'The fact is you can't create an urban renaissance simply by building flats'

A few years ago, as city skylines began to be transformed by block after block of new apartments creating a rash of so-called paper millionaires, the fashion designer knew it would end in trouble.

Back then, when it seemed the good times would last forever, Hemingway, who had just turned his own design skills to the problem of creating affordable housing people actually want to live in, was something of a lone voice; a doom-monger intent on spoiling everyone else's party.

Today as the property sector tries to recover from the hangover of a crash which saw flagship developments mothballed and sent many firms to the wall, Hemingway has been proved right. However, he takes little joy from the worst of his predictions having come true.

"I find it quite sad looking around at what has happened in cities like Leeds because it was all so avoidable," he says. "The simple fact is you can't create an urban renaissance just by building flats. Bricks and mortar don't make a community, people do and if you want them to set up home somewhere, you have to make that place attractive.

"The 'pile them high' housing policy which seems to have driven most developers over the last 10 years was always going to end in tears and sorting out the mess we have been left with will take a long, long time.

"A flat bang in the city centre might be great when you're a young professional just starting out, but they tend not to be so great when people start to settle down and want a family. More often than not, there are no schools nearby, the green spaces have been built on and people move out. In many city centres, you don't have a stable

community, you have a transitory population who have no reason to

invest emotionally in the four walls they live in."

It's what Hemingway calls the "churn rate". When developers were left with a costly housing stock and few first-time buyers able to secure a mortgage, they were forced to rent out the apartments they had hoped to sell on for a tidy profit.

A tenant at least guaranteed them some income, but with many on short-term leases the shift in demographics has had a knock-on effect.

"In Liverpool city centre, they did an audit and discovered that 97 per cent of the people who lived there left within three years," says Hemingway. "I don't know what the figure is for somewhere like Leeds, but I suspect it will be high. People might say, 'So what?', but when the faces are constantly changing and when no one feels they have any emotional ties to a place, that's when you get problems.

"It has to be about place making not just house building."

Given the housing sector's well-publicised woes, it's easy to be a critic. However, Hemingway, who with his wife Geraldine built the innovative Red or Dead fashion label into a global brand, has put his own theories into practice.

Ten years ago, in the first of what have now become familiar tirades against a general lack of vision, Hemingway bemoaned

the "Wimpification" and "Barratification" of Britain by "bland rabbit hutches" and "identikit housing developments".

Not long after the article was published, he got a call. It was from Taylor Wimpey, but rather than threatening legal action, the company wanted to know if he and Geraldine would be interested in working with them to improve their developments.

They were – and together they turned a forgotten corner of Gateshead into a desirable postcode. The first residents of Staiths South Bank moved in seven years ago and Hemingway says there is still a waiting list for homes.

"We put a lot of emphasis on outside space," he says. "The houses are arranged in a courtyard with a communal garden in the middle, but each property also has a private garden. Outside the front, instead of black tarmac and cars whizzing past, there is an area where children can play and now the landscaping has matured it just feels like a place you

would want to live.

"When we started that project, we were determined not to create uniform rows of new build houses, we wanted properties to be individual, we wanted people to be able to say when they had visitors, 'Mine's the one with the blue door... the one with the extra large window... the one with the wooden cladding'.

"Conventional wisdom seems to be that high density housing is a

solution to our housing needs. We are told that a high proportion of us have to live in flats like our European neighbours, but we have to question that theory.

"When I grew up, space was crucial and it still is. With a bit of vision, it is possible to take cheap land in an unloved area of a city and turn it into somewhere people want to live."

Hemingway makes his move into housing seem incredibly simple, but he does admit solving the housing crisis is not as easy as building a few pretty houses around some nice open spaces. Savvy marketing has also played its part.

"You can't just build a development and hope the right people will come," he says. "You have to think about the brochures and you have to

think about your target market. Good people, the kind who will set up Neighbourhood Watch schemes, who will organise community events and who will check on their elderly neighbours don't necessarily arrive

somewhere by chance, you have to tell them it's there and show them

what the future could be like."

Since their first project, the Hemingways have worked on a number of other developments and have just signed a deal to revamp an existing estate in Kings Lynn. It's a sprawling 1960s affair and before they do anything they will spend the next 18 months talking to the residents and researching possibilities.

"Britain is among the worst if not bottom of the league table when it comes to housing and we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is a new problem," he says.

"When the slum estates were demolished in the 1960s, people were happy to get a new place to live. They got inside toilets, they got modern kitchens and bathrooms, but the design wasn't all it should have been.

"It turned housing into mass living and these estates can be incredibly depressing places. But there is hope and we should look to what has happened in countries like Germany and Sweden where good design is king. However, in both cases the really good developers operate off

much reduced margins and they think about communities, two things which sadly don't seem to happen often enough in this country."

When the property crash happened, there were some who dared to hope

that it would not just be a wake-up call for the developers who lost everything, but would inspire a more fundamental change in Government policy. Hemingway still has his fingers-crossed.

"For too long, satisfying the demand for housing has been about ticking boxes, but that won't deliver places that lift the spirit and mature into buildings that are cherished centuries after," he says.

"You'd hope that we would learn the lessons of history and the reality is that if those same wheels that have already driven us into an ugly cul-de-sac start turning again then we will end up with an even worse housing stock than we've already got.

"As a nation we have to get rid of the idea that you can make money by buying a flat. It isn't true, but somehow we all bought into the idea that property was going to be our saviour. What we should be looking at is buying a home, not a passport to easy money and early retirement."

n Wayne Hemingway will be speaking on how to solve a problem like housing at Leeds Metropolitan University on April 21. For more details, visit www.leedsmet.ac.uk