Neither town nor

Neither town nor country

We all know what urban architectural design should look like, and equally what it should look like for buildings in rural areas. But Antony Gibb poses the question: what about the suburbs, where town meets country?

What should a house in the country look like? Ask an architect or planner and they’ll tell you it’s about ‘context’. Something suitable for the country is not going to be the same as something that fits a town. A terrace of houses wouldn’t look right in the middle of a field for instance, while a traditional farm group sits happily in its countryside context. What’s right for town isn’t right for country.

But what about the suburbs?

A number of agricultural fields have been identified as suitable sites for housing in the Bridging Island Plan (BIP), our guide for development over the next three years. Despite plans to increase the density in urban centres, pressure on the countryside is likely to continue.

The BIP gives us Primary Centres (town), Green Zone and Coastal National Park (country), and Local Centres (everything else) but hardly mentions suburbs. The inter-war coastal strip development on the south coast - First Tower, St Clement and parts of St Saviour - are given the same designation as the parish villages, such as St Ouen, St Mary or St Martin, when they’re obviously very different. And Les Quennevais, identified in the BIP as our second town, is essentially a suburban development.

Given that suburbs are mainly where change is likely to happen, it seems odd that so much time has been spent analysing, assessing and describing how to protect the countryside and coast, and how to develop town, and so little has been spent looking at the spaces between, where one becomes the other.

What does this mean for the design of our suburbs?

What is the ‘local character and distinctiveness’ to which the BIP would like new developments to contribute?

What is the ‘existing character’ that should be respected? After all, the suburbs are full of individual expressions of identity in styles that range from inter-war housing inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement, through modernist flat roofed houses, 1960s bungalows, Spanish style villas, New England weatherboard clad houses and, more recently, apartment blocks of painted render and glass balconies. Contextually it’s difficult to pin down.

The eclectic approach to design seen in the suburbs has in the past depended largely on the vision of a developer, whether public or private. A good example of this is the flats at Les Marais in St Clement. At 14 stories, they very obviously don’t ‘fit in’ with anything at all. They’re an urban form built on the edge of St Helier’s eastern suburbs, with agricultural fields beyond. They wouldn’t be contemplated now, but were a response to the provision of housing typical of the mid-20th Century. The majority of current suburban housing developments in England, by contrast, are low rise, and inspired by the local vernacular, rather than system building and modernism. They use traditional forms, colours and details: brick and pantile in East Anglia, stone in the Cotswolds, and so on.

Here in Jersey there’s much discussion about what ‘local’ means. The BIP even ventures into new territory for an Island Plan in discussing the role buildings play in protecting and promoting the Island’s identity. This largely means looking at our traditional buildings and creating something that responds to these, without defining what.

Clearly what we need is good suburbs, but exploration of what ‘good’ looks like is needed, starting with acceptance of the word in our Island Plan. The BIP has concluded that Les Quennevais should be our second urban centre, so presumably ‘town’ rules would apply. Development around the parish centres is proposed, and designs here would most likely fit in by utilising traditional or modern vernacular forms.

But where fields give way to housing around the edge of town, it’s difficult to define a suitable stylistic form and tensions consequently arise. We are concerned about the change from rural to suburban, and in designing new buildings we are forced to confront questions of whether we should retain rural roots, or move towards a denser, high rise and more urban future.

This is complicated, but rather than leave it to individual developers, perhaps town and country can talk to each other about how the change can be managed. The result might be suburbs that stop being unsatisfactory liminal spaces – just somewhere on the way to somewhere else - and become places we’ve thought about and where we’d like to live.