#27 - Nicholas Boys Smith

0:00Nicholas Boys Smith, welcome to the podcast. Could you tell us what your involvement in Create Streets is and what Create Streets does as an organisation?

0:09Nicholas Boys Smith:Well, Bruce, thank you very, very much for inviting me. It's lovely to be sort of Zoom talking to you. And apologies, because I know it's been a while we've been trying to set this up. So sorry that the state of my diary has kept has kept malignly mucking up our plans. What's my involvement with Create Streets? Well, I set up, I founded Create Streets. So I guess that's quite deep involvement. For me, it's very much a second, I believe even a third career. And I set it up, I think legally in 2012, though actually only resigned my job to do it full time at the end of 2013. Create Streets is actually technically two entities.

0:51Nicholas Boys Smith:It's a social enterprise, Create Streets Limited, and it is a registered charity, Create Streets Foundation. um and they obviously they're related but from slightly different roles um at its heart creates streets and its kernel you might say does research into the relationships between place where we spend our days as humans as neighborhoods as as families as communities and outcomes for humans and for humanity you know where are we happy where do we lead happier healthier lives where do we speak to our neighbours more what will encourage us to support new developments what will give us confidence about the future what will diminish that confidence where where can developers make money we've no problem with that what types of property and place don't just sort of make money in the short term what guard their value over the long term what places are resilient you know what why what are the challenges of tower blocks or the advantages or indeed the challenges of other of other urban morphologies and forms you know what blocks i say so that's if you like that's the heart of what we do and then we um we bring that to life by caring a lot about the reality of placemaking and the stewardship of existing places so we support councils landowners developers a bit less more landowners or councils land promoters more than developers and above all community and neighborhood groups in making places more healthy and happy and beautiful and resilient um and we do that mainly by um well i guess we we're perhaps a little bit too too wide for quite a small only 10 of us but quite a small organization um so we do master planning we do design coding if you like we do strategic advice to people who can change things i used to be a strategy consultant a long time ago so I think we're quite good at trying to get to the key questions and cut out the rubbish we do a lot of community engagement sometimes literally working for the community often not and we've got our methodology for that we've got an online platform and we've got different ways of doing that and then obviously we continue to publish research and essays and we we publish our own things we publish obviously for the mainstream media we publish in the specialist media we occasionally publish things in academic journals a bit a bit less often but we sort of keep up a steady a steady trickle of that um and my just to finally answer your question my um so i obviously i set it up and i you know it was literally me in the dining room for some years um carefully replying to contact emails without without um without necessarily signing my name to give the impression it was more than just me um i'm now the chair of crate streets and my superbly uh talented and hard-working and brilliant colleague david milner is the is full-time managing director so he he takes day-to-day leadership uh with consultants to montigny and eleanor abroad and i then help oversee that bringing new clients and also growing the the foundation and that if you like that that wider movement i'll press pause on myself there because that was probably far too long an answer to a very simple question yeah so you're sort of half the audience already sorry everyone effectively a sort of think tank combined with a consultancy firm on urban design really aren't you it's you sort of advise people but also you're producing research sort of for its own sake in a way yeah we i mean we call ourselves a um uh we call ourselves a a design practice town builder in a think tank um so we're quite you know we're deep but narrow you might say you know we're we're hang on i'm just going to lost i think hopefully you're still there you know we're interested in everything uh that happens in terms of those relationships in place doing it and thinking about it and researching and writing about it yeah and you've been involved as well with various government initiatives and organizations we first met uh on the building better building beautiful commission uh and since then you've still not still not easy to say after five years not too many bees and there's an adverb missing sorry i keep interrupting you keep going bruce and you were involved after that with the office for place isn't that right that's correct yes yeah which was part of mhclg is that um i always wondered how far did you actually get in that organization like what was actually ultimately achieved at the end in terms of what policies actually ended up feeding through into legislation or into planning policy changes?

5:11Nicholas Boys Smith:So quite a lot changed and indeed is still changing in consequence of the Building Better Beautiful Commission and indeed associated work before and afterwards. Every policy change tends to have lots of parents and lots of tendrils leading to it um so there were um there have been i think three iterations of the national planning policy framework which reflect some of the work that i and others did either on that commission or subsequently um uh including actually one under under this government so a series of um changes to the expectation of community engagement to the expectation of good design to the definition of sustainable placemaking to specific things such as a requirement for street trees on new streets the level of support for design codes for mansard uplift a series of the components of the leveling up and regen act moving to a sort of more certain planning framework which is not yet promulgated through secondary legislation which i believe is know is is is now starting to be so-called national development management policies um um so you know a whole series of things have changed um obviously the requirement for beauty in in placemaking which um was cut back a bit by the new government when they unpicked some of michael gove's final mppf and in my view rightly and he knows i think this putting back um uh firmer house building targets into the system um but nevertheless the key ones changed and interestingly actually when they got they got criticized i think more than they the new government were criticized more than i think they anticipated on stripping back some of the references to beauty and interesting their defense was very interesting which was we're not taking it out of the system which is true they weren't um we're just taking out some of the references which is also true that is what they were doing so so i think it was sort of it was quite a sort of oddly in their defense of their partial um step back i think in a way they conceded the key point so i'm happy to take that as a as a partial win um and then we were delighted that some work that ed and david in my office led on uh sustainable extensions to existing places issues of active travel issues of transport um were then reflected in uh also in the nppf last year in terms of uh planning for transport and predict and provide versus a vision validate and actually accepting that we might want to create places where we're not just assuming infinite car use we're also delighted actually in the announcement the other day um on public transport which were very prominently put trams first so again that's something that you know we create streets have been set up our own trams network and we've been banging this drum now for some years so i think whereas the debate some years ago was very much trains or buses i think rightly because trams i think are critical to placemaking and gentle density we've got that now firmly in the national debate so yeah look you it's a bit like the police we're never gonna we're never gonna run out of things to do um but uh it feels like conversations about place about brownfield passports about popular preferences about gentle density about public transport about trams are sort of much more prominently there yeah and i won't say without disagreement because obviously there have been disagreements on things such as 50-minute cities and low traffic neighborhoods so you know and that's right there should there should be i mean you know this is a legitimate area for for political debate um but we're reasonably comfortable that things continue to move on the whole in the right direction.

8:45Nicholas Boys Smith:Clearly there will be challenges with the massively increased housing targets and the existential need for more homes. Is there a risk that some of that leads to some pretty bad development on appeal? Yeah, there clearly is. Do you think the argument around beauty has finally been depoliticised or is there still an element of it being seen by those more on the left as a sort of right-wing agenda that's all to do with like traditionalism and this kind of thing or is it is the sort of the science around the importance of beauty from a psychological perspective and that sort of thing and the importance of high quality design is that fed through do you think to be a sort of politically non-partisan issue now um so um oddly i don't think it was that part partisan in a party political sense in the technical terms you ask the question at all even at the start so you know was the criticism of the commission that uh roger chaired and latterly roger and i chaired together yes there was was it made but it was mainly i mean bluntly from architects now quite a lot of them probably are i mean i've not i've no insight into how they vote but yes i I think it's probably fair to say that many of the architects criticising most publicly are on the left.

