Originally posted just after the 2013 autumn conference season, updated in April 2015:

The Model Garden City that should be in all party manifestos

Welcome to Jack’s town

Over the last few decades, we’ve had repeated calls for a series of “garden cities”, often now labelled as eco-towns, but echoing places developed under the New Towns Act of 1946, but hopefully with slightly more successful designs.

I was thinking that if we want to keep those on the right happy, what we really need is not just to build these new towns, but to build them as patriotically as possible.

So how might a patriotically designed town start? Well of course, it would have to be built in the finest British urban planning traditions, including attractive landscaping:

In fact, landscaping alone wouldn’t be enough, surely a patriotic town would also not just embrace, but celebrate the Garden City movement, just as both David Cameron and Ed Miliband have previously alluded to:

A patriotic town would also include a diverse range of attractive housing:

Eco Town Waterside Houses

…and why not paint some of the houses red white and blue?

Beautiful British houses for all you beautiful British people

Yet this patriotic town would also be built around a central railway station – after all, didn’t we invent the train, and weren’t we building railway towns long before the Garden City movement started?

Railway stations at the centre of eco-towns are essential for mobility in and out of the town

Needless to say, although this patriotic town would be a railway town, it would also have an excellent road network, as we want to keep Eric Pickles happy, don’t we?

Happy towns, says Mr Pickles, must surely have ample parking, but happy towns also want to be attractive towns, so let’s build the car parks underneath the main shopping area or in multi-storeys directly adjacent to it:

Of course, our patriotic town should be a safe town, so let’s aim for a place that has a crime rate which is around half the national average, and why not also develop an internal road system that is almost entirely free of fatalities?

Jack’s Town

So what should we call our patriotic town? Well how about we name it Jack’s town after our beloved flag (remember, I’m flying this theoretical flag from a battleship fighting the War on the Roads)?

Let’s start with a ring road going round the edge of the town. To this outline, let’s add a railway running north to south and connecting Jack’s town with other major cities which are nearby. Naturally, in common with other railway towns, the main station will be right in the centre, and it will have at least four trains per hour in both directions.

Next, following on from the best traditions of the Garden City movement, let’s add a band of parkland going east to west across the town, with a traffic free route through the town centre, creating an attractive place for shopping, which is also easy to access on foot.

After this, let’s bring in roads leading from the ring road into the town centre, so why not put them on the diagonal?

As has already been said above, Jack’s town is a railway town to help commuters get in and out, but it is also car friendly, so each road will lead into a multi-storey or underground car park. We’ll throw in two hours’ parking for free, as that should be long enough for most shopping trips or a leisurely lunch, but after that you will have to pay a reasonable charge, otherwise the car parks would just get clogged with railway commuters who wouldn’t actually be spending money in the town.

Finally, let’s not forget to add enough places for Jack’s town residents to live. There’s also commercial space as well, both in the town centre and along the access roads, and the residential space also includes small pocket parks and of course schools.

I sincerely hope that you like my patriotic concept of Jack’s town, because I quite like it myself. In fact, it’s such a simple concept that if it works well, why not do it twice:

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Of course, Jack’s town is a fantasy, made up to satisfy the banner waving of the election season. Or is it?

In fact, Jack’s town already exists, although the description above is a highly simplified version. The real Jack’s town needs no introduction for anyone with an interest in Dutch urban design, as Jack’s town is actually the planned community of Houten, situated a few miles to the south of Utrecht.

Of course, Houten was never laid out to satisfy a lust for jingoistic patriotism, and it is very much more modest than that. Yet the essential pattern based on the Union Jack is actually not too far from the way the town is actually laid out:

For starters, Houten does have a very well laid out ring road going round the edge, with a connector road going between the northern and southern halves, to create a figure of eight pattern. From the ring road you can drive into a district and onwards from some entrances as far as the town centre, but you cannot drive across the town centre. This removes all through traffic from the two central areas. Although there are actually only two main car parks in Houten north, and just one in the smaller Houten South (Castellum), other smaller surface car parks are available behind the shopping areas. Moreover, visitors driving in from the ring road can use the indicator signs to point them in to the car parks, and at the time I visited, there was plenty of space available.

The linear park in Houten north runs not just east to west, but it also has other branches leading off the main spine. In the south, the park takes the shape of a pentagon which runs around the centre, and there is also a large lake to the east with an attractive board walk.

Houten was also built around an original old town which is in the south-west corner of the northern sector. Here you will find a delightful square with a number of cafes fronting onto it. Throughout the town, as is the case elsewhere in the Netherlands, local businesses thrive and there’s a much greater variety than the traditional chain dominated British high street. Needless to say, there are no betting shops or payday loan companies in Houten, and as Dutch planning law limits the size of supermarkets and rarely allows them in out-of-town locations, there are no large hypermarkets either. Yet parking in the old town in Houten is still unrestricted at the back of the shops, although there is a two-hour parking zone in front, again, as with the two centres, in order to stop long-term parkers blocking up the space.

