The ‘stated preference’ of most British people is for a detached house, which is what we have normally built over the last 60 years. However, the ‘revealed preference’ is often for gentle density of terraced homes and mansion flats which can capture most of the advantages of detached houses (personal space, a back garden, control over your own immediate environment) with many additional advantages of walkable proximity to pubs, shops and transport, easier creation of town centres and much less land take. We should create more of these ‘revealed preference’ neighbourhoods than we have typically done recently.
The gift of gentle density
Gentle density is the ‘missing middle’ of place-making between the extremes of tower blocks which maximise density on a given plot and detached homes which are popular but very land-hungry. Evidence strongly shows that ‘gentle density’ places of terraced homes and mansions blocks with some semi-detached homes and the odd higher building are very often the best way to trade-off between the advantages of lower density living with the high productivity and more efficient land use that comes with slightly higher densities. Polling and pricing shows that people prefer beautiful ‘gentle density’ places (think Bath or Clifton or Marylebone).
The ‘gift of gentle density’ is that we can create more homes on less land. For example, on the same amount of land that was used for greenfield development last year we might have built not 112,240 homes but 220,471 homes if we had developed at an historic ‘gentle density’ of, say, 55 homes per hectare instead of 28.