10:01Nicholas Boys Smith:I don't know that, but I think based on the way in which they did it, the terms they chose to use, I think that probably is true. I mean, the Labour Party, then in opposition, didn't really respond in those terms. They said, look, just crack on with building more homes, you're not hitting your target, which is a fair comment. And it was then, I think, very interesting. the response to the commission report, which we published, obviously, in January 2020, just a couple of short months before the COVID wave broke upon us all, and obviously shortly after Roger's death. Actually, a response from the architecture community, including, I would speculate, mainly on the left, I was going to say it was mooted.

10:44Nicholas Boys Smith:I think it was more positive than that. It was actually pretty positive. I mean, people like David Rudlin, several prize winners and prominent architects you know, Reba welcomed it. So I think we, in the, I hope this is certainly what we were trying to do in the terms and the tone that we took in the range of support and references we got in our, I hope, overwhelmingly clear empirical adumbration of the case for more popular and beautiful places I think we were able to bring sorry, I've got one of my colleagues making lots of noise over there um is that is that coming through or you can can you hear me okay no i can't hear that i can hear you fine um uh so we were able to um uh set out i think something that most people could sign up to not everyone uh and then i think quite tellingly in the run-up to the last election you know the then opposition actually worked with with with my team with create streets to think about what some of the outlines and the approach to new towns should be and indeed we published stuff with the Labour Party in opposition.

11:45Nicholas Boys Smith:And then obviously since then, I think the new government has talked about some of these themes in slightly different language, perhaps a little bit more mechanistically, perhaps a little bit less emotively, but essentially talking about the same thing. I mean, I think they'll put a little less focus on it probably, but sustainable, attractive, politically defensible placemaking is clearly still part of the agenda. know they've upped they've upped the the push on that in the in the mppf in some ways so i'm not i would slightly question whether it was ever that political in it with a big p um and i think if if some who don't like the idea that you make popular places that people like if they want to see that in political terms you know i think um arguing against the wider views of the public is it's never a very good way to do your politics um you know we've got such a robust evidence base on this now in multiple visual preference surveys in pricing studies in human behavior studies if you create places that people like which is quite a predictably easy thing to do um you know between 70 and 90 percent of the public will support it it's really quite a consistent range um uh and that's associated with higher values i mean so i mean yeah fine argue against that if you really want to um i'd rather be on my side of the argument because i think we're going to win yeah i think from the from the sort of architectural establishment perspective i think it was probably more ideological and stylistic than it was political that it was there was still such a hangover of certain design philosophies and there was a skepticism that there was this sort of group of people coming along saying oh everything must be georgian uh and that's not what anyone has ever said exactly and there was it was obviously a false perception but i think there was a perception there that there's sort of the classicists were attempting to come in and sort of dictate to everything that everything must be classical this kind of thing uh which obviously wasn't true and i think when the architectural establishment realized that that actually this wasn't a stylistic agenda it wasn't a political agenda it was just about quality whatever quality means that that was something they could much more easily support and therefore got on board and it was good to see that they have got got on board and are still on more to this day yes i mean let me be provocative um uh so i agree i agree with what you just said um but but i think it is important to make the distinction which is certainly the outcome of our work would be not that thou must use a georgian sash window but that if that's where you know what people want locally ends up that's fine too um and i think there is a there's certainly some who was who would literally want to ban that as as an inappropriate and a dishonest response to you know modernity and that we wouldn't agree with that but by the same token if if you ended up with a more heterodox textured uh coherently complex response to the place using some range of traditional materials in a slightly new way um that's that's fine too it's got to just be something that you can get that popular support so we can be creating those homes that we desperately need and making it easier for people tread more lightly upon the planet yeah yeah and i think that's fair um you mentioned new towns the obviously the labor government hasn't come across come out with exactly where they're going to be proposing and what they're going to be proposing yet as far as i'm aware no they haven't do you think that a do you think that will happen if it does happen will it be entirely state run or will they attempt to do it in some form of partnership with existing developers and if it does happen are they likely to succeed in doing it well well there's lots of questions there um let me put them in order i think the first one's easiest to answer so yes you know that uh they they set up a new towns commission uh which needs to report by next month if i remember my uh diary correctly um they had an interim report to do within six months which they did um which was a bit thin i think it's fair to say i mean that's not i mean maybe that was all they felt they could go public with i didn't really get there i thought the interim report that hopefully they're holding their powder dry um i think if i if i had been advising government on the speed in the process on this which i wasn't i would have told them to go much faster and i think i think they gave them too long um and you know parliament's only five years long and we're you know basically a year in now um and these things were never going to be quick anyway so um you know i think i think i think they could and should have given a shorter brief on that um will they be entirely state run no i can't imagine that's doable so uh will there be a little bit of pressure in that direction probably um obviously there are new powers for compulsory purchase under under actually the michael gove leveling up a regen act so will they make use of that i would imagine so um what are they and how good are they and when will they be delivered i can't give you that question because i don't know neither does anyone else um i think there is a risk that they end up being um too much what the the volume house bills would want to do anyway a two-car based without a real middle i was a little disappointed i've said this publicly in the terms of reference which uh we we create streets and in a way drafted the proto version of the terms of reference and i think they ended up a bit watered down when by the time they actually got delivered to um the new towns task force i mean not disastrous so i mean i think you could still do a really good job with what you've got i know there's some excellent civil servants and advisors uh working in the task force and working supporting it so i'm i remain hopeful um i know there i know there are people within mhclg who get it um uh we published um end of last year i think uh we published our report on new town our second report on new towns actually suggesting the principles for creating them suggesting how to create them and actually listing i think 13 uh 12 plus baker's dozen 12 plus one places to put them and we were you know quite clear principles linked to areas where you've got high unmet housing measured through social housing waiting lists, market prices, homelessness, ones ideally that make use of existing or already planned infrastructure.

17:41Nicholas Boys Smith:Because the idea of trying to sort of, you know, be building a new train line to do this or a new this or a new that, it's just going to take too long, given our current incapacity to create infrastructure, anything like appropriate speeds. We are minnows compared to our Victorian predecessors on this. So we suggested a series of places along the Elizabeth line, various lines linking in across the south of the midlands and southeast of england we suggested massive extensions to cambridge relying on some of the existing work done on trams there clearly you know if cambridge had the land prices it had in the 19th century that it does now it would have doubled and it clearly should do that to what degree will the new town's task force government take an approach like that i mean i honestly don't know they've certainly got quite several people saying that type of thing but they've got they'll have volume house builders saying look just allow us to build what we normally do and it'll be fine and which which it won't be and we've got to move from house building to town building and the problem is with the single partial exception of milton keynes which is a slightly odd case um i think it's fair to say that none of the new towns built post-war have been a proper success um we just have lost the skills of how to do this um there is no one alive today who has properly worked in this country on creating a thoroughly successful new town.

19:01Nicholas Boys Smith:I'd say with a partial exception, Milton Keynes, which does have some strengths. Well, I think it's because all the new towns were built during the automobile era, weren't they, when the philosophy of the hangovers of Garden City sort of merged into thou shalt drive everywhere. Yes, plus town centres. Cumbernauld was obviously the iconic ideal, but fortunately that was the worst. Well, I think it's so difficult to get away from that. Even the extensions to Cambridge, a lot of which have been praised, some of them, to my own mind, really don't meet the necessities of what makes a good place. You're looking at very, very blocky, spread out, only four or five story apartment buildings, mostly with far too much gap between them.

