Ike Ijeh: How to end Labour’s lurid legacy of towers

Ike Ijeh is Head of Housing, Architecture & Urban Space at Policy Exchange.

Margaret Thatcher once famously intoned that Tony Blair was her “greatest achievement”. With a similar level of ironic counterintuition, one could reasonably argue that British municipal socialism’s greatest urban achievement over the past 25 years has been the luxury residential tower block.

These structures now proliferate across our inner-cities and suburbs and whether they are in Manchester, Birmingham, Croydon or Southwark, in the vast majority of cases, they were brought to you either by a Labour mayor or a Labour council.

In 2002 London had just twelve buildings taller than St. Paul’s Cathedral. After two Labour mayors and a Conservative mayor who promised to stop tall buildings then ended up building significantly more than his Labour predecessor, the capital now has well over 120.

Most of these towers are residential and they are frequently justified on the basis that they will help fix the housing crisis. But this has demonstrably not been the case and there is even an argument to suggest they might have made it worse. As Policy Exchange’s 2024 Tall Buildings paper exclusively revealed, of the new residential units created in the 70+ high-rises taller than St. Paul’s built since the Millennium, only 6 per cent have been affordable and just 0.3 per cent have been social housing.

Equally, despite decades regurgitating tall buildings, London retains the lowest residential density of any European capital save for Rome, Oslo and Dublin. Additionally, it offers only a quarter of the density of low-rise Paris.

This is why Policy Exchange’s latest paper calls for a fresh approach to solving the housing crisis. Instead of a rush to build tall, S.M.A.R.T Density: Building Dense, Building Beautiful, advocates for a smarter and more intelligent approach to density that essentially makes high density more desirable.

Housing density is currently occupying rare political prominence because the latest revision to the NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) explicitly calls for residential density across England to be increased. This is a wise and natural response to the housing crisis and we saw it percolate through the Government’s policy portfolio last month when, as part of its ongoing planning reforms, it was announced that high density housing around strategic rail hubs will receive default planning permission.

However, high density, especially in the marginal greenbelt constituencies the Government wishes to install it, is frequently an electorally incendiary proposition precisely because local residents often fear it will lead to inappropriate tall buildings, harmful development, bad design, poor infrastructure and fractured communities.

This is scorched earth territory painfully familiar to Conservatives. The landmark Chesham and Amersham by-election was lost in 2021 due to the proposed zonal planning reforms that would have increased density in certain wards. And even the historic Conservative losses of Westminster and Wandsworth councils at the following year’s local elections could be construed, at least in part, as electoral punishment for both councils’ obdurate pursuit of locally contentious and sporadically ridiculed regeneration schemes like Nine Elms, Paddington Basin and the lamentable Marble Arch Mound.

Therefore, Policy Exchange’s S.M.A.R.T. Density paper seeks to publicly and politically rehabilitate high density from an acquired taste to an aspirational target. It does so by recommending that high density schemes adopt many of the characteristics advocated by Policy Exchange’s Building Beautiful programme, such as placemaking excellence, community empowerment and aesthetic quality. But it principally calls for the wholesale reintroduction of two entities once common to English urban planning: mid-rise and mansion blocks.

Mid-rise can be up to 40 per cent cheaper than high-rise to build and because it doesn’t absorb the spatial, structural, economic and energy inefficiencies high-rises eventually accumulate over a certain height, it can produce densities that either match or exceed those generated by tall buildings.

One of the strongest examples of mid-rise housing is the mansion block, the late 19th century London invention that is capable of producing astonishingly high densities within a format that is effectively a traditional, horizontal skyscraper.

Had Nine Elms been covered with mansion blocks rather than skyscrapers, not only could we have created a timeless new neighbourhood far more sympathetic to London’s traditional scale and character, but, in the midst of a housing crisis, we could have built thousands more homes too. Plus, because mid-rise is cheaper to build than high-rise, a mansion block-focused Nine Elms could have provided significantly more affordable and social housing.

Additionally, we have calculated that were our S.M.A.R.T. Density approach used to raise Birmingham’s density to London’s, this would mean another 200,000 homes in the city, a massive boost to one of Britain’s biggest regional economies. Equally, because high density makes transport improvements more viable, it would have been less likely to spark last month’s indefinite postponement of a new tram network for Leeds – already England’s least dense big city and, by no coincidence, Europe’s largest city without rapid rail transit.

But there is another, more politically localised advantage to increasing density. While Labour has deftly pirouetted from backing council estate tower blocks in the 1970s to privately developed luxury skyscrapers in the 2020s, British conservatism has not had a positive regeneration narrative since the transformation of Liverpool and London docklands in the 1980s. It desperately needs one.

It just so happens that the London districts that specialise in mid-rise and mansion blocks, such as Kensington, Chelsea, Maida Vale, Marylebone and Westminster, are not only some of the most dense echelons of the capital but they also happen to be some of the most desirable. If conservatives can use the density approach advocated in our paper to construct a housing crisis solution centred on recreating Marylebone rather than simply reaching targets, then Labour’s lurid legacy of towers could finally give way to a more popular, productive and patriotic sequel.