Wilding, Farming and Housing
Perhaps only a few times in a lifetime does a book really get you. During lockdown the book ‘Wilding’, by Isabella Tree, really got me. Now I’m by no means a pioneer reader of the book. It’s been around for a few years and clearly grabbed many others before me, but the reaction was visceral.
The book catalogues the process of letting a large, intensively farmed estate in Sussex be left to the devices of nature with very little human intervention bar the introduction of a few unusual beasts. It records and describes the extraordinary pace at which nature returns in a truly heart-warming way. It also describes much about the cultural and historic reasons for why we view our land the way that we do. How our intensive attitude to farming dates particularly from WW2, wherein a very short space of time we went from being quite a big importer of foods to becoming a nation obsessed by self-sufficiency in food, and so the drive for every inch of the land having to produce. A good steward of the land becoming one that held dominion over it for maximum production… with little else under consideration.
The story of the Second Half of the twentieth century was about continued intensification and efficiency. Bigger tractors had bigger turning circles and wider booms so needed bigger fields and fewer hedges. Soil was ploughed and fertilised. Crops sprayed with pesticides. Wildlife lost above ground and soil life below, and all with massive carbon detriment. The well-intention-ed drive for self-sufficiency ended up becoming the Frankenstein of European food mountains of surplus production, and a landscape exhausted.
What struck me reading the book was that the story of housing over the same period was startlingly similar. Post-war Homes for Heroes were all about efficiency, volume, numbers. A generic house in a generic plot, with space for a car to drive to a generic job, and as many as possible for growth. Like big fields for big tractors, volume house building, from a few big companies, on a mass-production scale, was designed around the turning circle of the motor car rather than around the softer needs of people. It was a high-efficiency model of living, but ultimately delivering the Frankenstein that we now have of endless place-less and heartless suburbs, with sparse consideration for community, for collective ownership, for belonging, and no consideration for other creatures except perhaps the occasional bin for dog muck. The well known Modernist architect Le Corbusier coined the term for his ideal house as ‘The Machine for Living in’. This volume house building, deeply uninspired machine after machine, has created little more than factories for living in.
In both cases; farming and housing, the issues that formed these entrenched cultural perspectives, were considered in tragically dramatic simplicity. Both our farmed and built landscape have become all the poorer for it.
Murmurings of discontent with this twentieth-century attitude of intensification and efficiency have been brewing for some time. In the main, we seem to have acknowledged that we are moving ever closer to a climate emergency and that there is a snowballing collapse of biodiversity. Whilst terrifying and tragic in so many ways, the current Covid Pandemic is perhaps an event of sufficient magnitude, comparable to WW2, to precipitate the shift in cultural attitude required to change the way that we view our place in the world. One less of dominion, efficiency, and unquestioning growth, to one that is more complex, rewarding and restorative.
So it is with some trepidation that I have read recent headlines of “Build Build Build”. Don’t get me wrong, building can be wonderful, creative, joyful, and life-giving. I’m an architect. It’s what I do, and it’d be a hobby if not a profession. But build what, and to what end, for whom, and with what long term consequence? Please can we not just build more of the same; more factories for living in, with little thought for the people who will try to live in them, and even less for any non-human creature. Please can we use the bountiful opportunities that we have to build things differently?
In the book Wilding, the Landowners took the very deliberate stance of setting the project going, then ‘sitting on their hands’ to watch it unfurl. The fundamental belief that the experiment would work best if they didn’t take a more interventionist conservation approach, that nature would find its own way. At times this was very hard to do in the face of huge opposition. But the results have been more joyously unpredictable and abundant than they ever imagined.
Perhaps we can learn a thing or two here about how we should approach making our next generation of housing. As well as making sure there’s abundant space for nature, perhaps we should be making a little bit more space and trust for people to make their own houses. Houses that they build around their own lives, their own needs, whims and hopes. A little bit wilder. After all, it is they that have a long term interest in what they build. Not any big housing corporation.
Tom Howard (October 2020)
Tom Howard is a director at Millar Howard Workshop Architects and a founder of LIVEDIN