19:56and not enough density and not enough actual thought as to what makes a sort of coherent streetscape rather than the sort of expansive and i know they're cheap to build so you can build like a nice concrete frame and cover it in slip bricks and you're done but no one seems to realize that that's exactly what was done in the 1960s and it does not age well and it does not turn itself into a nice uh coherent place i couldn't agree more i mean i've i know i've upset

20:24Nicholas Boys Smith:some of the team and the architects and urban designers have been working on some of those by being quite critical of them i mean look they're i think i'd be a little bit more supportive of their density and their urban morphology which i think on the whole is as good or certainly better than most stuff we've sort of coughed up in the last 30 years um they are greening up so you know they've planted them quite nicely and as they age they're getting a bit better because you know some of the trees and the bushes are slightly shielding the poor residents from the um chilly east anglian wins that otherwise other than you know for two months of the year blow heartlessly across that part of the country i've spent lots of time in cambridge so i'm being a bit i'm being a bit silly um uh but interesting actually one of our fellows and a former employee of great streets uh who wrote i care about one of my books with she used to live in eddington i think from memory which is one of the developments that you're referring to i think it's i mean she said this publicly so i think i can say i mean she basically hated it she thought it was totally heartless and sort of soul destroying and i don't think that was the main reason that she and her boyfriend went to live in Germany but but I think it was one of the underpinning ones actually was that they couldn't get anywhere nice to live um and you know they were working living and working in Cambridge and actually it was a little bit heartless um and yes it's because the love isn't there I mean I was speaking to one of the um you know senior people who've been very involved who was quite upset by what I said I didn't mean that I hope we but it's a technocratic response to a human need it's treating the man as a computer it is better than I think than what was done 50 years ago because i think the urban morphology is better i think the design is a little bit better but there's just there's just no love in it it's it's it's heartless there's no soul there's no ornament there's no there's always a little bit of texture um it's just too mechanistic and and it's the classics of emperor's new clothes everyone sees that other than the designers who think that it's a contextual response because they've used slip bricks that sort of vaguely reference um cambridge yellow bricks which they sort of vaguely do they're not red but it's just just not enough.

22:17Nicholas Boys Smith:At least they've been built, which is a good thing. At the risk of offending facade engineers as a profession, I am very sceptical of the idea that you can have a, what, 50, 100 mil deep skin on your building that constitutes the pretty bit that can be sort of outsourced by the developer to say, okay, we're going to spend this much on whatever it is to satisfy the planners that we're not just building a concrete box. And it's just not enough. You just can't have a sort of coherent place with a depth of feeling in the buildings where you're using repetitive patterns with very thin mechanistic systems.

23:04Nicholas Boys Smith:Sorry, keep going, Bruce. Yeah, no, I just think there's a philosophy, and part of it comes out of generative design, which I used to do a lot of, using repeating patterns. over and over again and panel systems and this kind of thing there's a over engineering and an over standardization of the external aesthetics of buildings and there's insufficient variety in my opinion an insufficient depth of integration of the ornamentation or the aesthetics of a building into the actual design and the layout of the building itself to give that sort of depth of feeling within a streetscape and within a building line and you just like modern construction just doesn't know how to do that and refuses to do it because it's more expensive yeah i mean i i'm curious so i certainly agree with you most of the time uh and the vast majority of the sort of you know new vernacular buildings that you see you know concrete flames brick slips are just sort of tedious to the to the to the point of um uh of misery um there are some buildings which i think a brick slip but actually i'm not always checked which i'm sort of you know which i think a rise above that so i can think of some ones i've seen in in uh in kansas and chelsea i can think of actually some ones there where i live in oval where they have put a little bit more love and texture in there and certainly superficially it works um it's possible they're not all brick slip and actually they've got they've got real bricks there you get so cynical that you don't believe i mean certainly you know most of them you know you do see the the um the joins and you can see this and you're just very aware that you know the bits of plastic that are holding it together are going to fail in 20 years and it gets tripped off again um i'm also very aware um i i'm aware of two housing associations big housing associations you've heard of in this country where the board are very worried about the quality of what they've built over the last 20 years and in some cases making uh unfavorable recommend you know references to you know much older stuff um which is not great is it yeah on the uh there's a funny example i've encountered recently which is the new everton stadium in liverpool where they i think i think the council insisted on them not using brick brick slips so what they did was create pre-cast panels of full bricks yeah just attached to each panel and then put on in exactly the same way that you would use a brick slip but it looks like their brick slips they just weigh three times as much and cost more and how the panel joins i'm not i've not seen or looked at how the panel well like like all the panels already just you can tell they're panelized you can tell they're not in any way it's structurally integrated not that they necessarily have to be because you think about the victoria a lot of victorian buildings that use terracotta they're all terracotta panels on steel frames so there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with using a panelized system if it's done well and done with sufficient complexity the problem is they standardize it so much so you've got a minimum number of typologies or minimum number of variations and then put them in a standard pattern that bears no real relation to what's going on in the building and has no sort of larger formal complexity and therefore it results in a sort of um sort of monocular um single entity single block building that doesn't have any real visual complexity especially from a distance i mean i talk about coherent complexity by which i mean as you get close you get that texture that stone or brick or wood organic materials give i mean metal can but you know an ornament can give detail but then as you step away from it it resolves itself into some sort of pattern probably with some embodied symmetries within it and probably with some form of representative or symbolic or biomorphic forms in it and you know it's just time after time that's what most people prefer not not everyone but most of the time and yes it's something that we are currently struggling to do and i i i do i do remember the view that i think it's more to do weirdly you may may disagree with this but i actually think it's more to do with philosophy than with cost i mean you can do crap really cheaply and that is a that is a challenge in a way we couldn't in the 18th century so you know if you look at um uh the flaxman maltings the earliest sort of iron frame building in the world uh you know it's bricks you know between the iron frame because it sort of has to be and it's actually rather nice and and the the the iron frame inside is expressed through these sort of slightly misproportionate little sort of doric um iron columns and it's all rather lovely um you you cannot just stick up a huge great metal shed on the m1 now you know 10 minutes at a fraction of the price per square meter so that we can do real rubbish really cheaply um but i was i was in i was in doha a few weeks ago and i was very struck i'm going to misremember my names here there's a i won't say the name of the suit because i'll i'll mispronounce it or get it slightly wrong but there's um a historic souk um uh where the port used to be which basically partly burnt down 30 40 years ago and had lost lots of its original material original buildings anyway they rebuilt it using original uh techniques so it's basically just bricks with uh i'll say plaster you know a form of lime mortar of some some some description using no doubt local materials all lovingly ornamented using local patterns it's quite cheap really i mean it's quite it's quite simple actually um and then around the corner there's a again quite a well-designed urbanistically much higher density uh new quarter allies and morrison's i think from memory with a master planner as though a range of architects were involved um and it is responding in some degree to um arabic patterns and textures and forms but only sort of superficially and it's much more expensive the material i mean you've got you've got expensive stones um i'm sure the price of square foot was astronomical um it doesn't actually have anything anything like the love or the humanity that the much cheaper much lower admittedly uh suit around the corner does and it was very striking as i walked around in the evenings uh the souk was full i mean jammed and the new neighborhood you know had a smashing of people people were using it they're walking through but certainly much better than the traffic modernism of much of the middle east i mean much better i mean infinitely preferable but it had nothing like the vitality or life or you know public appeal that the that the um that the rebuild did around the corner uh and yes that had that bimorphic texture and detail in it which they they sort of hinted at but just hadn't got to yeah yeah i assume have you read uh nico salingaris's book uh theory of architecture which talks a lot about uh all of the the fractal scaling laws and that kind of thing highly recommend to anyone no i i i nick os is a friend of mine yes yeah um yeah no i think it's i can understand why developers do it um like as a developer myself now you're in that different position of making cost quality trade-offs and having to say okay well yes i can do this extra thing which will look really good but it'll cost me more than if i don't do it and that will affect my profit margin But I think it's one of the reasons why we have to re-normalize culturally an expectation.

