iainmcnabuk

27 May 2015

Land Reform vs Planning vs Hutting

There’s been a lot in the news recently about Land Reform in Scotland, and many people involved in the hutting movement have been supporting this and connecting the two issues. In particular Donald McPhillimy wrote a blog post imagining sitting in a hut and reflecting on the impact of different types of landlord. It’s good that freehold land ownership has now come to the fore as it didn’t feel that was a particularly favoured model at the Hutter’s Rally last year. However, I think the real impediment is still planning law and practice, although at least in Scotland the planning policy recognises huts and requires councils to include them in their strategy “where appropriate”. Last year I roughed out some numbers about how to create a Carbeth style site, and I think they bear repeating in this context.

The Carbeth site is about 100 acres with about 140 huts, giving a density of about two thirds of an acre per hut. The actual plots assigned to each hut are smaller than this but the plots themselves are also well spaced which gives the site its semi-wooded character.

What are the costs involved if you wanted to create such a site from farmland? The Carbeth Hutters had to raise £1.75 million to the freehold of the site, but that was for land with planning permission for all those huts remember.

It’s easy to find agricultural land for sale online these days. For example, uklandandfarms.co.uk : scotland (change the sorting to “Low to High”) has bits of woodland and pasture starting for a few tens of thousands of pounds. Using one of these websites last year I found this field very near Carbeth, and so in the kind of location where we know a hutting community can thrive. That was 76 acres for about £125,000, which is a lot less than well over a million.

Let’s say we had created a hutters’ co-operative to buy that land, and then marked out 100 plots on it, to give a rather low density very like Carbeth with lots of space between plots. Everyone who became a member of the co-operative would get a plot. Half the available memberships would require a contribution of £125 per year over ten years; the other half require a one-off contribution of £2500 at the start. This means there would not even be a need for the co-op to take out a loan itself as the upfront payments would pay for the land purchase.

Add some rules to stop people reselling memberships in a way that drives up prices. Also some kind of common fund contribution: maybe £125/year, which the £2500 people don’t have to pay for the first ten years. This way after ten years everyone has paid the same in total, and there aren’t two classes of members. Some of the capital is used to put up huts owned by the co-operative available for £10/night to make the experience accessible and also so people can see if they really like it.

People would need to put up huts on their plots, but they could camp to start with while they did that. You can get log cabin kits for £2000-£4000 if people didn’t want to bodge together something themselves. But the co-op buying timber and fittings in bulk and then selling them at cost to members on site would be a great way of spreading the cost and letting people feel their way through the process of putting a hut up by trial and error.

We could do all that tomorrow in as many fields as there is the demand for huts if the planning environment was right.

In my view reform of property ownership is a worthy goal in itself. The option to buy rural land by local communities when it comes up for sale extended to tenant farmers would be a good thing, and not just in Scotland. The right of long-standing urban tenants to buy their own homes is also a worthy goal, as it is not good for people to be renting for any length of time and not getting equity in return: they’re just paying off someone else’s mortgage in most cases, whether the landlord is a private or public body, and they risk paying far more than the cost of the property if their family stays for decades. Long term renting is a con, rather like Currys selling maintenance contracts for £10 toasters.

But as I think the above links and example plan shows, all those issues about land and property reform don’t need to be resolved to restart hutting. Probably to do as much hutting as there is demand for it. It’s the planning environment which stops us doing it all over the place tomorrow.

24 May 2015

The Haven and Dunton plotlands

Last autumn I was able to visit the Langdon Nature Reserve near Basildon in Essex, and took the collection of photos at the end of this post. The site was a plotlands community of chalets on plots of land owned by “residents” and “weekenders”. Originally it was largely occupied by weekenders who had bought their plots as places to escape to from London on days off work, and often built their chalets and huts themselves. Gradually the fraction of residents increased, helped along by wartime bombing of London homes and people retiring to their holiday chalets.

However in 1948 local and national government decided to develop Basildon as a New Town, with “proper” houses owned by branches of the State rather than the people who lived in them. All the plotlands were designated for compulsory purchase, and Langdon was no exception. But in Langdon’s case the plotland community wasn’t destined to be levelled to make way for the next generation of people escaping London (into the Basildon Development Corporation’s houses) but to become the artificial nature reserve it now is. The site hasn’t been returned to its state before the plots were sold before the First World War: it had been grazing land for centuries, possibly thousands of years. Instead it has become fenced-off scrubland dotted with trees and bushes that can only persist in this form in the absence of wild grazing animals (that our ancestors killed off or domesticated.)

