Let us call him 'King Charles the Builder'

The greatest gift the monarch could give his subjects

‘Something that should be intrinsically ugly, if it’s been around for long enough in a much-loved place…. all is forgiven and people regard it as part of the place’s character.’

So says the architectural critic Samuel Hughes in a brand-new documentary series, Gentle Density, made by the website Works in Progress.

Hughes is a star-in-the making, a man who knows an awesome amount about his subject and revels in its delights. Very likeable on screen and in real life, he carries a certain classical air, without it ever being affected or LARPish, more like a figure from a gentler and more noble age (a compliment coming from me). An Englishman abroad, from the time where Englishmen would go off to discover dead languages or find Minoan cities.

The first episode of Gentle Density takes Hughes to the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn where he is shown around by affable architecture historian Francis Morrone, who teaches us the history of the area (colonised by New Englanders who resentfully accepted that they couldn’t compete with their rival).

New York is a stunning sort of place, beautiful and distinctive. It’s the most boring thing to say imaginable but when I first visited it really did feel a bit like being in a film; even the steam coming out of a manhole was excitingly New Yorkesque. As with all great beauties, even its imperfections add to the charm, the most typical element to most European visitors being the classic New York fire escape. The city’s safety-conscious authorities began to insist on these in the 1860s, a period when New York’s population was rapidly rising and its poor tenements were frequently the site of lethal fires. (The city generally seemed to constantly suffer large fires). This is what Hughes is talking about when he discusses the appeal of the ‘intrinsically ugly’ but established, a truth which perhaps extends beyond architecture.

Park Slope is very pretty, even if not spectacular or iconic or UNESCO worthy. That is the purpose of the show, I suppose, to highlight not the iconic landmarks in architecture but the beautiful and liveable. This Brooklyn neighbourhood is indeed a quintessential example of ‘gentle density’, the phrase coined by Nicholas Boys Smith of Create Streets to describe the sort of urban fabric most people prefer living in.

Name any of the most desirable cities or neighbourhoods on earth and they will all fall under this category of gentle density, usually between 3 and 8 stories in height; the most sought-after areas in London, whether it’s Kensington, Kennington, Greenwich, Islington or Primrose Hill, are all quite densely populated. My own neighbourhood, Crouch End in north London, was recently singled out as one of the best places to live and the overwhelming reason is that it has gentle density, largely consisting of three or four-story late Victorian and Edwardian architecture.

The most desired cities are all dominated by gentle density: think of Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona or any of the great cities of northern Italy. Indeed the happiest towns in Britain are all gentle density, in particular Georgian and Victorian terraces — Bath, Chichester, Stamford, Skipton, York and Harrogate, and even Oxford and Cambridge, despite the presence of universities surely dragging down the happiness quotient.

There is a fair amount of research suggesting that this sort of traditional architecture contributes to our wellbeing. Beauty makes people happy. It means that walking around is more pleasant and safe, and if people walk more, they talk more.

The reason that the most beautiful architecture comes from specific periods is partly to do with transport. As Hughes explains in his documentary, urban growth in the 19^th century followed along the routes of ‘streetcars’ (trams) and trains, which naturally led to high-density clusters. The compact medieval cities of Europe were therefore able to expand, while retaining their essential walkability and beauty. Gentle levels of density are the most visually satisfying for most people, although interestingly, but hardly surprisingly, conservatives tend to prefer being around fewer people.

Cars changed all this, not just by frightening pedestrians off the road and leading to the decline of civic space, but encouraging urban sprawl, which is far less attractive. Suburbanisation meant space and freedom but it also signalled withdrawal from civic life, and the result could be a new form of loneliness. Car dependent suburbs easily lost their amenities and lacked the sort of central points that were vital for healthy communities — shops, pubs, village greens and all the places that lead to serendipitous meetings.

And as the economy has moved from industrial to tech-domination, gentle density has become even more economically advantageous because of ‘agglomeration benefits’ — that is, economic growth, and high living standards, depends on larger numbers of people being connected. Cities which want to avoid being left behind will need to make it easier to agglomerate, with higher density and transport connections.

Yet as this agglomeration effect increases, the price of available housing becomes ever more expensive. Most of Britain’s ‘happy towns’ are also incredibly expensive, unaffordable to locals and featuring the highest house price-to-average salary ratio. There is huge demand for more traditional gentle density, but it’s hard to meet demand; newbuilds are incredibly unpopular with existing residents who try their best to prevent them being built, often under the guise of environmentalism. 

One historic reason for this problem is fashion. In every country where the question is asked, overwhelming majorities favour traditional buildings and NIMBYism even decreases when residents are presented with vernacular styles.

But they are not popular with the people who matter. Back in 1987, when he was just 21, psychologist David Halpern conducted a survey of students, asking them to rate buildings by attractiveness. He found that almost everyone had similar tastes, generally liking traditional styles – the sort you’ll see in Gentle Density. The exceptions were architecture students, whose favourite building was everyone else’s least favourite, and vice versa. The longer someone had been at university studying architecture, the more out of tune their tastes were with most people.

This trend matched the development in art heralded by Clement Greenberg’s seminal 1939 essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which attacked the ‘second-hand, shabby, and impersonal’ work of Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper, declaring that good art must almost by definition be unpopular with the public. 

In Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey observed that: ‘What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass’. This mindset infected architecture too, and most western cities stopped producing the sort of homes and public buildings which people loved.

I’ve written at length about how politics is influenced by status signals, and how some political and cultural ideas become associated with prestige, often because they signal education. Architecture has long suffered from this high-status opinion cascades, a sort of runaway evolution in which costly displays of counter-logical opinions help the individual; the more you support architecture which demoralises people, the more sophisticated you are. This has hugely reduced the supply of desirable homes, a problem which has become more costly as urban demand has intensified.

The intellectual snobbery noted by Carey still permeates the system. In one of the Create Streets reports from 2016, it was recalled how the director of housing and regeneration at one London borough spoke of the ‘horrid Edwardian streets that most of us live in’ and complaining of ‘dreary terraces’. Imagine having to live in an Edwardian terrace in London – nightmarish! Who would want that?

The truth of status cascades is often illustrated by revealed preferences. Stated preferences are what we claim to believe, and these are heavily influenced by social acceptability bias; revealed preferences are what we actually do. In Britain, people are prepared to pay more for older homes, pre-1919 buildings having increased in value at double the rate of modern buildings since 1983 – by 465% v 255%, according to data from Halifax. Since more modern homes benefit from all sorts of technical improvements, it should be the opposite; this echoes the dysfunction of the Trabant market in East Germany, where the chronic shortage of supply resulted in second-hand cars often being more expensive than brand new ones. It is indeed the style which attracts people, rather than the age, and a study from the Netherlands showed that ‘even controlling for a wide range of features, fully neo-traditional houses sell for 15 per cent more than fully non-traditional houses.’ 

But perhaps the most famous, or infamous, revealed preference in architecture is that modernist architects themselves almost invariably live in traditional Georgian or Victorian homes. Show me a brutalist utopian housing estate that won architectural awards, and I will show you an architect living in an early Victorian cottage in Chiswick or Brook Green. Sir Basil Spence, who blessed us with so many brutalist horrors, lived off Canonbury Square in Islington, almost the platonic ideal of traditional English architecture. A new build resembling Canonbury Square would have met with guffaws by much of the architectural profession in Spence’s day, yet they all want to live there — funny that!

This fashion has changed to some extent. There is always a certain period of time between the population as a whole realising an innovation doesn’t work, and the elite coming to accept it, and Hughes believes that in the architectural community there has been a move away from grand utopian visions, and towards gentle density – the problem is that we have just lost the habit of making beautiful, dense urban streets.

There are also a number of new laws designed towards incentivising it, in San Francisco, Houston and New Zealand, while there are various interesting new developments in northern Europe, Jakriborg in Sweden being the most exciting. Hughes’s delightful new architecture series will surely only strengthen this urbanist revival.

The housing crisis is the number one problem facing British society, and increasing the supply of gentle density is the most workable solution that provides the sort of neighbourhoods people want to live in. The political system is almost completely gridlocked over this issue, a tragedy of the commons, there being no individual incentive for an increase in housing supply but huge collective costs for a lack of action.

If only there was a man out there with strong opinions about traditional architecture, someone who could push for more gentle density and new buildings? I don’t know, someone who is being crowned this weekend? 

King Charles, as Prince of Wales, has already had a big impact on British architecture, in particular sabotaging attempts by high-profile modernist architects to impose their terrible ideas on the city. Charles was right about modern architecture long before it came to be accepted that much of what was put up in the late 20th century was complete excrement. The Prince was widely mocked, but he knew that in the long term he’d be proven right.

Architecture is hugely influenced by status games, and status competition is driven by insecurity, with new entrants to the upper middle class often the most desperate to adopt the right views. Charles was able to express some incredibly low-status opinions on architecture, perhaps because he was fairly secure about his status (being Prince of Wales and all that).

One of the advantages of monarchs is that they have an interest in caring about posterity in a way that democratic politicians don’t. Elected leaders can’t even think about 11 years into the future, let alone 100. Hereditary rulers know that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will carry their name and so take the blame and credit for what they did. 

King Charles, ignoring the mockery of the establishment and its midwit cultural camp followers, will already give to posterity the towns of Poundbury and South East Faversham; Poundbury is not without its faults, but it presents a real legacy and is far more attractive than most contemporary developments, and his new Cornish development of Nansledan looks excellent.

In contrast, there is barely a single building commissioned by democratic politicians of the past seven decades that will be loved or cherished by our great-grandchildren; many will have been demolished by then. Already the grotesquely overpriced Euston 3 looks almost as ugly as Euston 2, a truly impressive achievement. As Kenneth Clark famously observed in Civilisation, ‘If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings’ – and what a truth they reveal. 

Nothing would better suit the new King’s role than to build a new generation of towns and suburbs, and provide much needed housing for his young subjects. King Charles has a very limited role within the constitution, but his potential legacy is enormous if he wants it — beautiful towns and cities to last the years, living streets that in centuries to come people will want to gaze at and talk about. We need a dozen more Poundburys, a hundred more Nansledans. Build them, Your Majesty! Build them.