30:17Nicholas Boys Smith:And again, I'll deliberately use the word, you know, the buildings and places should be beautiful. So that, forgive me, Bruce, you as a developer, or indeed any other developer, would just be a bit embarrassed if you did something ugly. I mean, that is part of it. I mean, if you look at what was done commercially 150 years ago, yes, more ornament and texture was put in than was structurally necessary. it's worth adding a lot of it was provided by machine cut or semi-systematized it's not all done by hand and it's a bit of a myth that it always was something that some accused has explored very convincingly um uh you know if we had more people asking to buy this stuff you know the price would go down um at the moment actually some of the stuff that we used to be normalized has become a luxury product just because it's not used much but that that could change and indeed in some places i think it's starting to change yeah well it's nice to see that technology is being used to reintroduce some of this stuff starting with things like cnc cutting and that kind of thing um and i think as cnc milling gets cheaper that will start to be used more hopefully and certainly casting as well yeah i was actually um i was a talk with francis terry last night actually and he was showing a building that's coming out the ground right now which is uc and c cutting and he was very clear he couldn't go less and actually i remember years and years ago visiting him and uh they'd been i'll get my lingo wrong here slightly but they'd essentially been 3d mapping lots of sort of plastic fruits and corn sheaths, you know, like in a harvester pub, which they'd carefully arranged into swags and sort of, you know, braggadocio-style fruit, you know, basically to turn into machine cuts.

31:51Nicholas Boys Smith:I'm not quite sure what, no doubt some Dallas gazillionaires mansion. You know, so that is coming. It's already coming. It's already with us. And it'll come on more. I think I'd like to see, as much as I'm not a fan of over-regulation and the planning system is already ridiculously complex, as is the building regulations. I think some form of computer measure of visual complexity expressed in a single number, in the same way that U values are, and a requirement for that value to be over a certain level, in the same way that we have a requirement for under a certain amount of U values in energy performance.

32:32if you had a scale from zero to one say um of visual complexity you could and and that you would have a an ai or a just a some form of algorithm that measured the visual complexity of a facade system say or a facade of the building and the local authorities planning policy just said it must be above a certain amount that's a that's a brilliant idea bruce

32:56Nicholas Boys Smith:well we'll do some uh chat on that live in the world not live but i think you should write a blog or a 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 word essay saying how that would work. And we should put it out there. I talked to Claire Valentine, among my previous episodes, who's a neuroaesthetic researcher and Chinooki Seracini as well. And there are researchers outside of the architectural establishment in the sort of neuroaesthetics and neuroscience space who are looking at this sort of stuff. But I think it would be a very simple measure to say once you've got some whatever the system is that's measuring this in the same way that SAP calculations uh turn into the energy performance certificates once you've got a system you say this is the system as far as the government's concerned all the local authorities are going to use this system so it's all consistency across the board you've got to submit your BIM model or your 3D facade or even just drawings maybe and say okay this street scene say is and it could even vary by street like in some streets you want it to be more some streets you want it to be less but that would be down to the local authority and then you could say street by street or with a policy map these are your areas of um certain values of the visual complexity value i guess the challenge and again this is a spirit of uh supportive uh interest the challenge would be you know would it be gameable and turn into something ridiculous um um you know discuss you know could you could you could you find some way of just doing something silly at the edge or doing some funny pattern that actually no one likes no one wants so the reason we ended up and some of the work we do some of the policy work i've done talking about i did it short and as visual and as numeric as possible uh pattern books and design codes was essentially to get to the same point in a way that local people like and will support but with some of that um coded response to local materiality and preferences are you know codswell stone limestone red bricks hung tiles mathematical tiles whatever it might be because we again we clearly know um that local people do spot materiality even if they don't always know the name for their local material they really really do recognize it and actually they most of them care about it um so would a would a visual complexity metric is a really fascinating idea which i think should was worthy of further uh exploration and i'd be keen to keen to do that could that be gamed?

35:23Nicholas Boys Smith:Would it allow you to get that level of materiality that we know people care about? Yeah, I have thought about this, because in theory you could do something very almost Minecraft-y, that it was sort of singular voxels, if you like, in the same way you have pixels in 2D, you have voxels in 3D. You could create something very ugly looking, but visually extremely complex. That's a question for the people writing the algorithm, I guess. You have to have something written into it that meant that it wasn't gameable or you could just say okay you've got to meet this value but also there's an element within the standard planning officer's remit to say clearly you're gaming this this is not okay and it's just down to human discretion I mean we know because again we've approached the same thing in a less numerical way or different numerical way in the idea of sort of you know solid to void ratios materiality, minimal maximum heights I think there's more to be we haven't actually finished the work on this we haven't published it yet but I think it's open to question to what degree councils are deploying design codes well to what degree they're responding to what people like to what degree they're just becoming lots of vague statements of aspiration which are no use at all I gave you a glass half full answer earlier to one of your questions the glass half empty would be that with the loss of the office place which obviously was a disappointment um you know who within government is actually focused on that on the design quality and who specifically is linking looking at the link between local planning policy on design issues and de-risking development and de-risking planning to the best of my knowledge no one is i may be wrong on that um could that be an answer that yes conceivably so i think there's a definite I think there's a rich vein there.

37:17Nicholas Boys Smith:And what we just need to keep expressing is that what places look like does matter. It is not true that it doesn't matter. It is not true that it's superficial. When some foolishly say that what places and buildings look like is a merely superficial issue besides its actual functionality, they are fundamentally misunderstanding humanity. They're fundamentally misunderstanding the human response to places and literally how we're taking our information. Yeah, no, you're right. people do care i did um having recently been through a neighbor consultation exercise for one of my projects uh i was quite delighted and surprised by how supportive a lot of people were uh once you sort of drill down into the key questions of what do you what are your preferences what do you what materials do you like what do you not like what sort of massing do you like what do you not like what would you support on this particular site in terms of number of units size of units that kind of thing and people are i think if when you ask people they are generally supportive as long as you've asked them and they're able to express their opinion and you're not doing something completely unreasonable yes i would i'd emphasize that second bit as well as the first but yes yeah no yeah obviously like not to be done at yes exactly um and i had interesting i've um been using my local uh parish or village design guide or referencing it, which is over 20 years old now.

