Private Planning and the Great Estates (1/5)
Introduction
(This is Part I of my publication that I have split into five for Substack.)
See: Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V
We can learn much from urban history. Perhaps more interesting than the record of any particular time period are the dynamics of the system: how cities respond to changes in markets, technology and social forces. In the last 70 years, parts of London have changed greatly. The skyline, once dominated by St Paul’s, now contains multiple clusters far taller than Wren’s great cathedral. Over the last four decades, London’s commercial heart has been transformed: the skyscraper came to the City, and the Square Mile has been joined by Canary Wharf, a regeneration project built on part of the former docks system to the east. King’s Cross and Stratford are among other subsequent improvement projects.
Despite all this, most of Greater London has seen a relative lack of change. Extensive growth has continued at ever greater distances from the centre, and the socio-economic make-up of much of inner London has changed with gentrification and immigration, but the built environment itself has altered little outside a few commercial centres. Despite huge productivity advantages, London has grown only modestly. For most of history, advances in productivity would beget increases in population. Manchester or Liverpool emerged as boom cities; Norwich and Ely declined in relative importance. The population of the twelve inner-London boroughs of approximately 3.66m in 2020 is still lower than at its early twentieth-century high of around 4.5m.1 Historically this is anomalous, but also true of much of the developed world, from New York to Sydney.
This weakening of the relationship between productivity and population growth is mostly due to mid-twentieth-century changes in the political economy of urban development, which had both foreseen and unforeseen consequences on rents, home prices and, through knock-on effects, the economy itself. Simply put, Britain is poorer because of its failure to build in the right places or, more precisely, to allow building where the market demands. This is a central moral question reminding us that housing and the built environment lie at the heart of well-being. As the urbanist Alain Bertaud is fond of saying, cities are primarily labour markets.2 By restricting supply in the most productive regions, policies stop workers from contributing more to the economy. Some have even suggested that post-war regulatory changes were the worst thing to happen to the British economy since the Black Death.3 Empirical estimates for the USA, which has a less stringent regulatory system, suggest that restrictions limiting housing supply have lowered aggregate growth there by 36 per cent.4
Emerging from the wreckage of the Second World War, the political economy of the UK was transformed. Building on actions begun during the conflict (and the First World War), the turn away from the market and to state management occurred in many sectors. In the cities, German bombs, public planning and changes in the economy over the middle decades of the century combined forces. Experiments with social housing expanded from scattered cottages and mid-rise blocks, building on the philanthropic efforts of the nineteenth century, to tower blocks that destroyed existing urban fabric and redefined the skyline, and which in residential areas often lowered net density. Furthermore, what the regulatory state does allow is often less beloved and socially beneficial across multiple metrics.5
Learning from Historical Precedent
London, like any old city, is the product of many hands and minds, its buildings shaped by architectural taste, regulatory factors and market forces. Despite the focus of many histories on the development of public planning, some of the greatest urban set pieces resulted from private not public enterprise. Unlike many European cities, however, the role of the crown and the state has been relatively small. The crown, weaker in relation to the aristocracy than in most large European states, has mainly exerted control through palaces and less directly through what became the Crown Estate. The development of Regent Street and Regent’s Park on the Crown Estate was but one act of planning, dwarfed by the explicitly private development of London by the great estates. The biggest landowners were most often aristocratic but also institutional, such as the Crown Estate, Eton College and the Church Commissioners. To this day, despite successive attempts to weaken their influence, some of the great estates continue to thrive.
The system of lands developed on long leases allowed residents to benefit from core aspects of home ownership, such as the ability to stay in one place and to personalise interiors, while not engaging in speculation about the future land price. The rules allowed landowners to develop sizeable tracts easily and lowered the costs of redevelopment. When the price of the underlying land increased, landowners would often find it in their interest and capacity to add more units. However, this did not result in pure cheek-by-jowl density: landowners’ pecuniary interest – and aesthetic sensibility – led to their building the famous squares every visitor to London remembers. In these garden squares, residents often had key-access to the pleasures of the country just steps from their home. The great crescents, squares, shopping streets, terraces, mews and mansion blocks emerged not from public policy or royal dictate but commercial interest, creating some of the best-loved neighbourhoods of London.
In the middle to late twentieth century, a wave of pioneering urban historians began to consider the history of Georgian and Victorian cities, when the failures of the post-war regulatory regime were not yet entirely clear. In fact the problems facing cities in much of the mid-century were those of depopulation, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation rather than the institutional sclerosis that plagues London and other prosperous cities today in the form of the planning system.6 The economic and technological factors that created the patterns of the historical city were viewed as distinct from the contemporary ones. For example, H. J. Dyos wrote:
The technologies that underpinned these first cities of the industrial era are being superseded by others with quite different implications, and the processes that built up such high densities in those cities may even be going into reverse. For the urban mass no longer generates forces of attraction directly proportionate to its density. Density, though susceptible to almost limitless engineering possibilities, is no longer a necessary condition of urban intercourse.7
This is no longer true. Even after such a shock as the coronavirus and the shifts in technology that allowed widespread white-collar remote working, cities are facing many of the same issues as in 2019. While the fundamental tendencies towards agglomeration have clearly returned, the urban political economy has changed since the industrial era, dulling market responses to these tendencies. This publication seeks to shed light on the historical operation of the market system, especially by large landlords, for insight into how to think about contemporary issues in planning.
Large landlords are of particular interest because of their ability to deal with some of the problems that justify the role of government in planning, namely externalities. Furthermore, as many scholars have shown, the historical lineage of public planning comes, in part, out of the private planning of the great estates. Criticism of the private market focused on the less planned developments of smaller-scale speculators and the questions of justice surrounding the benefits of the land accruing to landlords. The great hope was that the statecould provide better planning. Bound up within the transformation of the political economy of development were other ideas about cities, economics and politics. Many of these are no longer fit for purpose.
Part II explores the operation of the great estates in London and explains the mechanisms through which they were planned and built. Part III argues that the system of long-term leasehold enabled urban intensification in ways that benefitted not just the landlords themselves, as historical critics often argued, but also society. Part IV explores the history of public planning from the seventeenth century to the present. Part V summarises lessons that can be learnt in the context of the current economic and regulatory regime, and evaluates opportunities for urban intensification according to market signals.
(This is Part I of my publication that I have split into five for Substack.)
See: Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V
Sources: Office for National Statistics, Great London Authority, Trust for London
Alain Bertaud, Order without Design: How Markets shape Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
John Myers, ‘The Housing Crisis: An Act of Devastating Economic Self- Harm’, CapX, August 2017; https://capx.co/the-housing-crisis-an-act-of-devastating-economic-self-harm.
Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, ‘Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation’, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 11:2 (April 2019), pp. 1–39; https://doi:10.1257/mac.20170388.
See e.g. Nicholas Boys Smith and Alex Morton, ‘Create Streets: Not Just Multi-Storey Estates’ (London: Policy Exchange and Create Streets, 2013), pp. 21–38, for a collection of survey results on tall multi-storey housing; and Sam Bowman, John Myers and Ben Southwood, ‘The Housing Theory of Everything’, Works in Progress (blog), September 2021 (https://www. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything), for the impacts on environmental, public health and other metrics
Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982).
H. J. Dyos, ‘The Victorian City in Historical Perspective’, in Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History by H. J. Dyos, ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 3.
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