by Tom Fort
Station Avenue, New Earswick – built 1905
Post-1945 New Earswick has continued to grow, albeit much more slowly. Inevitably – given the waning influence of the founding fathers – the style of building has become less interesting as time has gone on. The grim, concrete-clad flats in Garth Way, off White Rose Avenue, the chimneyless boxes in Oak Tree Grove, the black-clad flats in Maple Court, the 1990s development between White Rose Avenue and Alder Way – these could all have appeared anywhere.
But overall New Earswick remains a magnificent and inspiring illustration of what can be done with mass housing for ordinary working-class people, when those responsible have vision, boldness and imagination, care passionately about what they are doing, and – most important – have the time and resources to see their vision through to fulfilment. With its splendid Folk Hall doing duty as a very superior village hall, its primary and secondary schools, playing fields and leisure facilities, allotments, library, nurseries, churches and health centre, New Earswick is remarkably well provided for. True, it has no pub – the Rowntrees would not countenance making the demon drink available. But it has almost everything else that a village needs to sustain itself and thrive. It remains under the overall control of the Joseph Rowntree Trust, and although some of the houses are privately owned, most are still ‘social housing’ at affordable rents.
It is not surprising that people like living there and want to live there. Demand for the houses remains intense. It is green, leafy, spacious – a pleasure to cycle around. It is full of small delights: fine, mansard gables, overhanging eaves, neat picket fences, sweet little gardens, fine, upstanding mature trees. It even has its own nature reserve tucked into the south-west corner, with a lake and a fishing club.
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Rowntree expressed the hope that the model he helped create at New Earswick, with its emphasis on high-standard housing and village amenities, would be adopted elsewhere. And for a time the impact of the Garden City movement did continue to make itself felt – for example in the housing schemes drawn up in the 1920s by Raymond Unwin when he was in effect the government’s chief town-planning officer.
But over time the balance shifted from high-minded philanthropic individuals towards government departments and local councils. Rowntree at New Earswick, Cadbury at Bournville, Lever at Port Sunlight – and, indeed, Ebenezer Howard at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City – were able to do much as they wished. They and the architects and planners they recruited shared a vision of what modern living could be and how it could be achieved. They were not significantly constrained by regulation or the need to negotiate with and satisfy a local or national bureaucracy.
The 1914–18 War and the pressing requirement to provide mass housing afterwards gradually took the power away from the visionaries. The scale of what was needed was too great; only the state could provide it. And with state control came the inevitable accompaniments: bureaucracy, the imposition of general standards, the stifling of flair and distinctiveness. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 completed that process. Thereafter the duty to provide housing rested with a new generation of trained planners employed by local authorities and necessarily obedient to orders from central government.
Scroll on from the beginnings of New Earswick to Cambridgeshire in the 1960s. The county was faced by an acute shortage of housing. The obvious solution – to let Cambridge itself expand across the surrounding countryside – was deemed unacceptable; the planners took the reasonable view that to do so would be to destroy the character and value of the ancient university city. A policy was drawn up to restrict the city limits, and to concentrate new housing on the villages around. But it soon became clear that the villages could take only so much before their facilities were overwhelmed and their residents rose up in revolt against the swamping of their communities.
The answer, clearly, had to be entirely new settlements. The man put in charge of implementing it was Cambridgeshire’s chief planning officer, W. Leathley Waide. He set about finding a location for what was intended to be the first in a necklace of new villages that would loop around the north of Cambridge. He identified it on a tract of treeless and featureless farmland just off the A14 road to Huntingdon. This was to be the village of Bar Hill.
The rationale for building ‘new villages’ had been laid down by the then director of the Town and Country Planning Association, Wyndham Thomas (the prime mover in designing and building Peterborough). He wrote optimistically of smaller settlements providing ‘much superior conditions for family life and an increased degree of civic and community consciousness and participation in community life.’ In his evidence to the Bar Hill planning inquiry, W. Leathley Waide specified four criteria for all future developments in Cambridgeshire: that they be able to use existing public services; that costs to the public should be minimised; that the pattern should be best suited to the long-term needs of the county; that there should be ‘major improvements’ in the standard of layout and design (presumably over what had been the norm in the 1950s).
With hindsight it is evident that the only one of Waide’s principles to have any significant practical application was the minimising of costs to the public. It meant that the building – and in effect the designs and layout – would be undertaken by private companies in pursuit of profit. High ideals were not involved. Several big construction firms were sounded out before one – Holland, Hannen and Cubitts – signed up for the project. They appointed a Scottish firm of architects, Covell Matthews, to design the village.
The decision was taken to adopt the Radburn Principle in determining how Bar Hill should be configured. Named in honour of a new town in the American state of New Jersey, the Radburn Principle attempted to resolve the dilemma posed by society’s increasing reliance on the motor car as the primary means of transport. Its essence was that a settlement should be encircled by a perimeter road that fed the connecting roads between the sectors; but, crucially, car and pedestrian circulation were kept separate. Access to the front doors of the dwellings was generally by footpath only and the car was exiled to the back. The original plan for Bar Hill envisaged groups or ‘nests’ of around a hundred houses facing inwards on to a shared green open space. The total population would be about 2500.