38:44And it is very helpfully specific in certain cases, which is rare, I find, among design guides. And I've been thinking recently that there needs to be a much easier way for neighbourhood plans to be created by neighbourhoods who don't necessarily have resources. I think maybe you'd know if there is one, but there should be a template system or a very easy way for neighbourhoods to create neighbourhood plans and local design guides using a system that's very intuitive, very easy, requires minimum bureaucracy, doesn't require huge amounts of coordination between different people.

39:26Nicholas Boys Smith:Well, had the office place continued to exist, that was one of the things we were precisely going to do. The idea essentially of defining the process and the template. so you know you essentially could create a a village or a neighborhood design codes uh you know responding to the questions and the materiality and what's appropriate for for where you are to to strip out all the complexity um because we've moved a long way on this um so when i started uh some of the early neighborhood forums or parishes trying to do design codes were literally told by local councils that they couldn't couldn't what one literally said you couldn't which was wrong it's actually incorrect advice um what was more common which was more ambiguous was that you shouldn't um and then we managed to do some anyway and then we managed to get the system the mppf to change support it and we managed to get a little bit of funding there for it so that's quite common for them to i mean the two most effective things that a neighbor can do is allocating of land or three most effective working out what you do with your your neighbor bit of sill community infrastructure levy and and doing a design code those are the things you can actually do a neighbor plan that are worth doing and many sadly many neighbor plans waste huge amounts of time and you know emotional energy having rows about things and drafting things that are just completely relevant to their local plan that is a frustration um uh but yes i think a template to do it quickly and easily is doable um as we've done more and more uh design codes up and down the country you know we do find them easier to do there are bits you can appropriately copy you may change a thing but you know like the framework stays the same um so it is getting easier it has certainly been uh design consultancies of gaming the system overcharging making it too complex and there's certainly been councils um i've said this publicly so i can say again um nervous of asking the public i'm genuinely uh i've been on a on a teams a public teams meeting uh where a seniorish official at a uh at a northern city um when i think it was me pushing that they need to ask people what they like said but what do we do about the i think this is literally the quote or very close to it what do we do about the traditionalist prejudices of the public now come back to our georgian windows discussion yeah what one should not mandate uh you know certainly on the national level that it shall be georgian windows but if that's what people want the idea that you ban it is or regarded as wrong to do that is clearly perverse yeah I think it's, I wrote a long article about this and did a lecture on it, it's not necessarily the old styles that people like, it's the characteristics of the old styles or characteristics that the old styles have that people like and if you replicate those characteristics in new styles they will like it equally whereas if you don't do that in, say for example sort of mid-century modern or modernist design generally or very simple design that doesn't have those characteristics people are not going to like it no matter what i would i would agree with that i think i'd add one slight caveat or two perhaps two slight caveats one is that sometimes if you're you know deploying or evolving a traditional language it might imbue it with a location or symbolic significance that perhaps quite hard to reinvent de novo and that won't always be the case um and the other thing i'd say just as a sort of statement of practicality is you know we have to design systems for the average uh because most of us by definition are average certainly you know most most of the planners architects developers politicians are average it's just the human condition um and you know it used to be the case you walk around any victorian or even early 20th century street it used to be the case that perfectly average i don't use that in any way pejoratively perfectly average developers landowners uh designers uh were able to put together streets of great charm and we which we've which we found charming then people didn't object to them being built we've found them charming ever since they haven't gone through that period of of public hatred in the same way they may have had intellectual hatred but they've have been publicly disliked in the way that post-war modernism has been and is still um but so we need to give the full range of patterns that people can copy and deploy so yes by all means evolve it do something new with it use your create coherently complex places that are new totally supportive of that but if you're able to copy from the past as you're doing that it will just be easier for most of us to do it because you can use tried and tested forms frameworks mechanisms so evolve it but if you feel you need you need to redesign everything from from scratch some people will be able to do that brilliantly great most people as a statement of fact probably won't so that's why i'm nervous of a fear of copying uh from all of human existence because it just makes life much easier again there's something that i mentioned francis terry earlier something he would say is his life is incredibly easy because he gets to copy whereas most architects don't allow themselves to copy other than from the last 70 years well i'd argue that almost all architects do copy they just think they're not copying yes well i mean i would agree with that but but they're copying from a very finite yeah exactly a very small slice yeah um so you know allow yourself to copy from everything and then evolve it as you as you are best able yeah no quite um i'll ask you a difficult question now these have all been very difficult so far everyone complained not least me that the planning system is too complex and too expensive and takes too long if you were to suggest things to be removed from the planning process that are currently uh obligatory that should not be obligatory or ways in general to simplify the planning process to make it easier more accessible less costly etc what would you suggest i'll do one answer in the terms that you ask it and then one that may be slightly different to the terms you ask it so a thing i would just take out or certainly very largely take out is the part o building rakes which i think in the line um for people who don't know can you explain what that is well yes you mean everyone listening to your podcast doesn't know what part o building rakes who am i speaking to here bruce what is the level we're doing not all architects no no very wise anyone anyone listening um who doesn't know what part i very sensitive of you so part o was introduced a few years ago and is uh about the size and the efficiency of windows um it's been brought in to improve thermal efficiency and it's been brought in in some cases to prevent overheating uh all the risk of people falling out of windows those are the those are the stated rationales probably other ones as well and um its consequences are that it's now much harder uh to create sash windows dormer windows and windows on residential buildings above the ground floor above a certain size and below a certain distance sorry above a certain distance from the from the floor you can work your way around it so we are starting to see better architects higher end developments of you know doing their workarounds but what's happening in practice literally i saw one of these in in culture the other day what's happening in practice is that you know less skillful or caring developers or architects in less prosperous places we're seeing a new wave of really i'm going to use a rude word bruce shitty tiny little windows which are dispiriting from the outside and dark from the inside as a statement of fact are now going through and planning we're seeing them i was looking once only the other day as i say we're almost sort of creating well i think i think again i'll use a deliberately provocative term we're always creating a windows apartheid whereas rich areas get big windows above the ground floor poor areas you don't that's pretty indefensible so i mean i think it's i mean you you discuss whether you just get rid of the whole thing or redrafted quite majorly probably too much detail for now but that there's a thing i would certainly stick a stick a bazooka into and press the fire button um it's so cross-making um the second answer i'd give which is perhaps um more more conceptual than what i would strip out um actually it's less about stripping out it's more about de-risking so um i would use lira and i would use national development management policies and i'd say this to every council you know thou shalt have um on 10 pages maybe 20 maybe five you know tbd uh for all your area types uh design code um and you shall within that allocate maybe a adjacent you shall allocate um probably as a formula as a function of the number of um that housing target how big they are you know x number of brownfield passports within your area where you will pre-approve using probably a local development order um a certain number of developments so you're really clear as long as it's below i'm making this up now because obviously be a little bit site specific you know yeah it's always below this height as long as it's in one of the following five or three or two or ten materials and as long as you know it's got one of these following three or four or five pre-approved you know facade structures with with this type of ornamentation off you go you literally don't need planning permission you just need to get a literally tick box sign off which will say are you using one of these material types are using one of the facades you know is it below you know so it's literally you know unless you're fraudulent there's no risk um you obviously need to meet building regs so it's not you know there's still stuff to sign off and it's not but but we move it as quickly as possible from high cost of capital pre-planning equity style risk where you most landowners would need to bring in a developer or bring in a land promoter to take it forward and we move it back to the system which we used to enjoy until 60 or 70 years ago and which actually increasingly well to a slightly greater extent much the world still enjoys so obviously everyone has their challenges whereby quote unquote a normal landowner a person who owns that plot over there or those three plots over there or the business that owns that site over there can actually make stuff happen by getting a bit of bank debt and paying the you know the architect or the contractor just to crack on that's where we used to be it wasn't that this is the great category error that is made on both the right and the left it is not that we didn't regulate the built environment pre-1947 we really really did um we have hundreds actually we have thousands of years um as a species and our earliest extant sort of planning regulation in this country is from the 12th century it was the 11th century um 12th century 12th century so i'm getting my numbers wrong um always difficult these centuries things um but uh so that's what i would do i would essentially oblige councils to pre-approve housing in a certain range of places in ways that is linked to a patent book that is embedded as a supplementary document to local plant.

