Insights

By Ben Derbyshire, chair at HTA Design, former RIBA president, and President of the London Forum. I don’t generally play for laughs, but I got one anyway at Design West’s Arnolfini conference on Labour’s then-new housing plans when I urged the audience not to hold their breath waiting for the twelve promised new towns. We still haven’t finished the ones Richard Crossman began in the 1960s. As it turns out, we needn’t have worried because of the seven finally announced, all but one are not new towns at all, but much more sensible urban extensions. Housing ministers seem unable to resist Ebenezer Howard’s romantic vision in the Garden City Movement of “restoring the people to the land” as the cure for social ills. Today’s half‑hearted imitations borrow only the rhetoric of garden cities, ignoring Howard’s business model in which land value uplift was ...

Our President, Ben Derbyshire, provides his Insights into our recent Densifying the Suburbs event. I welcomed the invitation to speak at an open meeting of the Forum, ‘Densifying the Suburbs’ alongside Professor Tony Travers of UCL and local planners, Paul Lewin and Justin Carr from Waltham Forest and Brent councils respectively.  My challenge - most people who have time to participate in their local civic societies will already be well housed, so what, I asked, should be our collective response to fellow citizens who are not? I talked the sell-out audience through the full range of possibilities for housing development in the face of the collapse of home-building in London.  As ever, architects are out there flying kites for some radical alternatives. Peter Barber, who’s oeuvre as a whole is an illuminating exploration of tight-knit ingenuity, proposes the ‘100 Mile City’ - a belt ...

Bus passenger numbers in London reached a peak of 2.4 billion in 2014, but since then have fallen to 1.8 billion in 2025. This decline is now exercising the Mayor and GLA Transport Committee, but it is not a new phenomenon. From 1958 to the early 1980s there was steady decline in bus usage. In the ten years to December 1969 the scheduled fleet fell from 7756 to 6900, if Country buses and Green Line services are included. Scheduled red buses fell from 6451 to 5785. This decline reflected a growth in private car ownership and poor industrial relations. A prolonged strike in 1958 precipitated the decline; dozens of routes were withdrawn from January 1966 in response to an overtime ban. The increasing number of private cars added to congestion and also to bus journey times, especially at peak periods. A record was set ...

Statutory consultees play an important role in the planning application process by providing expert advice on significant environmental, transport, safety, and heritage issues.  There are currently 13 organisations that local planning authorities (LPAs) must consult about specialist issues when they receive relevant planning applications, from the Environment Agency and National Highways to Historic England. Their role is very important, but there is widespread agreement that the system is not working well, causing needless duplication of effort and delays in making decisions. Hence the Government issued in November a consultation document about ways to make the system more efficient and effective. One of the key aims is to reduce the amount of statutory consultation and follow up requests that are required, and it is difficult to argue against the proposition that there are currently too many needless referrals to the consultees. The most eye-catching proposal ...