30-Mar-2006 Country Life - HRH Vision
Local food, good design and affordable houses are the rural issues that we cannot afford to ignore, says the PRINCE OF WALES, in an exclusive interview with Country Life
'House prices are spiralling out of reach of many people who's families form lifeblood of our towns, villages and hamlets'
Five years ago, through Business in the Community, of which I am president, I launched the Rural Action programme — a new initiative to encourage companies to use their power for the good of rural communities. It all started because, in the late 1990s, I became aware that the fracturing of society, which had been so evident in the 1980s in many of our cities, was beginning to spread to our rural communities, and I wanted to see what I could do to help.
We have worked on local sourcing and community services—such as my 'Pub is the Hub' initiative —and we have tried to encourage people to start up small businesses in rural areas, through a bespoke Prince's Trust rural programme and by supporting Women in Rural Enterprise. But one of the key lessons that I learned as I travelled around the country was the desperate consequences of high house prices in rural communities. This was only confirmed to me when I became President of the National Federation of Young Farmers' Clubs in 2002; every time I met a group of young farmers, they told me that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find anywhere they could afford to live.
House prices are spiralling out of the reach of many people whose families have formed the very lifeblood of our towns, villages and hamlets for generations. They are being forced to leave for bigger towns and the cities and, when they go, they take with them the children on whom village schools depend, the business on which village shops and pubs rely, the teachers, nurses and police officers and, above all, the sense of community which makes our countryside such a special place.
The Affordable Rural Housing Initiative, which I started with the Duke of Westminster, but as part of Business in the Community, has been running for two years, and we have spent a great deal of time talking to different people and communities throughout the country. We have found that one of the biggest problems which affordable housing schemes face is resistance from local communities. Often the reason is that they fear what these new houses will look like. And one can hardly blame them—we have all seen examples of
traditional rural communities where the affordable and social housing seems to stick out like a sore thumb. Indeed, I visited the North Yorkshire town of Kettlewell, where an attractive scheme creating housing for six local families took 13 years to build because of local resistance. But we have not got the luxury of that sort of time. The problem is urgent and desperately serious and we have to move much more quickly. That is why I wanted to publish a guide to prove that the design of housing does not have to suffer because it is affordable.
As I have tried to demonstrate at Poundbury, in Dorset, by building well-designed affordable housing in small clusters and terraces, it is possible to build economically at the same time as blending the housing in with the character of the place. And because the social housing is indistinguishable from private housing, there is no stigma attached to living there.
Sustainable communities are places of the right size and scale to enable people to live their daily lives without having to consume too much energy. The key to this is mixed-use communities, where people have access to a whole range of amenities. Clearly, the mix and variety of amenities available in a city will always outstrip those of a small village. But not everyone wants to live in a city; many people enjoy rural life. The challenge is properly to integrate public transport into the regional structure so that people can move easily from rural communities to cities to enjoy the rich cultural mix, and city dwellers can access the countryside for rest and refreshment.
The interconnectedness between city and village is, in my view, very important for the future. We cannot continually transport goods hundreds of thousands of miles, consuming fuels as we do so. Local sourcing must come to the fore. The growing of local foods and local clean fuels can allow a symbiotic relationship to develop between countryside and city—with one providing the resources as the other provides the market.
I hope that Creating a Sense of Place: A Design Guide will help to establish the affordable housing that provides another form of sustainability.
PITH HRH Rural Vision Country Life 20060330.pdf