Northstowe is a new town, billed as the largest since Milton Keynes was launched in the 1960s. It is, its developers say, “sustainable”. It “has a strong sense of community and an identity that is entirely unique” – so much so, it turns out, that it has no shop, cafe or GP surgery, which means that anyone who wants to buy a pint of milk has to take the not-very-environmental option of driving. “It has no heart,” one resident told the BBC, “it’s like a home without a kitchen.”
This place is eight miles from Cambridge, for which Michael Gove earlier this month promised to unleash a plan for 250,000 new homes, one that would make it the “Silicon Valley of Europe”. You have to wonder what he has been smoking. There are 1,200 occupied homes in Northstowe, which was originally planned in 2007, at which rate of progress it would take 3,333 years to achieve Gove’s dream, although they might have built a cafe by then. Milton Keynes’s growth was far greater, and even included shops and surgeries, but required vigorous state intervention. This is probably a truth too awkward for a free marketeer like Gove to acknowledge.
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves, for Labour, promises to “get cracking on housebuilding”. She proposes to “reform planning”, in the belief that the magic of the market will make homes affordable. To which there are three responses: no it won’t, no it won’t and no it won’t. It’s been well established that, no matter how incentivised developers might be by our often “reformed” planning system, they won’t build at rates that lower the value of their products. So Reeves, too, has to embrace a truth taboo in modern politics, that you can’t always leave everything to the private sector.
Prigozhin’s poor taste
One of the joys of the downfall of powerful brutes is the revelation of their unfailingly revolting homes. So it is with the St Petersburg mansion of the former chef and unsuccessful mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose multi-arched exterior looks like a path not taken in 1980s domestic electronic hardware design. Its interior is a chatbot’s answer to the request “design me something classy”, a mismatch of hardwood, marble, ironwork, pot plants and swoopy iron balustrades, for which you hope his contractors outrageously overcharged. Given the murkiness of Russian politics, a Prigozhin comeback can’t be ruled out, but we’ll always have the comfort of knowing that no sentient being would want to live in his house.
Call out hate speech
“If you see a Terf,” said Sarah Jane Baker, a speaker at last weekend’s Trans Pride in London, “punch them in the fucking face.” (A “Terf” is a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, a usually hostile term for someone who believes that you cannot change your sex, and that therefore trans women are men.) As a number of pro-trans organisations and individuals have since said, this is an incitement to violence against women, both unacceptable and no help to trans people. It enables the rightwing press, as they duly did, to portray what was a celebratory and positive event as an act of hate.
The police, in a dangerous over-reaction, under pressure from the home secretary, Suella Braverman, have now arrested Baker. A round of polarised vituperation, of the kind sadly typical of culture wars, has broken out on social media. The only way out of such destruction is for all parties to call out wrong on their own side. As a trans ally, I’d like to join others in saying what’s plain: there’s no place for statements like Baker’s.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
