In Iceland, the builder of a new house may sometimes bring in a folklorist to check that the planned building will not offend the Huldufólk (hidden folk), or elves. In south-east Asia, “spirit houses” are attached to new buildings to provide dwellings for the unseen entities that may previously have inhabited the land. In Britain, housebuilding is subject to set of arcane, quasi-religious rituals, which even have their own bible: the National Planning Policy Framework.
Today (12 December), Angela Rayner announced a rewriting of this strange codex. But to understand its power, we must watch arguably this country’s finest TV programme: Grand Designs. In a recent episode a young couple decided to build their first home in Lincolnshire. They’re successful people who can take on a large self-build mortgage. The house they’re planning would be many people’s dream home. But there is an unsettling detail: why is it so long and thin?
The self-builders explain that their house is being built on the site of an old malthouse, and for planning approval, their new home has to reflect the old building. We will set aside the obvious fact that homes are different from industrial buildings, and it is insane to stipulate that one should look like the other. It seems the old malthouse must have been a really treasured part of the local community, if it is valued so highly that someone’s house must be built to look like it.
Or perhaps not. As I discovered from the planning documents for this build, the malthouse was knocked down at least 120 years ago. There are no known pictures or drawings of it. All that remains of it is a single word (“Malthouse”) next to a line on a nineteenth-century map. The housebuilders have been made to build a house of a particular shape to reflect a building nobody now alive could possibly remember.
What’s especially mad about this is that malthouses aren’t just long and thin. As Kevin McCloud explains in the episode, the malting process needs to be happen in low light, or the grain starts sprouting leaves. A feature of malthouses, therefore, is that they have small windows, and accordingly the housebuilders had to limit the size of most of the windows on the front of their house, so that they could more closely remain windows that no one on Earth has ever seen.
Deeper within the planning documents we find that the parish council lodged objections to the house, invoking the transgression of “inappropriate bricks”. Again, we will set aside the fact that a handful of retirees should have the power to decide which bricks are in your house, or why anyone in their right mind would care. Having offended the planning clerisy, the housebuilders then had to seek absolution by means of a specialist brick-distressing company, which took the tens of thousands of perfectly good new bricks they’d bought, daubed them with cement and repeatedly dropped them until they looked worse, like old bricks.
The mere fact that the housebuilders had chosen a perfectly good spot for a house – an empty plot between two other dwellings, not on a nature reserve, no newts were imperilled – was not enough. Nor was the fact that what people in rural areas desperately want, as the local farmer tells the Grand Designs crew, is for hard-working and prosperous young people to come and live near them. Sorry: the local council’s housing plan “seeks to target housing development to inland towns and villages”, while the NPPF states that planning decisions “should avoid the development of isolated homes in the countryside”.
It was to get around these conditions of national and local planning policy that the ghost of the malthouse was invoked. Part 84, section e of the NPPF states that an exception to its rule about building a new house anywhere in the countryside can be made if the design of a house is “of exceptional quality” and would “be sensitive to the defining characteristics of the local area”.
What this means is that to build a very nice house in a good spot, the housebuilders had to make up a story. They had to pretend that a dead industrial building, about which no one has given a flying fart for at least 120 years, would in some way be honoured by their new house. It would be much more sensible to have claimed that elves, dwarves or the animistic spirit-presence of the land itself might be angered by a new building. Such beliefs have persisted for a long time because they express a respect for the environment and the people in it. In Britain, we worship the code itself.
[See also: Why Rachel Reeves should crash the housing market]
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