Philip Stephenson-Oliver: We have the plans to do density well, let’s copy them

Philip Stephenson-Oliver is the current Association Chairman of the Queen’s Park and Maida Vale Conservatives (formerly Westminster North). He serves as a soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company and has worked in the wine trade for over ten years.

As I drove up to Norfolk for Christmas, I was struck by how relentlessly the countryside has been consumed by new housing estates. Through Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, and into Norfolk, the same developments appeared again and again: vast tracts of identikit homes, thrown up at speed, devoid of character, and rooted in the cheapest possible design philosophy.

This is housing as a numbers exercise, not as a place to live. Indeed, one of Angela Rayner’s first acts as Secretary of State for Housing was to remove any notion of a ‘right to beauty’ as a guiding principle in housing development.

These estates are the very definition of lazy architecture. They are built to satisfy short-term targets rather than long-term communities. And as the late Donald Rumsfeld observed, there are ‘known-unknowns”. One such known-unknown is this: somewhere within many of these developments lies a poorly built, over-regulated design flaw that will reveal itself in twenty or thirty years. When it does, these houses will not merely lose value; they will become prisons for their owners, costly to maintain, difficult to sell, and politically toxic to repair.

It does not have to be this way.

If planners, officials, and ministers were serious about solving the housing crisis properly — not just hitting annual completion figures — they would look to a tried and tested model of urban development. They should look at Maida Vale in West London.

For the past eight years, I have been happy to call Maida Vale home. It is a near-perfect example of Victorian urban planning at its finest. Across the ward stand rows of handsome red-brick mansion blocks, typically seven or eight storeys high, elegantly proportioned and thoughtfully laid out. While individual flats are not always large by modern standards, they benefit from high ceilings and generous windows, creating a genuine sense of light and space that modern developments consistently fail to replicate.

But Maida Vale’s real secret is this: it is one of the most densely populated areas not just in London, but in the entire country — and you would never know it.

On paper, the ward has a population density of around 18,000 people per square kilometre. Yet that figure understates the reality. Nearly a third of the area is taken up by Paddington Recreation Ground, a large and much-loved public park. Remove that from the calculation, and the true density rises to something closer to 25,000 people per square kilometre. To put this into perspective, the City of London has a population density of around 5,000 people per square kilometre, Marylebone around 10,000, and Vauxhall just under 17,000.

And yet Maida Vale does not feel crowded, oppressive, or hostile. It feels calm, orderly, and beautiful. This is density done properly.

That beauty matters more than many planners are willing to admit. Medium- to high-density urban living is where the majority of people now wish to live, and it is the obvious solution to our housing pressures. Yet it has been rendered deeply off-putting by decades of poor design: from the unforgiving brutalism of the 1960s, through the plasticised PVC architecture of the 1980s, to the soulless, cladding-wrapped developments of the 2000s.

As for much of today’s so-called architecture, the less said, the better. Even the most ideologically committed, pearl-clutching Liberal Democrat NIMBY would struggle to object to the development of this kind we see in Maida Vale. The lesson is obvious: people will accept density when it is done well.

This matters because housing — its availability, affordability, and quality — is one of the most important issues facing my generation and those below it. In my view, it is also a major contributor to Britain’s alarmingly low birth rate. When people cannot afford space, stability, or permanence, they do not start families. It is as simple as that.

I have just entered my thirties, and the vast majority of my friends either do not have children or do not plan on doing so. For aspirational middle-class families, the decision not to have children is often driven by cost. Britain’s housing system has become a generational Ponzi scheme: those lucky enough to buy early have grown wealthy on paper, while their children and grandchildren are trapped in high rents and obscene house prices.

There are only a limited number of ways this can change. One is a serious reduction in immigration — something that may finally be starting to happen as visa numbers fall and post-pandemic schemes unwind. But immigration policy alone will not solve the problem.

What we also need is a fundamental rethink of how and what we build.

I am not arguing that Maida Vale is a museum piece. I am arguing that it is a model. The cheap, modernist estates spreading across the country today will not be standing in a hundred years. Many will be demolished and replaced by something just as ugly and just as disposable. The Victorian mansion blocks of Maida Vale, by contrast, will still be there — a permanent legacy of beauty, density, and intelligent urban design.

If we want to build homes that last, communities that endure, and cities that people are proud to live in, we already know how to do it. We simply need the courage to copy what works.