Andy Burnham’s conference speech this week contained a phrase that caught my attention: “good growth in every postcode.” Housing formed a significant part of the speech, including plans for what he described as the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war era, with councils building on unused public land and retaining the new homes for future generations. The Labour Party
Whatever your politics, there’s a part of this conversation that I think those of us working in garden design and landscaping should be talking about considerably more.
If we’re going to build all these homes, what are we going to build around them?
Because a good place to live isn’t simply a house. It’s the street outside it, the garden behind it, the trees you see from the window, somewhere for children to play, somewhere for rainwater to go, some shade when summers get hotter and enough privacy that sitting in your garden doesn’t feel like sitting in your neighbour’s.
In other words, quite a lot of what turns a housing development into somewhere people genuinely want to live is landscape.
And landscaping still has an unfortunate habit of being treated as the bit we think about at the end.
A Housing Estate Isn’t a Community Because Somebody Planted Three Birch Trees
I’ve seen plenty of landscape plans over the years. On paper they can look wonderful. There are blobs representing trees, areas coloured green, a hedge here, some ornamental planting there and perhaps a little symbol showing a bench.
Everything required to make the drawing look appropriately green is present.
The question is what happens when somebody actually has to build it.
Are the trees in positions where they can reach maturity? Is there sufficient soil volume? Has the ground beneath them been compacted by months of construction traffic? What species have been specified? What happens to them during the first two summers? Who maintains them?
And perhaps most importantly: what will this landscape look like in twenty or thirty years?
We shouldn’t judge the success of landscaping on a housing development on the day the developer hands over the keys. We should judge it by what remains decades later.
Landscaping Isn’t Decoration
One of the mistakes we continue to make is treating landscaping as though it is the decorative finishing layer of development.
Build the houses. Build the roads. Put the drains in. Sort the utilities. Decide the levels. Construct the parking spaces.
Then see what space is left for the landscape.
But landscape can actually be part of the infrastructure.
A mature tree isn't simply something attractive to look at. Trees provide shade, intercept rainfall, create habitat and help soften the increasingly hard environments we create around buildings.
Planting isn't simply there to make the sales photographs look better either. Properly designed landscapes can contribute to biodiversity, privacy, water management, microclimate and the way people actually experience a neighbourhood.
If we genuinely want “good growth in every postcode”, I think good landscape needs to be part of what good means. Burnham has framed that wider programme around the growth of “people, places and businesses” and greater local control over how places develop. The Labour Party
Perhaps We Need to Stop Bringing the Landscape Designer in at the End
This is something I feel particularly strongly about.
Landscape designers, garden designers and landscapers can become involved far too late in the process.
By then the building footprints are fixed. The levels have been determined. Drainage has been designed. Access is decided. Boundaries are installed. Services run through the only sensible location for a tree and somebody has put an inspection chamber exactly where the planting ought to go.
Then comes the question:
“What shall we plant in that bit?”
That's not landscape design. That's decorating the spaces everybody else has left behind.
Bring landscape thinking into a project earlier and entirely different conversations become possible.
Where should the houses sit to create useful gardens? Where can significant trees genuinely be accommodated? How will surface water move through the development? Where are the views? Where is the afternoon sun? How do we create privacy without surrounding every garden with increasingly tall fences?
Those decisions are much easier to make on a drawing than after several million pounds' worth of construction has already taken place.
And Then There Are the Gardens
This is the part homeowners probably recognise most easily.
We design quite a number of gardens for people who have moved into relatively new houses, and there's a recurring theme.
The house may have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The garden sometimes feels as though it received whatever was left in the budget.
A small area of paving outside the doors. A lawn. Fences around the perimeter. Perhaps a few shrubs.
Job done.
Except it isn't.
The new owner then starts discovering things. The patio isn't large enough for the table they wanted. The garden is overlooked. The lawn holds water. The soil is poor. There's nowhere sensible for a tree. The shed blocks the best evening sun. The outside tap is in the wrong place. The route from the front to the back doesn't work.
And gradually they begin spending money putting it right.
Would Designing the Garden Properly at the Beginning Actually Cost Less?
I'm not suggesting every new house needs to come with a £50,000 landscaped garden.
Far from it.
Sometimes good design is simply about getting the fundamentals right.
Get the levels right. Get the drainage right. Give the garden decent soil. Make the terrace large enough to be useful. Think about privacy. Leave somewhere sensible for a tree. Think about where bins, bicycles and garden equipment will live. Consider how somebody gets a mower from the front garden to the back.
None of those things are particularly glamorous.
But get them wrong and the homeowner can spend a remarkable amount of money correcting them later.
Good landscape design isn't necessarily about adding more things. Quite often it's about making better decisions earlier.
Trees Need to Be Designed for 2050, Not Handover Day
Trees deserve particular attention.
There's understandably increasing pressure to incorporate trees into developments. That's a good thing, but the number planted isn't necessarily the most important measure.
I would rather see fewer trees planted properly, in suitable locations with sufficient rooting environment and realistic prospects of reaching maturity, than impressive numbers of trees squeezed into spaces where they'll inevitably cause problems.
A little ornamental tree may look perfectly proportioned next to a newly built house.
But what is its mature spread? Where are its roots going? How close is it to the building? Is it appropriate for the soil? What happens when the tree reaches twenty years old?
A landscape plan shouldn't simply show where a tree is planted.
It should anticipate the tree it might eventually become.
The North West Makes This Particularly Important
Here in North West England, we're also dealing with conditions that make some of these decisions especially important.
We can have extremely wet periods and increasingly intense rainfall, but we can also experience prolonged dry spells during summer. Newly created landscapes need to cope with both.
That means thinking seriously about soil, drainage, water retention, species selection and establishment rather than simply choosing plants that make a development look attractive when it opens.
The landscape has to survive January as well as July.
That's something I've written about before in relation to so-called drought-tolerant planting. Designing resilient landscapes isn't about responding to one weather extreme. It's about creating landscapes capable of coping with several.
The Garden Is Part of the Home
Burnham told the conference that “everything starts with a good home.” The Labour Party
I'd take that idea slightly further.
A good home doesn't stop at the back door.
The garden is where children play. It's where people eat outside, grow plants, entertain friends, sit with a cup of coffee, let the dog out and occasionally escape everyone else in the house.
The landscape outside our homes affects how our streets look and how neighbourhoods mature. Collectively, those gardens, trees, hedges and green spaces become part of the character of a place.
So if we're serious about building better housing, perhaps we should stop treating the space outside those houses as an optional extra.
Building Houses Is One Thing. Building Places Is Another.
Britain clearly needs homes. Burnham's conference programme proposes substantially more council housebuilding and greater local control over housing, while his broader programme places considerable emphasis on devolving decisions about growth to individual places. The Labour Party
Whether those particular policies are the right way of achieving that is a political question.
But there's a professional question for our industry that sits underneath it.
What kind of places are we going to create?
If we're about to build at scale, this is an opportunity to think beyond housing numbers and start thinking about what those developments will feel like in ten, twenty and fifty years.
Bring landscape designers in earlier. Give trees enough room to become trees. Design gardens that actually work. Treat drainage as part of landscape design rather than an inconvenience. Specify plants for the conditions they're going into. Give people usable outdoor space.
And perhaps stop treating landscaping as the thing that happens once the important work is finished.
Because it is important work.
We're not simply building houses. We're building the places where people are going to live.