Chalk, cherries and committees

By Jahn Roseveare and Archie Bashford

John Roseveare is a non-executive director who grew up in Jordans Village.

Archie Bashford is a landscape architect, urban designer and Public Practice associate.

Lessons from a hundred-year-old garden village

Inspired by the ‘satisfaction of the needs of others’, a century-old village offers an inspiration for contemporary living.

Just over a hundred years ago, in a remote field in the Chiltern Hills, the Quaker architect Fred Rowntree laid the first brick of a new rural idyll.

The Buckinghamshire village of Jordans was described in its foundation document as a ‘social and industrial experiment’, a place mindfully designed for work and home life to harmoniously coexist. The 95-acre estate was to be governed and managed as a Friendly Society.

The chief object set down in the founding document was: “to create a Village Community which will provide a fuller opportunity for the development of character and for self-expression than exists under ordinary conditions at the present time.”

The related objects flowing from this were: “To acquire, develop, maintain and govern an estate at Jordans... by means of a Village Community to be founded in accordance with Christian principles and in a manner serviceable to the national well-being... and to promote the establishment therein of suitable industries on sound and just lines” and “to provide opportunities for training in citizenship, as well as manual, agricultural and other pursuits.”

Under the heading ‘Village Industries’ – described as ‘an essential feature of the scheme’ – the document sets out what that might include: market gardening and fruit growing, poultry and beekeeping, building industries, the woodwork industry, a blacksmiths and wheelwright shop, plumbing, bricklaying and painting, and clothing industries. The ‘satisfaction of the needs of others’ was to be the primary object of the virtuous live/work life envisaged by the founders.

Readers familiar with William Morris’ 1890 book News from Nowhere might recognise the backward-looking utopian inflection here, particularly the selfsufficiency and the ennobling qualities of craft. In a history of the village, published in 1969 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the village, there is a story of one tenant, seen trying to squeeze a piano into his new village house, being admonished for his frivolity by an observer who wondered out-loud: “Wouldn’t you be better off with a weaving loom?”

Historic village plan c1923

So, what happened over the next hundred years? The original plans went through various iterations, and although many of the original ideas can be seen in the Jordans of today, some never came to fruition, like turning Dean Farm into a ‘model dairy’ where residents could be employed (see Figs 1-2 overleaf). Largely for ‘defensive’ purposes – to prevent unwanted development – the Village bought two fields along the western boundary, while a third on the eastern side, known as Chalky Field is owned by The Friends Trust, a Quaker charity. All three are rented, mainly for dairy pasture. The Inn was never built, a constant source of both humour and disappointment to many village dwellers.

The recession of the 1930s meant the village industries never really got off the ground. While there have been some suggestions of poor management during this time, creating sustainable work through this type of hopeful supply-led organisation has run into difficulties many times in history. Success would have been tough in any circumstances.

The founders also imagined villagers would industriously cultivate the large space around their own homes for food, and that the Village Store would be run on co-operative lines with facilities for “jam making and the bottling of fruit”. The store would receive and distribute “such produce as the tenants on the estate may wish to dispose of or obtain”. The reality has been that tenants’ use of their unusually large gardens to growtheir-own has ebbed and flowed over the past century. The Village Shop is currently run on gently subsidised community lines, but no system to ‘receive and distribute’ has been maintained for very long. Chicken coops and beehives have come and gone; orchards have been planted, cherished, then neglected; and vegetable plots have been tended productively for intense periods over the years, only to fall down the to-do list as the demands of modern life have intervened.

The COVID-19 pandemic has rekindled a huge interest in the possibilities of rural live/work housing, a different kind of work-from-home, and in growing your own food. While the ‘flight from the city’ debate is likely to calm down, successive governments have been favouring the return of garden villages and towns. Are there lessons to be learnt from a century-old community founded to provide precisely the affordable rural live/work housing in demand in 2020? A useful tool for addressing lessons learnt is a rubric used for the performance of companies: ESG – Environmental, Social, Governance.

Original elevation drawing

Environmental

We shouldn’t judge the success of the Village founders’ ‘experiment’ against the environmental standards of 2020. In 1919, the world population stood at around 1.7 billion. It’s now 7.8 billion. In 1919, the car was a relative novelty, the internet not even the stuff of science fiction. All the same, there are interesting parallels between 1919 and 2020.

Design: Relatively ‘modest’ houses sitting on large plots are a feature of the village. Speaking to tenants, working from home has meant, above all else, adaptation. Outbuildings in particular have come into their own. No-one can guess what the live/work balance will look like in a hundred years. However, flexibility of design will be central, with potential to adapt spaces to new ways of working, and incorporate each new wave of proven energy efficiency with the minimum of difficulty.

Food growing: The popularity of allotments had already soared before COVID-19, and has been described by many as a ‘lifeline’ during the pandemic. The pattern of use for the large gardens enjoyed by tenants in Village houses will always be variable. Turning the bowling green into allotments has clearly been popular in the village, at least amongst non-bowls players. More provision of this kind might be possible by reassessing large plots as they’re vacated.