In this nature reserve the authorities allowed one plotland property to survive, and the one chosen was the “Haven”, and it was turned into a museum.

Despite its origins, the Haven museum of plot land life is excellent. It is not the equivalent of a stuffed buffalo kept in an American shopping mall with a sign saying: “Look at what we exterminated to bring you all this!” The worst that can be said is that it has an exterior that looks like a conventional brick building, and so by itself it can’t represent the variety and individuality of the plotlands. As Deanna Walker says “it is quite posh compared to our little wooden chalets!”

The nature reserve and its volunteers have done a sterling job with it though. It has been faithfully populated with 1940s furnishings and goods, right down to a kitchen cupboard full of tins and boxes in 1940s packaging.

It’s a small building but it’s not claustrophobic and the space works well. Maybe I would feel differently if I’d been cooped up in it for most of a rainy August? But there’s no attempt to hide the fact that it feels comfortable, and desirable, and above all viable, especially for weekenders and resourceful residents.

Walking from room to room reminded me of Mr Foster’s house in the BBC “Plotlands” TV series from the 1996 which was clearly based on the site, with its fictional name of “Langton Fields”.

In the back garden are outbuildings, including a wartime air raid shelter, and a workshop for fixing bikes and other plotlanders’ household machinery, and a hen house for eggs – illustrating the self-sufficiency the plotlanders often strove for, both out of necessity on a site with poor roads, and in following the unconventional spirit which brought them there in the first place.

That grid layout of poor roads has now become gravel paths tended by the nature reserve and you can still follow them up the hillside and along the ridges, picking off the locations of individual properties. The leaflet and sign boards that are thoughtfully provided help with this, as would Deanne Walker and Peter Jacksons’ books which are available from the gift shop. Despite the encroaching trees, the more elevated trackways still have some dramatic views across towards London, with the Olympic park in the foreground.

At first I dutifully ticked properties off the map, then visited the Haven, and then got near the top of the hill and stood in the brick foundations of “Hawthorn’s” bay window. This looks down over a large glade amongst the trees and bushes, almost like a lawn. I tried to imagine what the land must have been like as chalets on their plots.

Then I suddenly realised that I didn’t need to imagine. It would have looked very like Carbeth does now, just with straighter lanes and perhaps less trees. Furthermore I realised that’s what it would look like now if the plotlanders had just been allowed to keep their plots and their community.

And then I just felt angry at such vandalism by the State.

London as viewed from the Langdon nature reserve

22 May 2015

Two books about Basildon plotlands

Deanne Walker has written two books about Essex plotland communities, first “Basildon Plotlands: The Londoners’ Rural Retreat” by herself and then “A Portrait of Basildon Plotlands: The Enduring Spirit” with Peter Jackson (who maintains a plotlands website.) The books are complementary pictures of plotland experiences and history and so I’m going to post about them together.

“Basildon Plotlands” is based on her own childhood experiences of her parents’ chalet in the 1960s to 1980s, and is primarily concerned with the “weekenders” who used huts as holiday homes in the countryside. “A Portrait” has more emphasis on the other group, the “residents”, who lived in their huts full time.

This division is still reflected in plotland communities that have survived into the 21st century such as Carbeth and the Humberston Fitties (where year-round occupation is the subject of a legal dispute with the council.) One of the strengths of the plotlands before the 1948 planning laws was the way in which boundaries between leisure and residential dwellings could be blurred to respond to the changing needs and wants of their owners.

“A Portrait” devotes a chapter to the plotlanders’ experiences during the Second World War when this flexibility allowed families to partially move out of their East End homes and occupy their huts to avoiding the bombing. For example by the mother and children moving permanently and the father joining them at weekends.

For some families the move became permanent if their home in London was bombed and when the housing shortage of wartime and its aftermath made their place in the country the most attractive option.

Both books describe some people’s transition from weekenders to residents when they retired, with familiarity of their chalet being more attractive (and cheaper) than a flat in the city. Again this is a testament to the flexibility of this kind of housing.

One of the important features of the plotlands was the ownership of their own plot of land by the individual chalet owners. This led to some very long periods of occupation, far longer than you might expect for a static caravan pitch for example. Many of the plots had stayed within generations of the same family since they were originally bought before the First World War. As “A Portrait” shows, this often led to groups of families being plotland neighbours for generations, even if only at weekends in many cases. The books’ co-author, Peter Jackson, is a graphic demonstration of this, as the son of parents who met as children on neighbouring plots.

