Homes for Heroes - the Prime Minister needs a history lesson
Or, if it were not for the fact that we’d never say such a thing about one so distinguished, the Prime Minister needs to be boxed about the ears until he grasps the problem. The announcement that the government is going to build homes for heroes - we approve, as do veterans. So, good.
Except that phrase has been used before. Lloyd George’s promise during WWI of “homes fit for heroes” became Homes for Heroes in the early 1920s. Then as now an entirely valid plan and political goal. It’s just that for one of us that whole story tells us what has actually gone wrong - howlingly, horribly wrong - with British building in this past century. Or, perhaps, what it is allowed that people may build.
Along one particular street in Bath, along Englishcombe Lane, it’s possible to see that gone wrong.
If we’ve managed to get Google Streetview right at the bottom of the road, some very grand late Victorians and Edwardians. Just opposite is part of Morlands, which is a 60s or so development by the styles of that time. No private space at all, no front or back gardens, no room to put the dog out, not even a flower bed. Houses on a council lawn that is. Ho well, socialists and private space, eh?
The more apposite point is that a couple of hundred yards up the road are those post-WWI homes for heroes. Here. Semi detached, not huge to be fair. But kitchen, living room, parlour, 3 beds and indoor bathroom. They’re still highly desirable houses in fact. Note, they’ve front gardens. They’ve also back ones too.
Now, we’ve heard this, even heard it from someone on Bath City Council (who had heard it, we’re not quite old enough to know anyone who was on BCC in the 1920s), and never, quite tracked it down officially. But the statement was made that the Homes for Heroes needed to be on 1/4 acre gardens. The working man needed the space to grow vegetables for his family and to keep a pig. These houses, the 1920s ones, do have substantial gardens as the 1960s ones don’t.
We can then carry on up this same road, to here. Perhaps 70s or 80s houses. No, no, not 1880s, 1980s. Note the wholly trivial size - and no, they do not have decent back gardens. The road at the top is called Whiteway. And a couple of hundred yards along that - please do note that all these locations are within hundreds of yards of each other - we’ve a view of Englishcombe itself. Which is, of course, free of housing because that’s Green Belt, that is. It would strike terror into the heart of the haute bourgeoisie if we ever built upon that - even if it were Homes for Heroes, let alone something better than a rabbit hutch for the proles.
And this is what is wrong with housing in Britain. Yes, yes, of course, not everyone’s going to live in a grand Edwardian. Yes, yes, we can fail to replicate those mistakes of when we allowed the sociologists to miss the point in the 1960s - personal, defensible, space is important to humans. One little thing - all our examples are council housing here.
But Homes for Heroes? We’ve done this before. And those Homes for Heroes? Right now, today, it’s illegal to build them. No, really. What was considered the basic minimum that the local council should provide to the working man is illegal to build now. Those decent sized houses were on those decent gardens d’ye see? You can get perhaps 9 dwellings with 1/4 acre gardens on a hectare of land. Last we saw the current insistence is that we must have no less than 30 dwellings per hectare in order to gain planning permission. Even though Englishcombe - as with so much other land - is there and ripe for the taking.
It’s actually illegal to build houses that were regarded as the proper minimum a century ago.
That’s the problem with British housing. It’s simply not legal to build anything that our grandparents thought was the necessary minimum, let alone better.
At which point we change our minds. Yes, the Prime Minister - whoever it is - needs to be boxed about the ears until they understand the problem. Then, of course, the boxing needs to continue until they actually do something about it.
Homes for Heroes is a great idea. But an entirely serious and sensible suggestion. Anyone and everyone involved needs to go see what our forbears built for that same reason a century ago. Then wonder how we’ve ended up with a system that makes building just that - a house with a garden for the working man - illegal.
No, really. Think on it. Really? How did we get into this state? And shouldn’t we be boxing the ears of every Prime Minister that allowed this to happen?
Tim Worstall