presumption at appeal, out with the local plan system and at odds with the 'communities in control' rhetoric that accompanied the Localism Act 2011. Howls of outrage about ‘predatory speculators’ were not far behind, to which the obvious retort was, is and will always be that the best way of defending a presumption appeal is to have a local plan in the first place. That though is a separate point to the one I am seeking to make here. Whilst appeals are not won in wholly unsuitable, unsustainable locations, hence why the NPPF is not a ‘developer’s charter’, it is not unhelpful to newspaper editors or countryside charity Chief Executives, who’s lifeblood are sales and membership subscriptions, to propagate such a narrative. Countryside good, development bad.

Adding fuel to this antagonistic fire, I have long thought, was the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, the ten year anniversary of which I have been reminded of this week. The deification of the NHS attracted some attention at the time, but equally striking for me was the similar treatment afforded to the pastoral English countryside. This is the best video that I can find on YouTube (which unfortunately has a gremlin halfway through, but if you have never seen it you will be able to get the gist).

‘The brutal uprooting of rural Britain’ is how Huw Edwards introduces the Industrial Revolution to the 27 million UK-based viewers and then, as the whimsical, bucolic scene is gradually concreted over, overseen by Kenneth Branagh as rapacious, capitalist Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he describes the ‘smoking stacks and chimneys, rising dramatically from the ground, that produced a lot of wealth, but disfigured many towns and cities and transformed society.’ Countryside good, development bad.

I am reading Hoskins’ ‘Making of the English Landscape’ (the other 'W.G.' - shout out to Paul Smith) at the minute and came across this lament from Anna Seward, purportedly written around 1785.

Thy Genius, Colebrookedale faithless to his charge,

Amid thy woods and vales, thy rocks and streams

Formed for the train that haunt poetic dreams,

Naiads, and nymphs, now hears the toiling barge

And the swart Cyclops' ever-clanging forge

Din in thy dells; — permits the dark-red gleams

From umber'd fires on all thy hills, the beams,

Solar and pure, to shroud with columns large

Of black sulphurous smoke, that spread their silk

Like funeral crape upon the sylvan robe

Of thy romantic rocks, pollute thy gales,

And stain thy glassy floods; — while o'er the globe

To spread thy stores metallic, this loud yell

Drowns the wild woodland song, and breaks the poet's spell.

I am not yet sufficiently well-read or well-travelled to know whether our relationship with development and the countryside is uniquely complicated amongst other industrialised nations, but complicated it certainly is. It is interesting to think, taking the example of Coalbrookdale, that one generation’s ‘over-clanging forge’ is another generation’s World Heritage Site. I often wonder too when watching the Oval test match how incredulous the residents of Kennington in 1853 would be to learn that the first of the five gasholders to be built next to the ground would one day be sufficiently important by dint of Grade II listed status to be retained as part of an apartment block.

One would like to think that, having industrialised first, we would have benefited from a longer period of time over which to add at least some nuance to the ‘speculative builder’ narrative that Hoskins himself uses to describe the slum (from a provincial word ‘slump’ meaning ‘wet mire’) housing built around new factories in the 18^th Century. Alas, seemingly not though, as demonstrated by the quality of debate around housing and planning in the recent Conservative leadership debates (described here by Jules Birch). References to ‘developer oligopolies’ and a suspicion of ‘top-down targets’, as well as our old friends ‘landbanking’ and ‘brownfield first’, all got thrown into the mix because, seemingly, none of the candidates felt comfortable saying anything other than ‘countryside good, development bad’.

There are myriad reasons as to why both public discourse and perhaps indeed society itself has become more divisive and polarised over the last decade. It is unfortunate if not surprising that planning has become more rancorous (as I have written about previously here) as, seemingly, the priorities of the housing haves are prioritised over the housing have-nots. Planning is a mirror that reflects societal attitudes and priorities, which, I imagine, is what Danny Boyle wanted to do with the opening ceremony, and whilst our relationship to the countryside goes back a lot longer than 2012, the reverence of it does seem to have become more a national pastime in the last decade. Did the Olympics and the NPPF have anything to do with that? Who is to say, but 2012 feels like, if not a great year, at least an important year for English planning.