Furthermore, the plotlands developed a strong community spirit including improvised entertainments, rudimentary services like water standpipes, and a supply of groceries by delivery boys (like Peter Jackson) who were willing to negotiate the unmade roads in all weathers. I’d not realised that the near universal practice of giving names to plotland chalets was needed to be able to receive the post in areas without properly laid out and numbered streets. This practice does seem to occur even in modern locations like the Humberston Fitties where the chalets are also officially numbered, so I suspect both the desire to name your property and the practicalities of receiving the mail are aligned.

The presence of residents helped sustain all this for both themselves and the weekenders, and they also appear to have significantly contributed to the security of the plotlands by their presence. As the efforts of the Basildon Development Corporation to destroy the plotlands came to their ultimate fruition in the 1980s, the last few owners experienced vandalism and break-ins at a level they were unprepared for.

“A Portrait” describes this process in its later chapters, although with less of the attention to the administrative and ideological background dissected in “Arcadia for all” by Hardy and Ward. One of the most chilling passages is a comment by the Labour minister for housing who revealed the government’s animosity to the mostly working class East Enders who had the audacity to own their own land. If the State decided they would be permitted to continue to occupy their plots after compulsory purchase, they would nevertheless be denied ownership on principle: “Freeholds should be in the hands of the community and transfer of land should be leasehold only.” As Walker and Jackson say “For the residents who had probably previously rented rooms or houses in London … and might therefore have been the first in their family to own their own piece of land, this edict from above constituted an intolerable outrage.”

Deanne Walker’s first book, “Basildon Plotlands”, touched on elements of this controversy, but also has more material about the weekenders that her own family represented. She begins with a vivid description of travelling out from London on a Friday night, opening up their chalet in the dark, settling in, and then waking up in the countryside with all the possibilities of a weekend stretching out before them.

It is the more personal of the two books, although both of them are well illustrated by photographs taken by the authors’ own families and friends. It also covers the practicalities in more detail, including experiences of constructing the chalets with “real DIY” (in a way which would have made Jonathan Meades proud.)

In my next blog post I will write about a visiting the preserved Haven Plotlands Museum in the one chalet the Basildon Development Corporation decided to keep as a historical record of what they had destroyed. But I’m going to end here with a comparison of the kinds of kits plotlanders were buying and building in the 1930s and today’s equivalent. The picture on the left is from Albert’s catalogue of chalet kits and one of the options was used to build the chalet “Eleanor” on the Berry Park Estate. On the right is a Lugarde log cabin you could buy today.

28 October 2014

Essex beach huts

This post has galleries of photos I took of stretches of Essex beach huts at West Mersea and at Thorpe Bay in Southend-on-Sea. This was the first time I’d had a good look at some beach huts and talked to people who own them, and there’s a lot of overlap with other types of huts, cabins, and chalets that also covered by the new Hutters Facebook group.

There are something like 20,000 beach huts in Britain but most of them are in the Southeast and Southwest of England. The most common model seems to be land the local council is prepared to rent to people in seaside resorts to put up a hut which the individual then owns, but in which they can’t stay overnight. People often own them for years or even decades, and the huts are another way of enjoying the seaside at weekends and during holidays etc. Huts like this, with the associated lease for the land, seem to resell for thousands or tens of thousands of pounds.

There are some beach huts where overnight stays are allowed, and high spec huts on those sites can go for over £100,000 or even £200,000. Huts in Mudeford in Dorset have being going for kind of money this decade, despite being on a relatively isolated strip of land.

Back in Essex, the first place I looked at was West Mersea. There are freehold plots and council administered stretches at the beginning and end of the gallery below, and in the middle a row of identical huts that are provided by the Seaview caravan park (shown here.) I took some pictures of the back of these huts and the only customisation from the owners was the type of padlock on the storage boxes at the back. However, since the huts are owned rather than rented, this may change over time.

One feature of the rest of the area is that the beach huts are often in rows, with grass in front of some of them rather than being straight onto the sand of the beach. The rows run along the often steep ground above the beach and so still have sea views over the roof tops of the ones in front. This steepness has prompted a built up decking in front of some huts and in turn people exploit the storage underneath, to the extent of enclosing it completely and fitting a door in some cases! In other places the rows are separated by wide, flat grassy lawns and must be a lot more private in summer than those straight on the beach.