Outline planning consent was given in December 1964 and detailed consent for the first phase six months later. Cambridgeshire County Council had pressed for this consent to be conditional on the provision of facilities, but in the event this was watered down to a soothing assurance from the developers that this would happen. It did not. Building work began in November 1965. The architects’ plan envisaged the first 300 homes being ready for occupation within eighteen months, and another 500 by the end of 1970. By then the village centre – shops, village hall, school and so on – would also be ready.
The plan and reality soon parted company. The construction of houses proceeded at a snail’s pace, that of the accompanying facilities not at all. HHC, the development company, needed to sell homes quickly to raise the cash for more building. But the selling was put in the hands of London agents with no experience or knowledge of the housing market in Cambridgeshire, where demand was concentrated to the south of the city. A drip-feed of bad publicity about Bar Hill – everything from the absence of shops to problems with drainage to windswept situation – conspired with marketing incompetence to hold back sales.
Bar Hill from the air
In 1968 HHC sold Bar Hill to the Ideal Building Corporation, which set up a new company, Bar Hill Developments, and entrusted the construction work to a local subsidiary, J. Nunn and Sons of Ipswich. By that time fewer than 100 houses had been completed, and with the sale of the whole project, the undertakings made by HHC for the village became null and void. The new owners sacked the original architects, ditched their layout designs and imported standardised house designs from their existing range. Complaints about the standard of the workmanship multiplied, as did the concerns of planning officers about breaches of th
e consent. In 1975 J. Nunn and Sons went bust.
The original concept for Bar Hill had been to ‘create a community’. Whether such an ideal is achievable at all in the public sector is arguable. Certainly the manner in which the Bar Hill project was pursued made it wholly impossible, at least in the short term. One by one the aspirational elements, or social aspects, of the concept were jettisoned or trampled underfoot by the developers. Instead of being concerned to create a community, they were compelled by market forces to regard Bar Hill as a composite of more or less lucrative financial opportunities. The building proceeded piecemeal rather than incrementally, on sectors often far apart from each other, while the accompanying facilities lagged far behind. A parade of shops was completed but several of the units proved impossible to fill. Bar Hill Developments then proposed a large supermarket next to existing shops, which – in 1977 – became a Tesco.
In December 1975 an influential Cambridge academic, poet and cultural commentator, David Holbrook, had a letter published in the Cambridge Evening News in which he described Bar Hill as ‘an environmental death . . . ill-sited, bleak, muddled, hideous and anarchic’ with a ‘a horrible little windswept centre which lacks all human touch’. In retrospect the mid-1970s can be seen as the low point in the Bar Hill story. By then – in defiance of the chaos and cynicism evident all round – the people actually living there were building their own community spirit from within. It was most evident in the work and increasing outspokenness of the parish council, the church and the residents’ association. In particular the residents’ association newsletter gave a voice to those who felt themselves – and they generally were – powerless to influence developers and the remote policy-makers of the county council.
The opening of the village hall and social club at the end of 1979 represented a crucial step forward for the village’s social dimension. With the arrival of Tesco and the building of a flyover junction with the A14 to replace the previous, highly hazardous T-junction, Bar Hill was maturing into a coherent, independent settlement. By now the building of the houses was progressing more smoothly, so that by the end of the 1980s Bar Hill was finished. By then it had a population of 5000, twice as many as projected in W. Leathley Waide’s original plan.
One more convulsion lay in store. In the early 1990s Tesco proposed to replace its existing large supermarket with a truly enormous superstore, with an appropriately expanded car park. The negotiations – sweetened by Tesco’s offer to pay the parish council more than a million pounds for the various parcels of land it needed – lasted for several years. In the end the objections of the villagers of Bar Hill counted for very little against the muscle of the giant retailer and the reluctance of the local authority to submit to a trial of strength. Tesco, which was then nearing the zenith of its ambition to control every facet of retailing in the country, won the day. Its gigantic glass and steel box with its curved front awning and acres of black tarmac opened in time for Christmas in the year 2000, sealing Bar Hill’s primary status – in the eyes of the planners anyway – as shopping destination rather than village.
There it stands today: the store and its associated delivery ports and car park like a huge right-angled wedge driven into the heart of what was once intended as a contemporary version of a peaceful, rural settlement. The south-eastern flank of the car park is a matter of yards from Bar Hill’s primary school, library and church, with its playing fields just beyond. To a first-time visitor the dominance of this slab of Imperium Tescorium is brutal, its closeness to the heart of the supposed village shocking.
But Bar Hill has learned to live with it.
