"My greatest fear is that we see a rise in the number of ‘little boxes made out of ticky tacky’": Ric Blenkharn

Rowntree also helped to create the garden city of New Earswick.

I have written before about the village, but it is particularly appropriate at this time, to not only recognise his legacy, but to consider how we are going to build the government’s Plan for Change which aims to build 1.5m homes over the coming parliament.

The Plan for Change notes that there are 1.3 million households are on social housing waiting lists and a record number of households, including 160,000 children who are living in temporary accommodation. Clearly this is some ambition yet fraught by considerable issues.

My greatest fear is that we see a rise in number of ‘little boxes made out of ticky tacky’ rather than create homes with a sense of permanence and place.

To create such developments with this sense of place, and equipped with the necessary infrastructure and service facilities will demand a sea change in our approach to design and construction. It will entail thorough consultation with landowners, communities, consultants and building contractors.

A good blueprint for such thinking can be seen from models in Scandinavia. For example, the city of Copenhagen is split into a number of districts. Each district has a group of representatives from the community who work together to create a masterplan for these districts.

Once in place, the blueprint creates a long-term vision to enable development to take place over time to a fully reasoned narrative. To some degree this was the thinking of Rowntree. Rowntree was quoted as saying, "I do not want to establish communities bearing the stamp of charity but rather of rightly ordered and self-governing communities".

It is exactly this type of development we should be trying to foster as we seek to provide homes for the future. Through many design reviews I have been involved in, I’ve been encouraged that developers acknowledge the value of design in making schemes with a clear sense of identity and belonging.

In doing so, they appreciate that thoughtful design is not only profitable, but will create schemes with a real sense of community. This concept of creating housing with a sense of community, harks back to the model housing schemes of New Earswick, Port Sunlight, Bournville and Saltaire and the Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City.

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The vast majority of these new communities had philanthropists at the fore, who had a sense of community at their heart.

The challenge today is to perhaps encourage those with wealth and influence, to help steer and shape communities of the future.

Building homes as numbers will not suffice. We need to build homes that create a real sense of community. This demands radical thinking. Thinking outside the ‘ticky tacky boxes’.

Ric Blenkharn is a self employed Yorkshire-based architect. Email: ​[email protected]