I talked to some of the owners, including the ladies in Ellfin who asked if I wanted to take a picture of the inside, and their motivations are very similar to that of the weekend hutters, the woodland log cabineers, and what the plotlands buyers talked about in the 1930s: they wanted a place away from home, that was their own so they could keep coming back to it, that was in a more natural environment than a street, and that they could decorate and modify how they wanted.

Further south at Thorpe Bay in Southend-on-Sea, some of the beach huts sit on the tarmac of the esplanade and have pull-out wooden wind-breakers which I suspect function as tourist-breakers on sunny days to stop people continually brushing past owners sitting out in a deck chair. Thorpe Bay also has some huts with raised verandahs and decking, and probably a wider variation in size and style than West Mersea.

West Mersea

Thorpe Bay, Southend-on-Sea

25 October 2014

Why Hopwas Wood matters

There’s been a lot of coverage in the last day or so about Hopwas Wood near Tamworth, which Lafarge Tarmac is planning to take a chunk off and turn into a sand and gravel quarry. Lafarge promise to reinstate this piece of Ancient Woodland after they’re finished in about 2030, but the problem is they can’t. English Ancient Woodland is defined as land that has been wooded continuously since 1600 and is almost certain to have been woodland since the return of the trees after the last ice age. It’s not possible to recreate that ecosystem by planting from scratch, any more than it’s possible to build a copy of a historic city and expect the cultural life of the place to be just the same.

Lafarge claim the area they want to strip of trees was damaged by fire in the 1970s and so isn’t ancient. But that misses the point that the seed bank in the soil and the fungi that co-operate with the roots to fix nitrogen have built up over millenia. It’s not the individual trees that matter: it’s the ongoing continuity of the processes by which an ancient ecosystem renews itself. I can see there are some situations when there just isn’t a way to build essential transport links or new towns without harming some pieces of Ancient Woodland, but another sand and gravel quarry isn’t something like that.

The Woodland Trust seem have to been in the forefront of making the media aware. The Twitter hash tag is #savehopwaswoods . There are Save Hopwas Woods campaign profiles on Twitter and on Facebook.

24 October 2014

New Hutters group on Facebook

Tonight we’ve created Hutters, a new group on Facebook for people interested in huts, cabins, sheds, and chalets!

23 October 2014

Woodland cabin in C4 “Amazing Spaces”

This year’s series of George Clarke’s “Amazing Spaces” features a log cabin being built in a woodland clearing. In the first episode, shown tonight, George visits this larger riverside cabin in the Lake District, built with larch logs taken from the surrounding forest. This is the plan with the smaller cabin he’s going to build, and there was a mention of identifying diseased trees to take. (Ramorum?) This episode also has a house built around a wooden railway carriage, and a couple of amazing locations (pod on a mountainside) and recycling (private jet body turned into a living space.) People in the UK should be able to view the episode for the next month on Channel 4’s 4OD catch-up service.

11 October 2014

East Yorkshire chalets

The Humberston Fitties in North Lincolnshire are the best preserved pre-war plotland site on the North Sea coast, but there are further pockets of plotlands and huts on the coast of East Yorkshire to the north. I’ve taken some pictures at three sites, on Flamborough Head, Wilshorpe, and Hornsea.

Flamborough Head

The Marine Valley Estate on Flamborough Head consists of three roads laid out like a conventional development of bungalows, but instead the buildings are wooden chalets and and substantial huts.

Google Maps view of the estate and the adjacent North Landing cove:

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d2910.243058558004!2d-0.10571351364661818!3d54.12704256658478!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e1!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1412890917291&w=600&h=450]

Many these developments that began as makeshift holiday homes are in very picturesque, even dramatic locations. The Marine Valley Estate is no exception, as you can see in this photo of North Landing:

Wilsthorpe

Further south, the South Shore Holiday Village in Wilsthorpe is mostly neat and rather uniform modern chalets. It has the feel of a modern static caravan park, with mowed lawns between chalets that are placed on pitches rather than occupying their own plots. However, here and there are signs of some a bit different and a bit older:

The numeric naming of the roads (“1st Avenue” etc) is often a sign of some kind of underlying plotland development in the past:

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d1456.5138067683486!2d-0.21324199413923733!3d54.06347415117072!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e1!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1412984543147&w=600&h=450]

Hornsea

Finally, in Hornsea there are scattered huts and chalets still:

These chalets are along Hornsea Burton Road, Graingers Road, and off Pasture Road beside the playing fields which go down to the promenade on the sea front:

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d1723.9391612563886!2d-0.16229453974155664!3d53.90926296087833!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e1!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1412985213954&w=600&h=450]

8 October 2014

What went wrong with Jaywick?

