The John Dickie Column: Quality housing is still possible in Northampton

All those clever forward planners with their endless visions and cunning plans have realised, in the current climate of despair, that maybe it would be a good idea to encourage more people to live in the town centre.

If it helps I will stand on my step and clap, but I have to warn you, when we were a Labour administration back in the golden age of visions and plans (except we didn’t call it Northampton Forward and have bags of government money dangled in front of us) we called it ‘living above the shop’.

And frankly we were not original. When the town centre was largely small, locally- owned specialist shops, the owners – the butchers, the bakers and probably the candlestick makers – lived on the premises.

When we tried to replicate the Mr Bun the Baker scenario, we ran into difficulties. The multiples didn’t want provincial hobble-de-hoys strolling through their shops after closing time and, more significantly, the London property boys who owned most of the property didn’t approve of sub-tenants who might damage their investments by breathing all over the place.

They only saw Abington Street as a financial asset; a living, breathing lively town centre was not on their agenda.

How times change. The large stores and the chains have either gone online or moved to shopping parks. Who needs shops?

Their developers’ solution? Cop a packet from the government (ie us) and build blocks of ugly urban tenements in order to maximise the use of space and minimise the quality of life for the tenants.

The core of their argument appears to be that young people will accept any old shoebox, as long as they can escape quickly for a drink.

Contemplating the designs on offer, I am reminded of Malvina Reynolds’ song;

“Little boxes, little boxes on a hillside, they’re all made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same”.

She was singing about a development of rabbit hutches in Daly City, outside San Francisco, and that is an accurate description

having once visited the ER room there.

But of course it doesn’t have to be like that. There is a desperate need for decent housing in this town. There is especially a need for affordable housing for all age groups. It needs to be accessible to services, spacious and within a healthy environment.

After World War One, David Lloyd George declared that this country should build ‘homes fit for heroes’ and do you know what? That happened.

It was called municipal housing. Northampton saw a huge growth in council house building. Estates like those in Kingsley were built to high architectural standards with spacious gardens and, for the time, modern facilities.

Some of the flats in Spring Boroughs that were built in the late 20s to early 30s were elegant modern buildings, with flowing lines and large airy rooms; echoes of the then modern German designs.

It was perhaps no coincidence that a leading councillor on the housing committee at the time was the socialist, W Bassett-Lowke.

It is possible to build quality housing so unlike what is going on at the moment. Rowan Moore, in The Observer (September 27), said: “Across England, a policy designed to open the planning system to the market, has resulted in social catastrophe. Converting office blocks into homes has led to thousands of people living in tiny flats, far from schools, shops, transport and green spaces The scandal is that for many, there is nowhere better to go.”

Northampton can do better, but with the active participation of our citizens, that’s why I welcome the re-creation of the town’s Civic Society, and not a fatuous organisation called ‘Northampton Forward’ that appears to be a board consisting of a couple of councillors, a passing property company and a university, a theatre and a shoe factory.

The government has announced that in any conversions they will enforce minimum standards for flats; the recommendations have been endorsed by the Town and Country Planning Association (authors of the proposed Healthy Homes Bill). I hope that will warn off any speculative developer as well as the strangely coy ‘Northampton Forward’.