We must encourage the building of urban one-home wonders

London’s suburbs, which Sir John Betjeman famously called “the home of the gnome” half a century ago, have become the hunting ground of the SUV. These hulking death machines dominate the streets and their presence is a blight on our neighbourhoods.

This is not something we collectively agreed to; it’s the product of personal choice, inadequate regulation and cheap finance.

In 1973 the poet laureate was conflicted in his disdain for the loss of the countryside to suburban expansion, while also celebrating the value of the commonplace to the “ordinary citizen”. Betjeman could never have anticipated the arrival of the Personal Contract Purchase.

The argument goes that car ownership is a manifestation of personal freedom, yet this liberty is desperately dull. Fully 70% of private vehicles sold in 2024 were grey, white, black or silver.

One by one, the streets become increasingly achromatic: white cars, white homes – the coral bleaching of our towns and cities

We see the same in our houses too: the depressing prevalence of house-flipping, where developers buy up characterful but shabby properties and expunge any remnants of joy by wrapping them in clinical white insulated render, and swap timber sash windows with anthracite grey aluminium. One by one, the streets become increasingly achromatic: white cars, white homes – the coral bleaching of our towns and cities.

Some of this is driven by sales conventions: grey windows shift more easily than green. Part L requires a new thermal envelope and crisp white render is an easy sell. Increasingly prescriptive space standards demand a precise number of rooms of a particular size, and build costs make it impossible to provide any more than the bare minimum. Like pebbles in the ocean, the churning of the regulatory tide softens every hard edge into vapid uniformity.

Last week a draft replacement National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) appeared, correctly diagnosing that the simple division between major and minor applications with a threshold of 10 homes was anachronous. A new category – medium – is proposed, capturing schemes with 10 or more dwellings, but fewer than 50, with an accompanying reduction in the burden on applicants and a scheme of delegation to elude incalcitrant planning committees. This is welcome, but also a missed opportunity to add a further category covering single family homes.

>> Also read: How suburban intensification could hold the key to delivering Labour’s 1.5 million homes target

Since its introduction in 2012, the NPPF has included a specific allowance for single houses in rural areas that are “truly outstanding” where they would otherwise be refused. Oligarchs, hedge fund managers and wealthy actor types are well-served, all able to afford the world’s most talented designers (or the most expensive planning lawyers) to smooth the path to constructing gaudy palazzi or sleek modernist mansions in the countryside. The new NPPF retains it.

It is not right that there is no equivalent provision for urban areas, precisely where we should be encouraging new homes to be built. A new category of development application is needed which enables individuals or families to buy up scraps of land and transform them into homes that respond to their individual needs and personal tastes.

Maintaining the alliterative terminology, the introduction of a new micro classification for new houses should remove all of the conventional planning requirements and impose just dimensional parameters to ensure limited impact on neighbours: no taller than the highest point of an immediate neighbour, perhaps; no closer to the road than the front face of an adjoining property; remaining outside a 45-degree angle drawn from the primary window serving an existing habitable room.

In line with the requirement to make the best use of land, this should impose a maximum site size of, say, 200sqm, but beyond that the Building Regulations would be enough to ensure that the dwelling is safe, secure, well ventilated, warm, sustainable and accessible.

As for space standards? Forget them. Japan has demonstrated how a talented architect can squeeze exquisite homes from the most preposterous of plots when freed from the constraints of a suite of housing standards that assume every family unit falls neatly into normative expectations.

Automatic permission, even within spatial constraints, would inevitably lead to some localised horrors, but the upside would be a parallel wave of surprise and joy sprinkled across the suburbs

Not everyone adheres to the conventions expected of them by government decree, nor does everyone desire to live in a standard home. Extended and non-nuclear families are poorly catered for by the NDSS, and the demographic target for a two-bed, four-person flat is surely so niche that their prevalence speaks more to our failure to build proper homes than it reflects a genuine need.

A micro planning category, freeing individual houses from the constraints of the planning system, save from the obvious safeguards needed to protect the amenity of immediate neighbours and important heritage, would – at the very least – allow families to build the homes they really need. Within conservation areas, new development must “preserve” or “enhance”. It follows that, outside of them, character should be free to evolve and adapt.

“In-keeping”, “subservient” and “sympathetic” are the last refuge of the chronically unimaginative. Let’s excise them from the lexicon.

For sure, automatic permission, even within spatial constraints, would inevitably lead to some localised horrors, but the upside would be a parallel wave of surprise and joy sprinkled across the suburbs. And, let’s be honest – can we really claim that the current planning system is effective at preventing the most egregious designs? At best, it drives us inexorably towards housing homogeneity.

It is time to loosen up. As Hannes Coudenys, founder of Ugly Belgian Houses, a website dedicated to poking gentle fun at the peculiar aesthetic choices of Flemish self-builders, said: “It’s better to be ugly than to be boring.” Who are we to argue?