At the moment, they are at the hardest stage of any building project, and are finding what it feels like for architects: getting everything costed, and finding it costs too much. But the Hemingways have an innate optimism that the tide is flowing in the right direction. “It’s a massive job making changes in housebuilding,” says Wayne, “But the great thing is that Wimpey really wants to do it. I think they want to be the first mass housebuilder to break the mould.”
You get the impression that the Hemingways - determined people that they are, and prepared to plunge more or less full-time into what was originally meant to be just a consultancy - have given Wimpey a high old time. The director of Wimpey’s City Living division, Ronnie Baird, phrases it thus: “Wayne and Gerardine have brought a whole new way of working to the table. They have questioned practices and policies that we and every other volume housebuilder have taken for granted for decades and in doing so, have produced plans that we think will send the whole industry back to their drawing boards.”
Fightin’ talk, as they say on Tyneside. Car-free developments, new materials, children-friendly landscapes, new and varied house designs - will it work? The key to all this will be management and security. If this were an old-fashioned council estate, the whole concept would fall to pieces the moment the underground garages became danger zones, and the council stopped maintaining the landscape. But as London’s Barbican Estate shows, good management is all that is needed to keep the concept functioning smoothly. Since Wimpey is building an estate of private homes - almost all for sale rather than rent - the management and residents’ groups can be expected to look after the place in their own self-interest. Wayne Hemingway’s attitude is that he want people to come there because of what it is - which means he doesn’t want people who feel they have to park their cars two feet from their front door.
It looks promising. But it’s important to realize that neither Wimpey nor the other big housebuilders are going to suddenly change their standard house types overnight. Wimpey is perfectly open about this - while people continue to buy the old products, they will build them. While, one might add, reaping the PR rewards of high-profile developments such as this.
For all its ingenuity, Gateshead’s Staithes South Bank is an urban riverside development, a building type where higher design standards are by no means unknown. Things are very different out on the edges of towns and cities, where the cluster bombs of dumb cod-historical housing continue to be scattered across the green fields of Britain. Perhaps Wimpey or one of its rivals might like to interest Wayne and Gerardine - and some of our promising rising young architects, say - to tackle that seemingly most intractable of design problems. That way, the Gateshead experiment might not turn out to be a one-off.
