It’s too difficult to build one-off homes in urban areas. A new category of planning application is needed to lower the barriers for single family houses.
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Author: russellcurtis
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Growing Pains
Building homes on London’s allotments isn’t going to solve the housing crisis. The capital’s comedic carrots and amusing marrows are safe, for now.
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London, Open
How updates to the London Plan might enable new homes to be built on London’s golf courses.
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Balancing the Books
How the use of quadratic voting could help moderate the public’s attitude towards planning applications for new homes.
The Labour government’s array of announcements on planning reform has been dizzying, but more ambitious action must follow if we are to see real change during this parliament.
How emergency permitted development rights could help address the financial and human cost of homelessness.
Some planning committee members have a mindset of ‘planning by vibes’ rather than being led by policy. No wonder the government is keen to address this.
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Housing Delivery Test 2023
A brief analysis of the Housing Delivery Test scores from 2023, which were published in December.
The publication of the revised National Planning Policy Framework in December 2024 was accompanied by a new set of Housing Targets for each of England’s unitary, district and borough authorities. Much has been made of the new targets by rural councils, claiming that these will require large areas of countryside will need to be “concreted […]
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Get on board
The potential for 27,000 homes around existing stations between London and Cambridge: Submission to the New Towns Taskforce, November 2024.
Using AI and high-resolution aerial photography to categorise types of land cover within the metropolitan green belt.
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Grey Belt Geometry
The following describes a potential methodology for establishing the extent of “grey belt” using a geometrical approach to settlements within London’s metropolitan green belt. 1. This example uses Brentwood in Essex. The settlement is entirely enclosed by London’s metropolitan green belt. In this diagram the orange colour shows the extent of Brentwood which is not […]
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All AIs on the Grey Belt
The use of AI and spatial mapping to categorise the use of England’s green belt and identify opportunities for new development.
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Cornering the Market
Some thoughts on a “brownfield passport” and the potential for corner plots to rapidly deliver suburban intensification.
The Grenfell report fails to grasp the wider lessons of this tragedy by ignoring the warped procurement culture that encouraged so many awful decisions.
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Right on Target
Why concerns about the effect of the new government’s housing targets on the countryside are misplaced
How planning authorities’ online portals demonstrate bias against new development.
Labour’s new towns plan won’t deliver the homes we need anytime soon. To boost sustainable housing sooner, we should look to our suburbs.
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Towards a Suburban Renaissance
How lessons from Croydon can be applied to London’s suburbs to deliver thousands of new homes through modest intensification.
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Small Sites, Big Ambitions
How suburban intensification can quickly deliver new homes.
Data from an AI learning model that mapped the London Borough of Lewisham suggests the capital’s targets for ‘small site’ development could be radically increased.
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Procurement Using 50% Scoring Ratio
This describes a typical limited tender process using standard methods of price / quality measurement, with a pricing ratio set at 50%. It demonstrates that this scoring ratio will almost certainly result in the cheapest price winning the project, even with a very low quality score. The sample scores used to test this model is […]
I contributed to an article in the Economist newspaper about the state of Britain’s green belt, and the potential to build hundreds of thousands of homes around rural stations.
When Sadiq Khan first published his draft London Plan in 2017, in addition to the general housing targets that had been a feature of London Plans since 2000, the mayor set out a requirement for each of the planning authorities in London (including each of the 32 boroughs, the City of London, and the two […]
The London mayor should point out that the green belt is an anachronism and that a million homes could be built by sacrificing just 1 per cent of it.
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Off the Rails
Making the most of existing transport infrastructure must be a priority for Labour – even if it is in the Green Belt.
In an effort to address the housing crisis, I mapped every railway station in England and used publicly-accessible data to show that 777 of them have development potential
In tearing up the council’s innovative design guide for development at its fringes, Jason Perry has prevented the benign construction of urgently needed housing in his borough
How to support new homes in your local area
Placing requirements on suburban boroughs to do more to help meet the capital’s housing needs could have made a huge difference.
The lack of oversight, ownership and liability that the inquiry has exposed is of little surprise to those of us immersed in the everyday realities of construction
To find an architect lamenting the erosion of the profession’s role within the construction process may elicit from many little more than crocodile tears or, to others, smack of a futile act of self-preservation when faced with challenging financial targets, shrinking capital budgets and the avoidance of risk. But while architects’ railing at the demotion […]
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After Grenfell
Passengers touching down at London City Airport are likely unaware that buried beneath the tarmac lie the brayed concrete remains of a 22-storey tower, the demolition of which signified a watershed moment in British housing. Erected hastily towards the end of the 1960s, Ronan Point concluded two decades of rapid housebuilding. At its peak, some […]