50:22Nicholas Boys Smith:It would take probably 18 months to get that in place. I would give them a target, and I'd give them a little bit of money, a little bit of carrot, and a bit of stick. And national development management policies, existing mechanisms such as LDOs, the existing requirement for authority-wide design codes, which is there in statute that hasn't been made through secondary instruments, that's all there. I mean, that was basically the direction that the last government was going in. I think it's a disappointment that we've lost a year. I understand that the government is now back moving in that space, and it would be that would be i don't criticize the concept of new towns i think they're right to have done them we supported it we helped uh raise the idea but that was always going to be a slower burn because it involves obviously more infrastructure and more time and rightly more complexity in planning um here is things that you could actually de-risk from planning on the existing street infrastructure and allow our streets to start to to regenerate and re-intensify and grow as they used to until we essentially massively increased planning risk first conceptually through the 47 Town & Country Planning Act.

51:20Nicholas Boys Smith:But actually then, and I think you pretty much said this earlier, Bruce, then through the layers and layers of accreted complexity that we've sort of hung onto that system over the last 60 or 70 years. It's very easy to add complexity. It's very hard to take it away. You don't care about this. You don't care about that. You don't care about this. It's a very hard time. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think the number of SME developers peaked in, I think it was 1988, at about 20 ,000. And it's now under 2 ,000. and it's just like you look at the the old planning applications even from 15 years ago and you've got five documents maybe and you look at one from this this year you're looking at 30 documents each of which cost thousands to produce but then you said you propose getting rid of any one of them and people say oh like you say you don't care about this you don't care about that obviously i do but you've got to if you just keep adding a new consultant every year you're just making it more and more and more complex and you need a phd to submit a planning application we're planning by pdf and we i mean and we're creating you know i say that you know great streets commercially we do some of this stuff so you know i'm speaking against myself here um uh we've got to bring the democracy forward have really clear requirements um the idea and but and then not rely on uh the process i mean everyone says we rely on the process you just you know and so you we're encouraging people and if you haven't submitted this and haven't submitted that you will get it turned out um you know no you know tick box i mean i deliberately provocative tick box the idea that you can't do tick box planning is is is food and yeah let's look okay let's be some sympathetic planners um i am sympathetic planners i personalize against them um um they believe that the good they do to society comes through their textured and nuanced response on a place-by-place basis to an individual planning application often and sometimes with good reason um they are very cynical about the motivations and the moralities of some of the developers they're faced with they're right some developers are you know shits you know you couldn't give a toss about what can't happen so you know this is the dynamic they're in and and they want to be certain that what will happen is is is high quality and they want to have a nuanced conversation about it and that's the value they bring and i get that um but it's not working it's it's a rolls-royce system with morris minor resources um and it's only so far that um it and digitization can take us uh with a system of that degree of discretion and weirdly ai might might take us a bit further but i don't think we're going to be at a point where we're happy just to take men completely out of them and women completely out of the loop on that so absent that then we have to bring the democracy forward set clearer requirements but this is the bit the planners i'm afraid in the public sector struggle with if you're going to be really fixed right you know you shall do one of these three um fences in this village i think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say or one or even one fence you know picking fence you know foot high whatever painted in one of the following five colors i think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say but then you can't you can't reopen it it is that and as long as they've got one of that you can't complain and that's the two sides go together which is we insist on this but if we haven't put in the things we insist about it's up to you that's the bit they struggle with so we're going to insist on this this and this you shall do that as long as you're following building regs the rest is up to you that's where we need to get to and that so far we're struggling with yeah no i think the idea of expanding permitted development rights using patent books as the basis of allowing that i think that's definitely a good idea as long as i think i said ldo is not permitted development and the reason for that is it seems to be harder um to link permitted development to a patent book um i also think politically that's a harder sell with this government because as you doubtless know permitted development without windows was associated with some pretty awful development a few years ago which rightly you know has now been stopped it's therefore seen quite toxically as a way of putting poor people in windowless sheds which it actually isn't anymore you can't use it for that anymore but it is associated with that so i think probably permitted development is not the mechanism of choice um for that but sorry sorry to interrupt but i think it's quite important points sorry to interrupt it yeah no and then would you have so it'd be up to local authorities to basically pick a number of sites that would meet a target of units uh or a certain proportion of whatever their housing target was yeah i think so i mean i think you'd probably give them a back stop so you'd say that you've got x months to to do x proportion of your targets through pre-permitted local development orders and i wouldn't maybe maybe pd as well but certainly local development was maybe permission for transport is not much used um and you know if by this date you haven't done it we'll do it for you and that that would that would sort of feel like the right way to do it so you you do you do oblige them to do it and i believe that you could do that through national development management policies maybe you couldn't do the obligatory doing it from top down i think you probably could actually they're pretty widely drafted as best i can work out yeah that would result in some very happy landowners for the ones who got their site selected for yes and i think so you know you you'd have to i think do it on if you like urbanistic rather than landowner principles so you know clearly some landowners are better people than other people and more ready to develop and have got greater access to cash but that would become less important i mean systemically less important if you pre-permit um because if you've got let's say you own a garage um in a near town center site in in a not particular you know and there are you know there are quite prosperous towns where you get surprisingly quickly you get you know wasted space um chesham where we did some work on this nature it is surprising in chesham is on the metropolitan line it's close to london you'd sort of sort of think it was done it's really not there's loads of opportunities in those and other places you know let's say you're running a you know a medium sized business and you own essentially a bit of land that could could go back into being a muse or a street um you know you suddenly you could contract you bruce you could contract you know a guy who can build it you could just do it you'd have to take some debt and you may or may not be able to do that but suddenly we've got a fluid market for this without it all being bunged up by the need to win a planning commission which obviously becomes the smallest part of the funnel and then only a small number of people are able to get it and they then are quite i mean this is understandably but erroneously the charge is always made the volume house builders and they're not actually this is not really their fault is that they've got this the mythical land bank um which they're only building out a certain speed well prices have got to such a point they can only build out a certain speed yes by all means bringing more affordable housing they'll never get us there we've got to bring back in the self-build the custom build the sme the have a go joe and some of them will make some mistakes but we without that long tail to the market we'll never get there we can't rely just on the volume house builder guys and the market they'll always want to go to will be the bigger sites because that's where they can get the economies of scale that's where their uh their model can work they'll never be able to pick off all these small sites which in consequence even in areas of high demand you you just see so many sites that could be built out even in london i mean around the corner from where i live in zone two um there are sites which urbanistically should turn into four-story terrace houses they're just sitting there i know i don't have the cash or capacity to you know but if they were all pre-approved and they could be i mean they're right next to some um uh the one i'm thinking of is right next to um uh four or five-story uh probably 1820s or 1830s terrace just just pre-approve something the same literally just pre-approve the same um i mean you can see all the reasons why our dear friends and heritage wouldn't want that to happen but actually it'd be perfectly doable they wouldn't you know it would improve the streetscape and would would create um create a five-story boat house or turn into flats probably probably more likely that yeah but i suppose landowners are discouraged from applying for planning permission speculatively because of the cost of doing it absolutely that's my point so so i yeah surveys and all this stuff yeah totally get that and i i you know if i owned that i i couldn't afford to do it i mean i don't own that plot sadly but um um and you know nature similar one that um we've written about and i should i should fess out this is the only um proposal we've made that which which i personally would benefit from uh we've talked about making it easier to uplift existing buildings and mansards and within a again an acceptable patent book uh we would push we've moved sort of planning policy move in that direction at the national level again i think you it's interesting actually quite a lot of councils are resisting that and quite a few i'm pleased to say uh mansard uplifts are now going through on appeal which is a good thing playing inspector definitely doing their job right on that one um and it's interesting in our interactions with several councils in london on this interesting it's the again i think the case of democracy i'm a fan of democracy everyone's a doubt um it's the councillors who get it and who see the need to do this and actually it's the officials both in development control and heritage i'm afraid to say who are resisting the sympathetic uplifting of historic buildings which is exactly what used to happen to them again something that others and i have written on i think you're right as long as there was a sort of standard pattern of how to do it that was approved that would be fine because there's so many examples of people doing it terribly or doing in a really really unsympathetic way that i think i can understand why sort of councillors or officers rather are wary of that.

