Clearly enough, one of the factors keeping house prices so high is scarcity. It is a classic case of demand exceeding supply, with the planning system acting as a brake on the market to keep supply low and demand high. Chancellor Gordon Brown is known to favour building lots more homes in order to moderate this economic distortion. And the only way to build lots more homes while trying to keep as much of the countryside as possible is to build dense. To pile people together.
So when people talk of density, how dense is dense? Even on a good, award-winning low-density private housing development in the rural fringes, you'll be lucky to find many more than 35 dwellings per hectare (14 per acre), and often far fewer. Go up a notch and you find greenfield developments regarded as exemplary- such as Countryside Homes' "Abode" estate in Harlow by architects Proctor Matthews - at 43 per hectare or 17 per acre. Check out the "brownfield" sites (old hospitals, airfields and so forth) and you're looking at 50 to 60 per hectare (20 to 24 per acre). Finally, go to the prestige high-density city apartment developments such as developer Urban Splash's Timber Wharf in Manchester by architect Glenn Howells, and that comes in at 367 dwellings per hectare (149 per acre). So we tend to build up to ten times as densely in the city as we do in the countryside. Clearly, urban is more efficient. But can it be just as attractive?
High-density is good if you don't fancy the idea of the permanent loss of huge tracts of the countryside. Good if you like an urban buzz. But not the thing at all, if you're one of those who wants precisely that now officially discredited suburban ideal. Huge numbers of us aspire to just that, and it's not surprising. For generations, we have been taught by everyone from starry-eyed Utopianists to hard-nosed planning professionals that fewer people to the acre is healthy. The Victorians associated high density housing with disease epidemics, crime, and social disorder. It's what made them demolish the swathes of slums they called "rookeries". It's what drove the whole Garden City movement in the early 20th century, leading to such London satellite towns as Letchworth and Welwyn. And so on to the "new" low-density city of Milton Keynes, laid out from the 1960s to the 1980s, where the later housing layouts, taking their cue from private housebuilders, became very suburban indeed.
When architectural modernism arrived in the inter-war years, its manifesto position was space, light and health: which as it happens was also the sales pitch of the speculative builders of inter-war suburban estates, the Metroland phenomenon. But whereas the modern urban architects were prepared to build high in order to get their space and light, the spec builders, busy making suburbs, knew what the buyers wanted: to each his or her personal Shangri-La with a stained-glass galleon in the window, and please nothing more cheek-by-jowl than a semi-detached.