Maintenance and stewardship: In a place as small as Jordans, and with an ageing population, changes to maintenance regimes and to environmental stewardship can be treated with suspicion. In this respect, the learning may travel in the opposite direction. Interesting projects are springing up, like the local Chalk, Chairs and Cherries initiative launched last year by the Chiltern Conservation Board. One development might be to think more long-term about the fields the Village rent out for pasture. Throughout the 20th century, smallscale market gardening entered into for idealistic reasons frequently foundered. ‘Locally produced’ has also been found to sometimes involve higher energy inputs than imported food. However, much more is now known about the economic and environmental realities of small-scale operations. An intriguing idea is for the village to consider viniculture.

Transport: Providing the single largest sector contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, transport is often the elephant in the planning room for new village developments. A recent report, “Garden Villages and Towns: Vision and Reality (2020)” by Transport for New Homes (subtitled “Which will we actually build? Garden Village dream or tarmac estate?”) is highly critical of many new developments, citing their excessive dependency on cars. Weekly bus services have come and gone in Jordans. And despite benefiting from a rail station within 15 minutes’ walk from the centre of the village, the car isn’t going out of fashion as quickly as it is in nearby London. The rural equivalent of the 15-minute-city championed by the current Mayor of Paris – all your basic needs within 15 minutes’ walk or cycle of you home – is unlikely to arrive any time soon.

Social (including tenure)

The original intention had been that the society wouldn’t sell any part of the estate. The residential ‘cottage sites’ were developed as a mix of around 40% village owned and managed and 60% private leasehold properties. Then in 1967, the Labour Government introduced the Leasehold Reform Act, allowing individuals to buy the freeholds of their properties under certain conditions. Leaseholders in Jordans naturally opted to buy their freeholds.

“The Leasehold Reform Act obviously changed things” says Chris Jenkins, the current Estate Manager. “but the Society successfully applied to the high court for a Management Scheme which was imposed in 1980 and secured the Society’s right to manage its estate and the freehold properties enfranchised by the Scheme.” This move probably saved the Village. It would have only taken one successful ‘Right to Buy’ application under the 1980 Housing Act to start a ball rolling capable of laying waste to the founders’ – and funders’ – ideals.

The estate now has 158 dwellings, with 61 owned by Jordans Village Ltd – 40 houses and 21 flats. Intriguingly, rental rates in Village dwellings have been held significantly lower than the ‘80% of market’ used by local authorities to define affordable housing.

Governance

In its 95th year, the Village moved its status from Friendly Society to Community Benefit Society, using the new Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act (2014). A Management Committee runs the affairs of the Village, with at least a quarter of its membership coming from the Tenant Members Committee (TMC). While a consensual status quo has more or less prevailed over the past century, there is an inevitable tension – not least around local planning powers – between the tenants of Village houses and the private freeholders, in a part of the country where land values have risen in leaps and bounds.

Summary

When Jordan’s villagers celebrated their centenary in 2019, they could justifiably do so as members of a successful new settlement. The structure set in place by the founders has prevailed, even if the idea of local employment didn’t happen in the shape they imagined.

One lesson for people looking to manage new garden villages is to stay on the front foot. The loss of Jordans Hostel and the children’s home next to the shop to private residential buyers represent missed opportunities. A more forward-looking plan might have given rise to different outcomes. Communities wanting to maintain a mix of affordable rental tenancies and private freeholds will not only need a carefully considered Design Guide, as proposed in the government’s 2020 White Paper; they will also need to be thinking about 2050 and beyond.

Pressure from private freeholders and developers will eat up more and more time if there is no long-term plan. Communities need to set up advisory/ sterring groups that report to the Management Committee, and that meet separately to collate ideas and options.

Some couples already talk in the first instance of dwellings as ‘two bedrooms, two offices’, reflecting the fact that they’ll both be working from home in the immediate future, with or without the pandemic (or children). Adaptability and flexibility will be critical. Don’t fix on single-solution models.

Settlements are dynamic. The people inhabiting them change, as does the technological environment around them. Management structures need to be alive to that change, and capable of admitting when things have gone wrong.

1. Notional village house adaptation

1 Garden studio building – A contemporary, flexible interpretation of “cottage industry”

2 Explicit relationship between external and internal, articulated by openings and surfacing – Subtle changes in internal layout and external placement of communal growing beds connect the source of the food to the kitchen

3 Communal allotment beds – one of three possible places for growing. The communal allows for a medium between the larger scale commercial operation and the private garden allotments – a place to meet, incidentally

4 Boundaries made permeable, to form shared courtyards – Reworked boundaries are in keeping with the villages design standard; hedges rather than hard boundaries, but allow for a degree of free movement, expressing both privacy and communality

5 Simple, mown pathways connect the street to the Village Green through a planted boundary – The village green is the place to meet other households. An enhanced/refined maintenance regime could provide ecological benefits whilst addressing the founders ambition for environmental stewardship

6 Communal table within Village Green – a focal point, a place to meet, a place to eat

7 Private garden adapted growing spaces – as eluded to in point c. The choice to productively garden in a gradient from public/commercial, to communal, to private and domestic is provided.

8 Electric car (EV) charging points – strategically placed around the village

2. Idea of a contemporary, sustainable smallholding

1 Electric agricultural vehicles – Similarly to the village it’s self, the farm could be limited to electric vehicles, EV charging points and PVs on roofs

3 Dairy farm realised – “model dairy” as was planned, implemented

4 Possible future vineyard space – Buckinghamshire already has the loamy soil that lends itself to grape growing. Rising temperatures in years to come may make wine making even more appropriate.