High rise living doesn’t create communities

There are currently proposals for two high-rise buildings in Apsley and Boxmoor - The Beacon next to Aldi off the A41 and Illumina in nearby London Road.

Nicholas Boys Smith from social enterprise Create Streets, which promotes meeting housing needs through houses and medium-sized flats, said that tower blocks often create insular communities.

“There is evidence that people living in very big buildings use local shops less, know fewer of their neighbours, use local facilities less and are just less a part of their 
community,” he said.

“There are ways to mitigate that. If you put people in clusters instead of long corridors you can get more interaction but that is an inward-looking community.

“It doesn’t create, in all the evidence we have seen, a part of Hemel Hempstead.”

However, developers behind the two tower blocks say they will be creating ‘vertical villages’, which will take ‘the classic communal aspects of traditional British village life and imagining them in a modern urban context’.

A planning document put together by Corona Properties for the Illumina development says ‘the property contains commercial and communal spaces, allowing residents to meet most of their needs without needing to leave the property’.

Corona add that the tower blocks will help Dacorum Borough Council meet its housing targets and will complement the existing former Kodak Tower, which was converted into homes in 2010.

But Mr Boys Smith said: “I’m going to assert with 
confidence, there is enough land to meet the housing need. I would be gobsmacked if there isn’t land available to build through a low or 
medium-size set of sites, which in all the evidence we have shows people prefer and are much happier to see built next to them.”

He said that although these types of tower blocks are being created for the luxury end of the market, he doubts this will prevail.

“I’m not convinced that they will last as luxury housing for the next 100 years. I think there is a high chance that they will be sub-let.”

All 208 flats at The Beacon, granted outline planning permission in June, will be sold privately because no housing association wanted to take on the proposed affordable housing portion of the complex.

A modern day dilemma: High rise living or sacrifice green belt for housing?

Two tower blocks for Hemel Hempstead are facing fierce opposition from neighbours, while council plans to earmark greenbelt land for housing is also opposed by householders.

But the ‘not in our back yard’ mentality still leaves 
Dacorum Borough Council with the conundrum of meeting its housing targets over the coming years.

Under its Site Allocations Plan, which will earmark land for housing over the next 20 years, six greenbelt plots have been identified by council chiefs.

They include Marchmont Fields, which neighbours Piccotts End and Grovehill, where 350 homes could be built, land in west Hemel Hempstead on land near Chaulden, which could accommodate 900 homes, and a site near the Old Town where 80 
properties could be built.

Sites have also been identified in Icknield Way, Tring, Shootersway, Berkhamsted, and Chesham Road and Molyneaux Avenue in Bovingdon.

The council is committed to building 10,750 new homes between 2006 and 2031 - equating to 430 dwellings per year.

Michael Nidd, who represents residents from Piccotts End opposed to building on Marchmont Fields, said brownfield sites should be developed before greenbelt land.

“Our argument is that if they convert unused offices and shops into dwellings at the rate they have been doing since June 2013 they won’t need to build on greenbelt land,” he said. “Our argument has been, you don’t need to do this and in any event the government says the failure to achieve a particular housing target or a supply of land for house building is not a sufficiently special criteria to justify building on greenbelt land.

“Dacorum Borough Council is sitting on quite long tracts of long term undeveloped land in Maylands which it insists is employment land.”