You might have heard of Poundbury, the project by the man who is now King to build a traditionally styled town on the edge of Dorchester in Dorset, where 1,700 homes have been built over 30 years on land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall, the 52,000-hectare (128,000-acre) estate that has now passed to Prince William. It’s widely touted as a solution to housing demand – if you make new development attractive enough, is the theory, local opposition recedes and new residents flock to live there. It inspires imitations: the duchy itself is building along similar lines on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall, and has plans to do so at Faversham in Kent.
You probably won’t have heard of Houlton, a town now growing on 473 hectares (1,170 acres) on the edge of Rugby in Warwickshire. Its development has been led not by royalty but by Urban&Civic, a property company owned by the Wellcome Trust, and Aviva investors, and masterplanned by David Lock Associates and JTP. But with more than 1,000 homes built in five years out of an eventual 6,200, it can claim to be more effective than Poundbury at getting a desirable new community through the planning system and then building it. Urban&Civic have 14 such developments under way, Houlton included, all but one within 100 miles of London, on which they have planning permission for a total of 33,000 homes.
If Houlton is little known, its site was once a conspicuous landmark for travellers on the west coast mainline, thanks to the forest of masts of what was the Rugby radio station, rising up to 250 metres high, that stood there from the 1920s until the last of them were demolished in 2007. This history meant that it was conveniently considered a “brownfield” ex-industrial site, even though it was abundantly green, which made it easier to get planning permission for new homes. These are mostly for private sale at local values – about £350,000 for a three-bedroom house – with 20% of those built so far being designated as affordable.
The guiding principles, say the developers, are to provide what people want – easy access to natural landscape, decent schools, good infrastructure – and make sure they are in place early in the development. There is a Co-op shop, a nursery, a cafe, a community building and a flexible working space already in place, with doctors’ surgeries and other facilities to follow. You can walk around the town through “wildlife corridors”, wide and shaggily planted with native species, sometimes winding around the ponds that help to manage the dispersal of rainwater. There are trees and hedgerows, both pre-existing and newly planted. Allotments and a community garden are due to open next month. Normandy Hill, a place patterned by centuries-old ridge and furrow agriculture, has been preserved as a place for the public to wander. Houlton’s landscape, designed by Bradley Murphy Design, is not exactly countryside, coming as it does with play spaces and cycle lanes, but it is not a formal civic park either.
The town’s other conspicuous feature is its secondary school, formed out of a listed transmitter complex from the old radio station, to designs by van Heyningen and Haward Architects. The old buildings are big and sturdy, with round-arched brickwork on the outside that evokes the English baroque architecture of John Vanbrugh, and muscular steel engineering within. Together they give height and volume and something you won’t find in any other new school in Britain – an assembly hall with the spirit of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. New blocks, in a modern take on the originals’ robust aesthetic, provide classrooms and the sports hall.
Houlton’s new housing, built by other companies within the framework created by Urban&Civic, is less striking, being better-than-average versions of the types that housebuilders erect up and down the country – approximations of traditional styles with modern enhancements such as double glazing. More care has been taken than usual with such things as siting, materials and detail – there are more curves and less regimentation, for example, than most housebuilders offer – and I’m assured that most buyers like their houses like this.
Personally I wouldn’t want the multiple glazing bars of small-paned windows in the manner of 17th-century cottages getting in the way of the view, given that humankind has since worked out how to make larger sheets of glass, but architectural style is not really the point here. What matters more is that homes are being built in significant numbers, and in ways that give such simple pleasures as the ability to walk your children to school through verdant landscape. Houlton is also distinctive, thanks largely to the civic landmark that is the transmitter station turned school, not the could-be-anywhere sort of place that new housing tends to create.
Typical housebuilders, by contrast, will avoid planting trees whenever possible, as well as such complicating elements as curving layouts and converting historic structures into schools, their objectives being to erect and sell houses as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then jettison responsibility for their upkeep. Houlton is built to a different, more long-term model, where the developers keep in an interest in the site; they are prepared to invest more upfront and wait longer for their commercial reward. A £35.5m loan from the government’s “housing accelerator” Homes England has been helpful in achieving this.
For years now, headline writers have loved to ask whether one clever idea or another is “a solution to the housing crisis?” The answer is invariably no, it isn’t, as the cost and scarcity of homes in Britain constitute too complicated a problem for a single magic bullet. But the approach at Houlton makes as serious a contribution, in both quality and quantity, as any organisation in the private sector has been able to think up.
• This article was amended on 19 September 2022 to correctly attribute the images of Houlton’s school hall and the Rugby transmitter complex to photographer James Brittain.
