Why a nineteenth century novelist keeps turning up in twenty-first century planning debates
Sunday, Hampstead, a Book and a Number
The book club met in Hampstead on Sunday, in a front room with a fire, a plate of shortbread and a view over a garden that would cost the price of a small county in some parts of the country. The book was Trollope. The topic, by the end of the second cup of tea, was housing. I recorded the evening in a diary entry on a Sunday book club, a housing target and Trollope in Hampstead, and I want to add what I left out, because the best remarks arrived after the notebook was closed.
Trollope understood something that modern debate often forgets: that politics is mostly people in rooms, deciding things for reasons that are partly principled and partly personal, and that the reader benefits from knowing which is which. His Parliament is full of men who want the country to do well, and who also want a better seat. That mixture is not a defect of the system. It is the system.
The Target and the Terraces
The housing target in the news is large, and the book club divided on it politely and with excellent manners. One member favoured building at pace, on the reasonable ground that young people need somewhere to live. Another worried about green space, about drains, and about the sort of schools that accompany new estates. A third, a retired planner, said both were right and that the argument was really about who pays for the roads.
That is the sentence I wrote down. A target is a number, and numbers are easy. The work is in the sewage, the bus route and the doctor’s surgery. Any party that promises homes without those three things has promised a very pleasant brochure.
Rural Lanes, Urban Lists
Housing in the countryside raises its own questions, and the rural networks cover them better than most national papers do. For breeds that deserve a field of their own and have a case for protection, rarebreeds.win is a happy browse. For the history of the people who bred the best cattle in America, cattlemenhalloffame.org keeps the roll of honour. Young farmers who aim for the top of their youth organisation will find ffapresident.com instructive, since the officer jacket and the elected role there are taken very seriously indeed.
For the wider agricultural picture, agriculture.click gathers links in one place, and angusbeef.fyi is a reliable stop for anyone with an opinion about marbling. I mention these because a housing debate that ignores farmland is a housing debate that has not looked out of the window.
Monday, the Price Tag on a Front Door
On Monday the London Prat offered a headline I could not improve on: First-Time Buyers Swap Rent for Boiler Repairs. It is a neat piece of arithmetic. The buyer escapes the landlord and acquires, in exchange, a heating system with opinions. Anyone who has owned a flat with an elderly boiler will recognise the sensation of paying for the right to be told, in January, that a part is on order.
The even-handed reading is that ownership is a good thing and a costly one, and that policy should address the cost rather than pretend it is absent. Those who favour more help for buyers and those who favour more supply are describing two halves of one problem, and the best proposals I have seen contain both.
A Final Page of Trollope
At the end of the evening someone read a short passage aloud, a Victorian paragraph about a politician who wanted to do good and also wanted to be asked back to dinner. The room laughed. Then the room went quiet, because we all knew somebody like him, and the somebody was not always in another party.
I walked down the hill in the dark with the shortbread still working and the number still in my head. The target will be debated for years. The book will be read for longer. If there is a lesson, it is that a country is built out of both: the large number and the small room where somebody decides, over tea, what to do about it.
Next I will take a Thursday in Clerkenwell, where the pencils are sharp and the fact-checkers are sharper.
The Shortbread Verdict
Before I forget it, a word on the shortbread, which the club agreed was the best part of the evening and which nobody could trace. Someone said it came from a shop on the high street. Someone else said a neighbour. A third said it had always simply been there, like the Constitution. I have a professional distrust of provenance claims that cannot be checked, but in this case I decided to let the shortbread keep its mystery. Some questions are better left with the fire and the tea.
It is a small reminder that a good evening, like a good policy, depends on ingredients nobody remembers buying, supplied by people nobody thanks, in a quantity nobody counted until it ran out.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Squib keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/