Look! St. Albans

I am in @CityAM discussing the Government's changes to the NPPF to make it easier to build near train, tube, and tram stations. It has the potential to deliver hundreds of thousands more houses in commuting distance of the places offering real economic opportunity. However, it is unclear whether these houses will join together to create functioning and desirable neighbourhoods that people actually want to call home...

The same building with 4 differences: 1. bricks from the same factory produced in 1890 and today. 2. Flemish vs stretcher bond 3. subdivided sashes vs unsubdivided casements, 4. colour of the windows and doors. Two completely different buildings sold as exactly the same product. The Devil my friends, as in all things, is in the detail.

1/ What do people actually want their streets to look like? We’ve been asking in Pimlico. The answer is not complicated. Create Streets are publishing our latest visual preference survey. It is a comparison of public preferences for two types of building design on Upper Tachbrook Street in Pimlico, London. Conducted by Create Streets with @DeltapollUK in July 2026. A visual preference survey is an A/B paired-image survey of public design preferences. This survey was conducted with a nationally representative survey of UK adults measuring wider public design preferences. By almost five to one, the public preferred a traditional terrace based on neighbouring Pimlico houses to the existing contrasting building. People have very clear preferences about building and place design. People prefer buildings that are designed to be familiar, rooted within the place they are built and in keeping with the aesthetics of the surrounding neighbourhood, rather than attempting to contrast to it. Design matters and people know what they like. Everyone agrees: the preference crossed every demographic group reported. In an age which is pulling us apart, love of place can bring us together. Left wing, right wing, old, young, rich, poor, male, female: all agreed. The result supports a wider and increasingly international evidence base. This finding corroborates multiple studies across the world in Britain, the Netherlands, America, Norway, Greece and South America. All find that the public strongly prefer buildings and places with some combination of human scale, coherent complexity, ornament, materials texture, ‘biomorphic forms’ (i.e. shapes that echo nature) and buildings that feel more clearly rooted in their surroundings. The implication is practical: new buildings can add homes and floorspace while responding positively to local character. More traditionally conceived streets and buildings with detail, variety in a pattern and more textured building materials are dramatically more popular with the public. You can read more....

Wishing Sir David Attenborough a very happy 100th birthday. Enjoy your special celebration this evening! 🎈🦍🐆🦅🌿 Tune in to ‘David Attenborough's 100 Years on Planet Earth’ at 8.30pm on BBC One and @BBCiPlayer.

Babies, say the boffins, prefer baroque architecture to brutalism & classic facades to featureless contemporary ones. St Paul’s lifts the soul. Corbusier depresses it. In a University of Sussex study last year, babies looked for over 3 times as long at buildings ...

How can English councils respond to increased housing targets and the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF)? Get in touch [email protected] #nppf #planning #housebuilding