Zack Polanski and the Anglofuturists have the same housing and planning policies. Both are wrong.

All anglofuturism does is wash over the failed planning system with a load of twee, AI-generated slop they choose to call beauty.

Ugly specuative housing build for profit no people (according to the Anglofuturists)

No future for you, no future for you

No future, no future for me

No future, no future for you

No future, no future for me

No future, no future for you

Two seemingly unrelated statements got me thinking about the future of Britain. Not merely in the context of the current economic and social malaise but in a wider sense of declining levels of fertility, the hollowing out of suburban communities, and the long-set struggles of people to put down roots in a nation where housing is unaffordable.

The first of these statements was the latest rock star of the left, Zack Polanski, talking about housing (obviously to a receptive audience since he, like previous rock star politicians, avoids real debate):

“No matter how many houses you build, if they are not affordable, then you will not solve the housing crisis.”

The second of the statements was from Robert Jenrick, the man some on the right seem to regard as ‘king over the water’:

“I am what can be described as an Anglofuturist.”

Most of us are very aware of the housing debate but unaware of this thing called ‘anglofuturism’. What Polanski gives us is the orthodox (if economically illiterate) view of the housing crisis, one held by what, when I worked in it, was called “the housing sector”: solving the housing crisis requires government direction and planning with the emphasis on building affordable homes for rent usually by councils. Polanski, like the Mayor of London (and the soon to be Mayor of New York) adds rent controls to this solution and, obviously, blames the crisis on profiteering landlords, greedy land-banking developers and a rapacious finance sector. The Green Party vision of Britain’s future, set out in Polanski’s populist ideas, is one where most people live in state-controlled, low-rent apartments, in the sort of dependent peonage that we thought right-to-buy and economic growth had broken in the 1980s.

The Greens also want to freeze the size of the national economic pie (because growth is bad for the planet) and to share it out more fairly. You won’t have to do anything to meet the needs of your family (assuming you have one which is unlikely) because the kindly and benevolent leaders of government will take the money that the rich don’t need and give it to you. This will allow you to do noble, creative and uplifting things like street art, interpretive theatre and eating snacks while watching daytime TV.

Which brings us to ‘anglofuturism’. It is exciting in a sort of slightly nerdy, ‘I’ve read some science fiction and love England’ sort of way. The Anglofuturist substack is filled with articles each adorned with a piece of twee AI slop depicting a 1950s aesthetic mapped onto flying cars, sleek trains and high tech homes. But dig a little deeper and the anglofuturists are saying almost exactly the same things about housing as Zack Polanski:

“Over the past 30 years, housing policy has veered off course. The state has washed its hands of responsibility and handed the future of British housing to a single ideology:

Leave it to the developers.

Instead of councils building homes, we were told the private sector would deliver. That the invisible hand of the market would solve the shortage. That competition would increase supply, lower prices, and balance itself out.

It didn’t.

Not because homes weren’t built- but because the wrong homes were built, in the wrong places, for the wrong people, at the wrong prices.

We didn’t get homes. We got investment vehicles.”

And, just like Polanski, the anglofuturists are wrong. And this is a problem because, while the Greens may offer a future of stagnation and spreading decrepitude, the anglofuturists simply offer a managerialist, technocratic fix that, in truth, isn’t a fix at all. And that technocratic fix involves central planning, rent controls and the glib, trite aphorism taken straight from the trendy left “build for people, not for profit”.

I’m sure that the anglofuturists would consider themselves YIMBYs, keen to get Britain building and all gung ho for every kind of exciting development, but if you’re going to say that “the wrong homes were built, in the wrong places, for the wrong people, at the wrong prices” then you are just a different variety of NIMBY.

If you ask economists about a better future for Britain, one of the first things they all point to is our planning system and, if you probe a little, the use of that system to constrain the expansion of towns and cities (what we call the green belt). Yet what we see from right and left in Britain is a massive exercise in cope and tinkering that they choose to call “planning reform”. And that’s assuming they even get to the reform part of the equation. For a lot of the political ecosystem the solution doesn’t lie in scrapping rules but in employing more planners and getting them to design new towns. Here’s Tom Ough, one of the progenitors of anglofuturism:

“In the near future, it could be the home of a new town, one within reach of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Tempsford should be built in one of the traditional styles that people generally prefer to modernist buildings; think of the charm of Bath, for instance. Many more towns should be built in parallel, each of them in similarly attractive fashion. The Government should reverse its decision to close the Office for Place, whose aim was to help British development become more humane and attractive. Nicholas Boys-Smith, who was the agency’s chair, should be given extensive powers over the design of these new towns. To streamline these developments, we could make use, where possible, of Crown land; needs must.”

Now it might be a good idea to allow the development of Tempsford but we should, at the same time, remember just what a disaster the last programme of new towns was:

“Instead of allowing the organic growth of a city, we’d apply a tourniquet called a green belt and designate places beyond that belt (a thing vaguely derived from Howard’s ideas but more an elitist reaction to the suburb - “Your vile suburbs can offer nothing but the dullness of the grave” as Edward Bulwer-Lytton sneered) as suitable for the development of towns along, sort of, the principles set out by Ebeneezer Howard in the days before the motor car. And we built them, Crawley, Swanley, Stevenage, Harlow, Basildon, Slough and Corby. All sculpted in concrete and designed to rehouse the urban poor in corporation homes far from the places and communities that shaped those people.”

It may be that, under the benign, old-fogeyish eye of Nicholas Boys-Smith, the architecture of these new towns will be better than the brutalism of Cumbernauld or Corby but we still have ‘experts’ drawing lines on maps with big coloured crayons to determine, according to their plan, the places where you will be allowed to live. The anglofuturists know better because, of course, you have been gulled by the evil financial markets into seeing your houses as “speculative financial products rather than where we live and raise the next generation of Britons”. The model here isn’t England’s amazing 1930s suburbs or even our fantastic 1890s suburbs but Bath and Edinburgh New Town. Except with more apartments, taller buildings and lots of pastiche masquerading as beauty.

The reason for all this, of course, is that like Zack Polanski and his Greens, the Anglofuturists hate the idea of speculative development driven by private finance and initiative. That’s why John Barwell Cator’s rapacious capitalist development of Beckenham and the two million three-bed semi-detached homes built in the 1930s by 76,000 private builders (for profit) are eschewed as a model for England’s future in preference for the same old centrally planned and directed model that has failed us since the passing of the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. All anglofuturism does is wash over the failed system with a load of twee, AI-generated slop they choose to call beauty.

Frankly I’d rather we scrap the planning acts and allow a new generation of Cator, Ideal Homes, David Estates and John Laing to build a new suburbia that’s determined by what people want not be some old fogey’s idea of what they want or what some local council decides to build.