Take a picture of where we were in England at the end of 2025. This is the housing base-line. It forms the basis of where we want to go in the next two two generations; where we want to be by 2100.
How can this picture be created? By using three old pictures. Where were we seventy five years ago, in 1950? Where were one hundred and fifty years ago, in 1875? Where were we in 1800, a generation before Queen Victoria came to the throne, and Napoleon was taking over Europe? Makes you think, about change! Looking ahead to 2100 no longer seems silly, or simply impossible. And the scale of change revealed by these old pictures is daunting. It is a world your grandchildren will know.
Personally I can remember 1950, when I nine years old, clearly and with the detached balance of childhood innocence. Then I lived in Worcestershire, to me my spiritual home , and had the joy of the beautiful Malvern Hills outside my backdoor Few people walked the Hills in those days. Few people had private cars to reach them from the surrounding towns and villages. Another one and half decades passed before planners and planning cottoned on to the fact that all households would own a car and the impact that freedom of travel released.
About that time, soon after the end of WW2 a small estate of new council homes was built in West Malvern.. Typical of the era. The rationing system was still in place, and the free market of the pre-war years was only slowly returning. They were and are these sort of council homes that Margaret Thatcher had in mind for selling off three decades later.
Planning in those days meant building in the next open field at the end of the existing built up area. In those days a spatial policy, determining where to build, to protect where not to build, was simply not needed. It was all common-sense. You filled in gaps, and replaced very low density with something more, if the market was there. 60 years later the introduction of a spatial policy is long overdue. But its introduction forces local people to face unwelcome possibilities, spatial policies identifying where future build will go are unliked. Hot topics. Contentious topics. Best left alone. Understandable but unwise. Understandable because such policies could fuel new uncertainties in the future and thus undermine the growth of future values. Unwise because lack of spatial strategies degrades the potential for adding value in the future, and increases short term, five years ahead thinking which is always half-baked. With very unpopular results in the world of housing where mistakes cannot be brushed aside.
Put plainly, which is better when planning ahead? Short term knee-jerk reactions or long term visionary thinking? Amongst many political leaders it remains a scary world. Speaking as a non-planner whose career has skirted the world of public planning for decades, I am convinced there is so much upside potential for communities with the foresight and leadership to look ahead. They must be given the freedom to become effective local leaders of their communities. The Treasury must remove the one system fits all policy, which is claustrophobic and destroys incentives to progress.
If in Tresury assumptions of today had applied in 1800 and 1875, decades spanning years of fast growth and transformation of living standards for the masses, we would have lost two world wars.
Does this sort of low regulatory world also lead to chaos? So far as town planning goes, a long term spatial strategy for all areas, channelling growth and freeing up growth, whilst removing the fear of unexpected change for residents seems to me, looking back at history, to be the way ahead for the next two generations.
Ian Campbell
4 May 2026
