“I feel somehow / That it isn’t going to
last,”
Philip Larkin wrote in “Going, Going,” his lament for the English
countryside — that development would soon cover everything green and pleasant
on his isle:
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And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Larkin wrote these words in 1972. On the
basis of a trip through England and Scotland this summer, I can report that his
fears were premature.
British conservatism, of which Larkin was an eccentric
representative, has always had a stronger conservationist streak than its
American cousin. And
the greener sort of Toryism can take pride in the
landscape of its island home: the greenbelts encircling the major cities, the
compact and ancient-looking towns, the country lanes still made for carriages,
even if you’re allowed to squeeze a minivan through.
Unfortunately this preservation has a stink
of embalmment about it. At a time when Europe as a whole looks stagnant
relative to the United States, Britain has joined Italy as the continent’s
sickest patient: its living standards falling well behind its neighbors, its
economy stuck in a 15-year torpor, and its public services, including the
vaunted National Health Service, in a condition of generally acknowledged
decay.
The Conservative Party, in power for most
of this period, is often blamed for backing post-financial crisis austerity and
lurching into Brexit. But the deeper problem is the Tories’ imprisonment by a
dispositional rather than ideological conservatism — the fact that their base
is older, propertied, and seemingly content to preserve Larkin’s beloved
landscape by making it impossible to build or develop anywhere.
Again, this is a general problem for rich and
aging countries, but Britain has taken it to an extreme; not since the 1870s,
according to one estimate, have home prices been so extraordinarily high
compared with wages. This punishes the younger generation in the short term and
deepens longer-term stagnation delaying marriages and kids. It also interacts
in toxic ways with cultural debates, because
governments seeking growth have
chosen to increase immigration even as their development plans falter — which
does increase gross domestic product somewhat, but also makes the immigrants
themselves look like agents of rising house prices, adding to the miasma of
mistrust.
I feel somehow / That it isn’t going to last,” Philip Larkin wrote in “Going, Going,” his lament for the English countryside — that development would soon cover everything green and pleasant on his isle
For a long view of the British housing
deficit, I recommend “Why Britain Doesn’t Build,” an essay by Samuel Watling in
the online journal Works in Progress, which describes the urbanist vision of
post-World War II Britain’s central planning commission: a system of
densely-populated “New Towns,” connected by rail to the London hub, with plenty
of protected countryside in between.
But planners underestimated opposition to
dense building even in the “New Town” areas, while areas deemed “green belt”
became impossible to reclassify, so there was always less density and more
protected land that the initial vision assumed. Then as
Britain grew wealthier and more people became homeowners, the opposition to new building deepened, and
the central authority was left with notional power but no mandate — unable to
either decentralize and deregulate or to simply force new building through.
During our summer trip the Tories were once
more banging their heads against this wall, with Cabinet secretary Michael Gove
proposing a new urban development, with up to 250,000 homes, around the
university town of Cambridge — and earning a swift rebuke from a
local Conservative MP, who called Gove’s vision “nonsense plans.”
At a time when Europe as a whole looks stagnant relative to the United States, Britain has joined Italy as the continent's sickest patient
In a way it feels uncharitable for an
American to critique this attitude, given how much my family enjoyed our rural
peregrinations. But that, too, is part of the problem: There is money in
selling the museum experience to the American cousins, but it leaves Britain
bifurcated into a
financial economy and a tourist economy, with general
prosperity out of reach.
Let me end on a more optimistic note,
however. Maybe this just reflects the route we took, but where we did see new
developments in the United Kingdom, they were often significantly lovelier than
the American equivalent. In Gove, a partisan of “beautiful and popular”
development, and in King Charles III, a builder of experimental townships with
traditional forms, the U.K. has some leaders who appreciate a legitimate reason
that people fear new building — the dreariness that characterizes so much
contemporary architecture, whether cheap suburban sprawl or
“starchitect”-designed monstrosities.
Britain has been spared some of this
ugliness by its zeal for preservation. Ideally, then, the kingdom would be
converted back to
growth and youthful hope while remaining a custodian of
beauty — so that dynamism need not mean the end of the guildhalls and carved
choirs, but many more buildings worthy of such poetry.
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