SERIES FINALE: How to Make Development Beautiful (With Nicholas Boys Smith)

In this episode Clive unveils some new research. It’s the result of a coffee shared with his guest in today’s podcast, Nicholas Boys-Smith. Nicholas founded Create Streets, a social enterprise, think tank and urban design consultancy in 2012. The coffee shop was on a schizophrenic part of the street, half of it being Victorian terrace — brick built, repeating classical windows, a lot of variety in the modest shops and cafes as street level — the opposite side of the street having been rebuilt not so long ago in a Modern style of unornamented grey walls and window openings without mouldings.  Nicholas commissioned Deltapoll to conduct a visual preference survey, showing a randomly chosen group of over 2,000 people of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicity and geographical location within the UK which they preferred of two options: 1, the street as it is. 2, a photoshop of the street with Modern section replaced by a copy of the 19th-century terrace.  The result was conclusive.  Only 17% of the sample chose the Modern image, 83% preferred the Victorian one. 

People say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but that’s not quite right.  There are a lot of aesthetic matters on which most people agree.  They would prefer to live in neighbourhoods built as they were in the past, with variety and interest, rather than a Modern development that seems bleak and unfriendly. The results of the survey can be found on the Create Streets website www.createstreets.com.  Importantly, this was not a chance result but entirely predictable (indeed he did predict it).  Create Streets have undertaken numerous similar projects and the outcome is always the same.

This shines a spotlight on new development. How are developers ever going to convince the public that it is a good thing, when so many people are instinctively opposed to it?  The subject stirred in Clive’s mind when he visited the sublime landscape garden of Rousham in Oxfordshire, laid out by William Kent in the 1720s and 1730s. His client General Sir James Dormer was a friend Alexander Pope, himself a keen landscape gardener.  The views from it are now threatened by the proposal to build an enormous housing development nearby. What can be done to save it?