Houten old town

Filtered permeability

Houten might be a Dutch new town and it might not be possible to copy over all of the ideas that are used here, but the key concept which is at play here is known as filtered permeability, and this involves separating out motorised and non-motorised traffic on trunk routes, so that cars are able to access wherever they need to go, but they are kept out of the important spaces in the town centres, and they are also heavily tamed in residential streets.

However, unlike the typical British housing estate where parking is almost universally under-provided in some vain hope that this will persuade people not to get a car, houses in Houten come with adequate frontal parking or they have an allocated space in a side-of-lot parking area. There is also enough parking on the streets to cater for visitors, but not so much that parking takes over, and the streets are attractively laid out with regular planting.

On local streets, the cars are slowed right down and narrow roads create a physical barrier to stop people from speeding. Traffic calming is relatively soft, using gentle humps and chicanes, but there are no straight sections of residential road longer than 75m without some sort of calming device. This has helped create a compact town of nearly 50,000 people that has had only had one fatality to a pedestrian or cyclist within the ring road in the last 30 years[1]. Overall levels of recorded injuries from traffic incidents are also less than half the already low Dutch average.

Contrary to popular British misconceptions about connecting streets together where there is no motorised traffic (blind alleys), levels of crime in Houten are also extremely low, although this could also be explained by Houten not having to deal with large-scale social problems. Yet where these links are provided, including pathways through parks, they always have clear sight lines, and they are well lit.

The long way round?

What about the fact that to drive from one neighbourhood to another in Houten might mean you have to go a much greater distance?

Will this takes the assumption that driving is your only option, and in a typical British outer suburb, that is very much the case. But the whole point of Houten is that it provides a choice of transport modes. This typically makes it easier for residents to go under their own steam for the shorter journeys, perhaps to use public transport to commute into nearby Utrecht and to drive for longer or more complex journeys. They can also connect very easily to just about anywhere in the Netherlands (and many places beyond) via Utrecht Centraal station.

So needless to say (I have tried to avoid mentioning them specifically so far to play up the other benefits of this layout), bicycles are the transport of choice for a very large number of local journeys. One Dutch commentator has quoted the bicycle modal share as 60%, although other figures say that is just for access to and from the stations. When Houten’s main railway station has 3500 cycle parking spaces – probably as many as all the London termini combined, it is easy to see why this might be the case.

The official figure given to me by the region of Utrecht is that 44% of journeys within Houten are made by bicycle, but other sources also quote up to 20% of journeys being made on foot, which is hardly surprising, given that Houten is a very compact town and the main shopping facilities are right in the centre.

These figures are exceptionally high for any new town (despite its high profile red routes, Milton Keynes doesn’t even make double figures for cycling share), especially as Houten is so easy to access by car as well.

There is undoubtedly a lot that British towns can learn from this model, but two hours free parking wouldn’t be something city centres could emulate. Yet they could still provide a lot more high turnover car parking spaces with a shorter free period, perhaps an hour in a suburban location in a city like Coventry?

If there’s one key lesson to learn from Houten it is that the car is being catered for, and not punished. If Houten provided all day parking in the town centre, then they would just be turning it into a giant free park-and-ride site.

Of course, mature city centres can’t just slap down linear parks, but they can certainly introduce other filtered permeability measures to keep out through traffic and to funnel visiting cars into multi-storey car parks or rapid turnover short-stay spaces, if that is what is needed. Yet a glance at any British city from above would still reveal a surprising number of green corridors which aren’t being adequately used – be they old railways, flood plains, canal tow paths or just any other derelict strip of green land.

Naturally, Houten is a town with a large number of traffic free cycle paths, but what it really demonstrates is that an effective urban layout is far more important than cycle paths alone. Houten was designed in the mid-70s, just as the Netherlands was going through a rapid change in attitudes towards reducing accident rates and adapting cities to cater for non-motorised traffic (the country hasn’t always had such high cycling rates).

So Houten was a pioneering town to take some of the localised street design measures which were just starting to be adopted and apply them across a complete urban layout, including a ring road system which was completely separated from the cycling network, and from which cyclists are banned. Before anyone starts asking why there is no such “right” of access, I can only suggest that there is simply no need or desire for it.

Filtered permeability, especially in the city centre, is also particularly developed in the city of Groningen, which claims to be the world’s cycling capital, with 60% of journeys made by bicycle. So even though Houten is a new town, the planning lessons to learn from it are universal.

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