1:00:35Yes, I would agree with that.

1:00:36Nicholas Boys Smith:But not only is there nothing to stop, there is actually national planning policies to encourage the creation of those standards. I mean, I've said this, I can repeat it. I mean, I've certainly suggested to Historic England that that would be an obvious thing for them to do because in much of the country, this is surprising, again, as a function of regulation and legislation in the past, a surprisingly finite number of house types express quite a lot of our housing i mean certainly a big city like london if you if you follow you know the 1770s or the um uh housing building acts or some of the subsequent metropolitan acts you know they essentially predefine your house types in terms of width and height and frame so yeah you you wouldn't it wouldn't need to be a very complex document i'm no doubt it'd be 100 pages or so essentially to do you know you could you know you can imagine a full reba stage three plans look you know literally just lift and drop you know make that you know almost put them out in the public domain i mean i realize you as an architect don't like the idea that's all out there in the public domain but i think to some degree that's necessary because you'd still need an architect to actually do it and come in and um uh and or uh professionals to actually link it into an existing house you would still need you would still need pros to do it but just right we know we can do it up to that height this material one of these two pattern types right i'll pick that one off we go yeah the uh rachel reeves 39 billion for housing retrofit uh or as housing generally isn't it but the nobody seems to have come up with a way that works financially to retrofit the existing housing stock for environmental improvements the green noog was it the green deal didn't work something like that yes um is there a way do you think that a financial model can be created other than homeowners just paying for it themselves because they want to that will actually incentivize people to improve the energy standards to a meaningful degree of the rather old housing stock that makes up most of our properties in this country um so short answer i don't know slightly longer answer um is that the answer which i i wouldn't i won't try and play with your intelligence without your listeners by making up on the spot um will be place based it won't be cash flow based or um uh company based uh how do you get economies of scale for this you get economies of scale by doing houses next to each other you don't get economies of scale by having you know anything that happens to be using this supplier or that supplier or owned by that landlord altogether i guess the landlords might be uh they may be coterminous but can you get economies of scale by doing all street all at once you clearly can so the answer is in some way that now when you've got fissiparious land ownership patterns within that street i don't off the top of my head know how you resolve that but i do know i guess i would say this wouldn't i but you know part of my argument over the last 10 years now has been we need to put conversations about place back into our understanding of politics we need to care about place treasury green book needs to care about place more um our whole approach to leveling up and before that to um you know blair era um regeneration was about helping individuals and that often helped individuals but it helped them to leave the place from whence they came and go to the city of london or to manchester or wherever or even america and do well in life great all for that but we've got to think you know but that's made the left behind places actually more left behind as we have a more mobile labour market, which we certainly have done over the last generation.

1:04:12Nicholas Boys Smith:So I know, without knowing the answer to your question, I know it's about a place-based approach that gets those economies of scale by being place first, not this is the corporate looking at the ones we've done. But it's a really good question. I've actually got a short essay with Mark Gregory, who's the former economist at Ernest & Young UK, coming out that will touch on that but it is something um we want to look at more but we haven't we haven't done yet yeah i agree with you that economies of scale would make it work financially but i just don't think you're ever going to get the coordination of people that's going to make that work but it's hard enough to put together land assemblies for development let alone getting a whole sort of street to agree to do a redevelopment all at the same time so i i i agree with that and if i i guess if we knew the answer that then we would have to answer the question but but in in some way that is possible i don't quite know how i mean maybe it's maybe it's incentives maybe it's um maybe it's stick maybe it's carrot and i think if anyone listening or watching has got good ideas on that please do get in touch because we are in the market for that okay final one on a separate issue the quality of new builds has often come up as a issue um people often complain that new build houses produced largely by the large developers are of a poor quality and i can attest to this having seen quite a few of them i am a big fan of the role of the clerk of works which is an ancient role that has disappeared seemingly from the um the portfolio of roles within a construction team um and for those who don't know the clerk of works is this sort of eyes and ears of the architect on the ground or the client they are employed directly by the architect or the client to effectively supervise the work and make sure it's drawn to the design, to the drawings and done to a sufficient quality.

1:06:04And they're normally extremely experienced builders. I would quite like to see, or I think it would be a very good idea for the clerk of works to be a statutory position on developments over a certain size. And they are already used because they are very useful on large public projects by the developers. and by the clients but they're not used anymore on most housing projects and certainly not medium-sized or anything smaller housing projects do you think that could be a potential route to improving the quality of our new build housing stock isn't the um so so so yes is the short

1:06:45Nicholas Boys Smith:answer um i think it's a good question well asked um i think the problem is more profound though than just not having a clerk of works. Quite often they don't have an architect. Oh, yeah. Well, now you're into the realms of protection of function, and I'm not the right person to ask myself. Well, let me say... It's inherently my interest that it happened. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I...

1:07:10Nicholas Boys Smith:It goes to this cultural divide again, which is, certainly speaking to some volume of house builders, they literally don't see the need for an architect. They've got their pattern book of houses. their view is i this is almost if not word for word it's certainly not misrepresenting a conversation i've had where they say well one earth would we want to bring in an architect they just get all snooty and be rude about our houses um that's that's not entirely untrue you sort of that sort of would happen absolutely 100 true yeah yeah so so you know volume house won't use architects if if they have some perception of that um that you know the architects have to have to deliver value and they need to be able to say well if you work with us you'll get more house per meter and and they'll people will pay more to live there and that that's got to be the deal and i think um so i think you know the house builders are to blame but i think the architects are blame as well so until we get back to that model where you know this and you if you read about um victorian developments you know they did have an architect um that architect was responding and making obviously making use of local statutes or local building regs because they had to uh and he or she well that would always been he i think in the 19th century would then have their clerked work taken.

