Michael Gove’s Cambridge folly His housing plans are a monument to government hubris

Numbers aside, a civilised Marylebone-like extension to Cambridge would certainly be an infinitely better proposition than the ever-growing, car-dependent, jobless, shop-less, medical and civic-free sprawl now wrapped around the city like some tectonic boa-constrictor. But quite who would be willing to pay for such high-quality streets and buildings, though, is an unanswered question hanging over the Case for Cambridge.

Perhaps Gove’s authors took a cue from one of Cambridge’s most famous academics: “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” This is Wittgenstein, of course, who, working as a consultant in the late Twenties on the design of a new house for his sister in Vienna, had a newly completed ceiling in one room removed and raised by 30mm to give it perfect proportions.

But when Gove’s similarly rarefied homebuyers move in, can they expect such attention to detail? When, for instance, they turn the elegant taps in their splendid kitchens, will they expect water to flow? It’s not such a silly question. Water is not a given here. There are no local reservoirs. Cambridgeshire water comes from underground chalk aquifers supplying rivers, including the punted Cam, as well as homes, colleges and the recondite labs of “Silicon Fen”. There is a plan for a reservoir north of Chatteris in the Fens, but this is subject to public consultation and unlikely to be completed before 2040. And there is another for a pipeline from Grafham Water, one of England’s largest reservoirs, 25 miles north-west of Cambridge.

If Govetown were a less ambitious proposition in terms of numbers, it might be built and supplied with just enough water. Here, though is the rub. “Our water scarcity issue”, Stephen Kelly, Chief Planner for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils, has told Building magazine, “makes it slightly indulgent to try and meet the country’s housing need in a place that doesn’t have any water”, especially when the Environment Agency plans to cap water abstraction licences in Cambridgeshire in two steps in 2030 and 2040.

But Govetown is flawed most of all because it conflates the possibility of a new “urban quarter” of hi-tech, high-income Cambridge with solving the nation’s need for millions of new homes. If these are to be built properly, rather than rushed up in unsuitable locations, including Cambridge, simply to meet pie-in-the-sky government targets, they need to be part of a genuine policy of “levelling up” towns and cities the length and breadth of the country. New housing must be a life-enhancing part of new and revived industries, supporting opportunities, education, jobs, wealth creation, health and welfare, and integrated transport networks. They must be a part, too, of places with true centres, or hearts, with all this implies in terms of delight and of the only wealth that truly matters: life. And, certainly, they must not just be plonked down, isolated, on fields, meadows, flood plains and former airfields. Think of how in the 1840s the Great Western Railway set up its workshops in rural Wiltshire. With so many skilled jobs on offer, Swindon prospered and grew, with new homes arriving in the wake of its economic ascendancy. In time, Great Western built a system of education and healthcare — a precursor of the NHS — demonstrating along its metalled way how a progressive new town might be formed and prosper.

If the Case for Cambridge is a product of both wishful thinking and a squintingly focused political imagination, it is also case study of governmental as much as spatial sprawl. Stephen Kelly, whom we met earlier, leads a shared planning service of 140 or so professional and technical staff managing what is already enormous growth — 61,000 new homes — across the Greater Cambridge area. But Kelly’s team was not invited to join Gove’s Case for Cambridge discussions. Now a new governmental body, the Cambridge Delivery Group headed by Peter Freeman, Chair of Homes England, a national body with a “crucial role in delivering the government’s housing, regeneration and levelling up priorities”, will set up a dedicated “Growth Company for Cambridge as the next step towards a Development Corporation”.

The Growth Company’s remit will be to enable and accelerate developments, to establish a “Cambridge presence and brand… including a website”, to “identify… solutions to complex constraints” and to discuss the future of East-West Rail, that is the Cambridge to Oxford railway line hacked to pieces by Lord Beeching in the Sixties, and along which many thousands of  new homes will surely sprout in years to come as trains return. It is hard not to think that all these fast-breeding official bodies talking 19 to the dozen about “delivery” — once the preserve of milkmen — seem a little remote from the earthy processes of pouring concrete and laying bricks.

My own experience of housing and planning ministers and the expert bodies and quangos they have spawned, from Mrs Thatcher’s governments onwards, is of a “passionate” commitment to architecture and planning that has tended to burn out before you could say Perpendicular Gothic, Milton Keynes or “the next election”. So many ambitious politicians and well-paid experts hanging on to their coat tails, so few buildings. I have been shown plans for a Barcelona-style “Greenwich Village” (all tram-adorned boulevards and New Labour café culture), for Gordon Brown’s Eco-Towns, George Osborne’s Ebbsfleet (a Garden Suburb, of 150,000 people), Nick Clegg’s vague new garden cities, and some administration or another’s Thames Gateway, a Cockney Siberia intended to smother the Essex marshes.

The supply of and demand for new housing have been out of kilter for decades. Where, until the Eighties, there were four key methods by which houses got built — private housebuilders, housing associations, local authorities and New Towns — only the first two, with very mixed results, remain at work today. Gove appears to be harking back to the halcyon days of New Town Corporations. These were certainly effective in terms of getting homes built. Idealistic, too. In September 1948, a year before the Essex New Town got under way, Lewis Silkin, Clement Attlee’s Minister of Town and Country Planning addressed a packed local public meeting. “Basildon”, he proposed, “will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit.” Really? No, not really. Yet the New Towns were built. Today, especially with high levels of immigration, Britain will need something like five new cities the size of Birmingham even before Govetown is, if ever, completed.

Given the problematic scale of the British housing question, is Govetown just a case of re-arranging deckchairs on a sinking ship? Not quite. Yet the intense focus on Cambridge seems, at best, overwrought, and the advisers as misinformed as the architects and planners of Fatehpur Sikri. And where Akbar rode out and away from his short-lived dream city, surely Gove can only follow.