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I talked to a little group of mums who had just dropped children off at the school. They all said they were living in Bar Hill because nowhere else around could offer comparable facilities and amenities at a comparable price – around £250,000 for a three-bedroom semi. They all spoke warmly about the school, the library, the village hall, the fact that you could walk or cycle everywhere; about the friends they had made and the social activities; about the openness of the place and its safeness. What about Tesco? I asked. Isn’t it rather overbearing? But handy, they said. We don’t even have to park.
They liked Bar Hill and liked living there. But they clearly regarded it primarily as a convenience, a staging post on a progression that would lead somewhere else. I got no sense from them of loyalty to it, or a strong feeling of belonging. One said she had grown up in a ‘proper village’ in Warwickshire and would love to live somewhere like that again.
The elderly people I met were just as contented, and had no intention of going anywhere else. It was safe, which was the most important thing. Good health centre, welcoming church, sound paths for mobility scooters, friendly people. Tesco? They all liked Tesco.
It being mid-morning on a working day, there were no blokes of working age for me to ask, but I’m sure they would have had much the same view. Nor were there any teenagers around, who would undoubtedly have told me that Bar Hill was deadly dull and there was nothing to do. (Interestingly, both Bar Hill and New Earswick installed skate parks at great expense to give the young people something to do; in both cases the amenity came under sustained attack from vandals and graffitists from the word go, to the point that they became hazardous and had to be demolished.)
Bar Hill’s range and quality of amenities would be the envy of any village. It has all the essentials – schools, pub, church, library, village hall, sports ground, shop (if Tesco can be called a shop) – and pretty much all the desirables: health centre, dentist, garden centre, allotments. Overall, despite all the setbacks and compromises, it is recognisably derived from its original concept. It has its village green and village centre. It is largely contained within its perimeter road. It is possible to walk from any part of it to the centre without having to cross anything more threatening than one of the feeder roads. It is leafy, grassy, quiet and self-contained. I spent some time walking a few of the many miles of paths that thread their way around the maze of closes, glades, rises, spinneys, drives, avenues and ways; I became lost, and I defy any stranger not to lose their bearings, but it was all perfectly pleasant.
But let’s not get carried away. Aesthetically there is nothing in Bar Hill that rises above the mediocre – not one building that can match the charm and character of one of Parker and Unwin’s cottage clusters in New Earswick. Every dreary cliché of Sixties and Seventies housebuilding – coloured panelling, tile or timber cladding, pop-up garage doors, windows flat to the exterior and the rest – are on display in row after row of terraced or semi-detached dwellings. The homes are packed in tight. Rooflines are monotonously unvaried. The big builders involved – Bovis, Wimpey, Ideal and others – imported their standard designs of the time; pallid brick, PVC windows and concrete tiles rule. The blocks of garages with their corrugated roofs and metal doors – for instance along Gladeside, which is the vehicular approach to the village centre – were clearly jerry-built and have fallen into a dismal state of decay. There is no spark of imagination or inventiveness or originality on show in Bar Hill; the best you could say is that it is not bad.
My final encounter was with an elderly lady who was getting into her car outside her home in Acorn Avenue. This was the first row of houses to be completed, and hers was the first to be occupied – back in 1967, by Rob and Stella Burry and their daughter Elizabeth. The current owner had bought it ten years later, for £11,750; the fact that she was still there – her children having long gone and her husband having died – was, I thought, a considerable testament to the good things about Bar Hill.
I asked her if she regarded it as a village. She shook her head decisively. ‘It’s not a village. It’s a settlement.’
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Bar Hill was to have been the first of a new generation of Cambridgeshire villages, but it remains the first and the last. In the final analysis too much went wrong for the model to be more widely adopted. For a long time it was tainted, and the fact that it has come
good in the end says more about the resilience of people and their capacity for making the best of things than for the value of the concept.
The pressures that brought Bar Hill into existence have not diminished, but intensified. The demand for housing outside Cambridge has grown and grown, to the point at which any village within reach of the city is threatened as speculative developers scrabble for potential sites. The latest ‘solution’ is taking shape a couple of miles away from Bar Hill, on the other side of the A14, on what used to be an RAF airfield. Called Northstowe, it is projected to become a ‘new town’ of up to 10,000 homes – possibly even an ‘eco-town’.
Will the lessons available from Bar Hill be studied and learned by the planners of Northstowe? It would be nice to think so. But the experience of housebuilding in this country does not encourage optimism.
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CHANGING FACE
Pitton, Wiltshire
The village was hidden in a streamless valley between two folds in the rolling sea of green that is the south-eastern edge of Salisbury Plain. I came upon it suddenly, freewheeling down an old road called the Whiteway which cuts away from the A30 Winchester to Salisbury highway. There was a solid, handsome Victorian school on the right, a church steeple visible over to the left, a scattering of old cob and thatch houses. The road climbed up the other side of the village, the Whiteway becoming White Hill. This is chalk country, and there is a good deal of white around.