1:08:18Nicholas Boys Smith:So I think without, it's not that I disagree with you, it's just we've got a more fundamental problem to worry about first, which is the total disconnect between the volume house builders and the architectural profession, other than when they're absolutely forced to use an architect. And again, I've heard this said by house builders and it's said by architects. They're only used when the local council or Homes England forces them to. That's not the ideal way to have a professional relationship. um but just going on build quality more widely um again comes i will repeat myself but i think it's pertinent um if we have a much longer tale of people building homes and everyone knows that volume house builds the homes are not as good as the ones built by a local builder or by this local guy and the polling evidence there may be more specific technical evidence i'm not aware of off my head there is definitely polling evidence that suggests that the stuff built by smes is better or certainly complained about less by their first inhabitants, which I assume is correlated.

1:09:16Nicholas Boys Smith:You know, if everyone used, you know, God, don't go to, I won't name any firms, you know, them, them or them, and you use one built locally, well, that will start to move the market. And if they get a reputation for not being good enough, they'll have to respond to that. Right now, that is inconceivable because we've killed the SME builder market. Yeah. So that's not disagreeing. But I think there are things we need to sort of fix first. otherwise otherwise as a risk it just becomes um you know a sort of a stamp yeah i don't think protection of function for architects will ever be introduced in any meaningful form certainly as things are currently constituted and as they're currently educated i wouldn't support that i'm afraid yeah no i mean i don't think i'd support that either and potentially on larger schemes but then architects tend to be used on large schemes anyway except for the volume house builders because they've got their own like say their own in-house design teams who use pattern books and they know they know how they like to do things and they do them that way but we're starting to i mean volume house bills are quite a hard sort of nut for us to crack um we are starting to so we have done um master plans for a couple of them and we've done critical friend reviews you know quite frank um uh for several i mean four or five times up a little bit more actually um we you know some of what we say they listen to and some they don't listen to but you know we we've improved a bunch schemes um we've at least once been asked by a volume house builder with a paycheck associated to approve their their scheme and put our name to it and say it was great which we weren't prepared to do because it wasn't um so we we forego that i won't say who we foregoed that uh that that check um and we felt quite comfortable about that so um yeah uh but it's a tough nut to crack yeah no and i do think some volume house builders do do generally a very good job but they are the exception rather than the rule and there's still far too many that do a utterly terrible job they were moving i think in the right i mean you know obviously there were challenges with what happened at the end of the last government with housing targets which i wouldn't i wouldn't defend um uh they were moving in the right direction because they knew they had to i think it's open to question now whether that's still the case i mean some did improve that i mean again we advised on a little bit of this um some did improve their pattern books some did think more about street design we were starting to see some better street designs in some of their plans we're aware of a couple of places where we pushed back often working sometimes working head office against if you like the locally led awful master plan and actually were listened to and did make some get some changes made um i think it'll be a little bit less of that probably uh in the current environment where it's going to be more about just getting stuff through on appeal and finally would you have a message for architects or architecture students from your uh from your knowledge base and all the work you've done as to how they could engage more uh productively or change their working methods or anything to improve placemaking and improve our sort of built environment generally in the best way they can i don't know when this will go out the first one i'd say is come to our summer school in late july next uh we're doing this we're doing recording this on the 17th of june so that that's my first very very very competitively priced that'd be my first magazine forgive me forgive me um more more widely i would say look i i'm i'm careful in how i talk about the professions i i don't i hope i'm not being i'm not trying to be uh discourteous architects are hard-working well-meaning people they have a tough and expensive um educational uh route which i think in most cases doesn't very well um prepare them uh for the world they're going to face outside sadly and that's a bit of a con um i would say um i would say this you've probably been taught that innovation in itself is the end good it's the tell-offs that you're seeking the purpose of what you do uh it's not it's one of the um ingredients innovation i support innovation to be clear um it's one of the ingredients you need you need to make happy and healthy places but it is not the only one and i guess the the almost by definition the opposite is small c conservatism you need both to make a good place um be my first point so ask yourself instead the question what places do people like where are they happy where do they feel at home where is it easy for them to know their neighbors that's your question and and how can we build places not just sort of thermally efficient but actually that can endure and prove resilience um and it will be so lovely that people will uh lobby and fight for their preservation 100 years hence when they're cut you know their use whatever reason disappears that's your question i'm my first point and then my second point would be um uh well again perhaps two points perhaps a sort of superficial conflict or superficially uh intention with each other one would be you know the data know the research on this stuff i one of the reasons i set up create streets was because i was staggered as i I started to talk to planners, urban designers, developers.

1:14:19Nicholas Boys Smith:Actually, as I started to find some of the information on this, it was actually how little people knew. So the second one would be know the data. I'm afraid it does surprise me to what degree professionals across various sectors on this do not know the data. They should do. So this is a social science and a public good we're providing here or trying to. And the third one, perhaps in superficial tension, that would be if in doubt, ask the people. and it's very easy and i'm certainly guilty of this it's very easy to make this too complicated too tense and too uh hard to disentangle you know what is right and what isn't but actually if you ask people we do we start nearly all our projects like this if you start by asking um you know where do people like to go what places do they like what buildings do they like uh where do they let go their children's hands where what's their favorite place in this and what are their least favorite places what would they like to improve in our experience literally without exception and we've done this in dozens of places in this country and are now increasing smattering abroad you get incredibly clear patterns in the data of where people like to be and listen to that trust it don't just define it away don't say that the people are being reactionary don't say that the people are only doing that because it's the only option they've been given um if and again i you know if you find yourself explaining away what people are telling you you're doing it wrong and i i've lost count of the number of times i've been in a workshop with again with professionals not just architects where essentially they're telling the public they're they're wrong i mean i remember an early one um in outer outer london with a urban designer one of the big residential architecture practices you know if you're in outer london you do need a car you know maybe we'd love to live in a world where you don't but you do and it actually gives you a level of liberty that as a statement of fact most people appreciate and value and this guy was basically within five minutes for telling people they were wrong to want cars i just put my head in my hands at the sort of just the sheer inanity of it um so there you go so um uh those would be my my three thoughts which i hope are of some help and not in too much internal conflict great thank you very much my message would be uh architects should all become developers yes yeah well again if we can de-risk development then it'd be a much easier architects often used to be developers more than they are now because you didn't need to have access to the same levels of capital that you now need yeah well it's the thing is we don't learn anything about financing and funding and development the way developments actually work from a business perspective and I think that should be taught in architecture schools and we can all be go back to being master builders rather than just architects I think that's excellent I wish I'd said that there you go four things I agree with Bruce Nicholas thank you very much and we look forward to hearing from Create Streets in the future.

1:17:02Nicholas Boys Smith:Watch our website. Thank you very much, Bruce. Total pleasure. Cheerio. Thanks a lot.