CRTB: Building a Consensus

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Matt Wood

This piece on a Neighbourhood Plan emerging in Norton and Malton caught my eye, and has some resonance with some of my earlier observations about the Community Right to Build. Continue reading →

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Cheer up, The Guardian!

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Matt Wood

The Guardian Housing Network blog posted a ‘social housing gallery’ last week. I told them I thought it was a bit bleak, and that I’d rummage out some of my own snaps of council housing in Norfolk, to cheer them up a bit. Continue reading →

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The Cork Rural Design Guide

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Matt Wood

In a recent post I talked about the impact that local ‘design guides’ might have on how developers approach the design of new housing, and previously I’d talked a bit about the Norfolk Residential Design Guide. I noted that aside from David Summers’ rather lovely but stylistically indefinite sketches, it is illustrated primarily with pictures of either old buildings or modern buildings in a pastiche/reproduction style. The text briefly claims that ‘it is not the intention of this Guide to specify how buildings look…It is not intended to stifle creative design or just to create a pastiche of the traditional village street’…but the illustrations and photos do seem to pull in a different direction. The Cork Rural Design Guide is not so cagey…
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Community Right to Build: It’s All Gone a Bit Quiet.

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Matt Wood

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the Community Right to Build (CRTB) initiative, you might be forgiven for thinking it’s gone a bit quiet recently. This is partly true; the initial flurry of interest in the press following the publication of the Localism Bill in December, and its second reading at the end of January, has abated somewhat. There is also a slight shift in terminology, with the CRTB now being presented as the simplest form of the new Neighbourhood Plan process outlined in the Bill. There is still a steady stream of interest in the CRTB however.

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On ‘Local Distinctiveness’

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Matt Wood

In my previous post I reflected on the complex issue of ‘local distinctiveness’. Back in 2006 I attended a seminar run by the English Historic Towns Forum entitled ‘Designing for Housing Growth: Sustaining Historic Towns’, and was quite alarmed by the drift of the conversation in some of the ‘break-out sessions’. The following is based on a letter I wrote to the EHTF subsequently, cautioning against over-simplification of the issue:

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Local Materials Faux Pas

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Matt Wood

While writing the recent posts on local building materials, I was thinking about an estate in Wymondham called Whispering Oaks. The development is set at the very northern tip of the town, over a mile from the town centre and separated from it by 1930s and 50s ribbon-development along the old Norwich Road, and the Ashley Estate, a vast swathe of suburb laid out during the 1960s and 70s. This post-war development is the real context for Whispering Oaks, but the design-guide that supported its outline consent and subsequently informed its detailed design was dominated by pictures of Wymondham’s mediaeval town centre and also, inexplicably, the centre of the picturesque village of Hingham, over five miles away. Continue reading →

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Building Norfolk

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Matt Wood

Matthew Rice’s book ‘Building Norfolk’ attracted quite a lot of attention when it was published last year; not surprisingly. It is a beautiful book full of exuberant, colourful drawings. I could write a whole other post, lamenting the death of hand-drawn images in architecture or even one agreeing with Rice’s preference for drawing over photograph in capturing the essence or character of a building. Instead I’m going to be a bit critical.

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Norfolk’s ‘High-Road’ Buildings

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Matt Wood

As I explained in a previous post Stewart Brand in his excellent book ‘How Buildings Learn’ makes a distinction between ‘high road’ or special buildings and ‘low road’ or normal, everyday buildings. I also noted that the vast majority of what we see in the Norfolk landscape are in the latter class; they are the cottages, farmhouses and agricultural buildings which punctuate the matrix of fields, hedgerows and copses and even account for most of the pre C20th fabric of most small settlements. These are workaday buildings made for the most part of the ‘stuff’ that grows on or is scraped out of the earth. The last two posts, on Norfolk ‘stuff’, focussed on these architecturally modest buildings (primarily because the main thesis of Ruralise is that this is where architects ‘must try harder’), but it would seem remiss not to briefly describe Norfolk’s ‘high-road’ heritage. Continue reading →

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More Norfolk ‘Stuff’

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Matt Wood

So the vast majority of Norfolk is covered in brick-built houses with pan-tiled roofs, with plenty of surviving older timber-framed buildings, typically rendered over and painted – but that’s not the end of the story, of course. Continue reading →

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Greetings from Legoland

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Matt Wood

This week, Housing Minister Grant Shapp’s wrote to the Design Council, which has taken over the charred remains of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), torched in the Coalition’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’. He urged them to support local communities in demanding high quality, locally distinctive architecture from the developers and (fingers crossed) architects involved in their Neighbourhood Plan and Community Right to Build projects. Shapps writes: Continue reading →

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