Jaywick in Essex has been in the news recently with the by-election in Clacton on Thursday. It began as a 1920s plotland development, and as recently as 1984 its huts and chalets were being held up as a “charming example of English vernacular makeshift architecture”. But now it’s the poster-child for anti-plotlanders and a handy source of filler stories for the Daily Mail on a slow news day as England’s “most deprived neighbourhood”. So how did it get to this?

Jaywick Sands was started as a new development by the sea front by Frank Stedman in 1928, with freehold plots of land sold off one by one to Londoners and Essex residents looking for holiday homes to use at weekends or in the summer. They plotlanders mostly put up wooden chalets and huts, often built by the families themselves. Looking at the early photographs it was quite dense from the start, compared to more spread out sites like the Humberston Fitties.

Before the war there was some hostility to the site from Clacton Council, and development of new plotland buildings across the country was largely halted by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Along with other east coast sites, it received another blow from the North Sea flood of 1953 when 37 of the total UK death toll of 307 were in Jaywick.

During the 1950s and 1960s the Jaywick Ratepayers’ Association campaigned for Clacton Council to provide road maintenance and the water and sewerage services that other parts of the borough received in return for their rates. In tandem, Stedman’s original Jaywick Freeholders’ Association lobbied for better flood defences. During this period the demographics shifted from holiday and weekend occupation to residential use, with an increasing number of people retiring to Jaywick as a seaside area they had visited during their working life.

At the start of 1971, the council decided to eliminate the Brooklands and Grasslands areas of chalet development in Jaywick using its compulsory purchase powers. In the end, this move was blocked by an appeal to the Department of the Environment, whose inspector criticised the council’s failure to provide basic services. In 1975, a sympathetic councillor felt that the “Council were still sulking over the inquiry decision and don’t want to know about Jaywick”.

In their 1984 book “Arcadia for all”, Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy summarised outsiders views of the area:

Jaywick especially has been seized upon by architectural writers to illustrate, not the horrors of uncontrolled development, but the charm of an indigenous vernacular of makeshift design. Thus for the teachers of architecture at Oxford Polytechnic, it is an example of ‘structuring one’s own environment in defiance of external authority’ and for the architectural critic Sutherland Lyall, it represents ‘not shanty town jerry building but an indigenous British paradigm of the way twentieth-century “bricoleurs” respond directly to their exigent circumstances.’

So how did it become “Misery by the Sea” as the Daily Mail puts it?

The council played its part. The continuing hostility from the council placed the area under Article 4 directives requiring full planning permission for even minor alterations and improvements or even garden sheds. Rebuilding was prevented when decaying chalets were pulled down, or if one burnt down. The council appears to have objected to the idea of buildings that weren’t “proper” houses, but simultaneously dragged its heels over providing the proper roads and services that go with “proper” housing streets. Deliberately blighting an area has consequences for the future.

The economy had a role too. The wider recession in the early 1980s hit Jaywick particularly hard. Well in to the 1970s, Jaywick had been a seaside destination for day trips and holidays, with fairground rides and seafront shops and stalls. These businesses gradually ran down, and in 1983 the Butlin’s holiday camp, which had been a significant local employer, finally closed.

By the 1990s, Jaywick had a bad reputation. It had become the kind of place local taxi drivers were reluctant to take fares to, and people with Jaywick addresses didn’t get short-listed when going for jobs.

Gradually the freehold owners of the chalet plots sold up, or they or their families just abandoned the plots and forgot about them. Over time, more and more chalets fell into the hands of a small number of absentee landlords who let them out on short tenancies to people who could claim housing benefit and who came in from other areas. In 2011, the Guardian reported landlords were able to get £450 per month even for chalets in very poor condition.

How could this have been avoided? Many areas of conventional housing in cities arrive at the same situation, and this downward spiral can be hard or impossible to prevent. But it strikes me that when Jaywick was thriving, the people who visited or lived there owned their own chalets and plots, and had the freedom to improve them. As more control was exerted from outside, the worse the situation got. Treating people like children doesn’t lead to a thriving community. You want people to take pride in their neighbourhood, and the way to do that is let them have a sense of ownership. Part of that is having the ability to make choices to shape their environment. Living at the mercy of a “We Know Best” state bureaucracy or beholden to a slum landlord doesn’t do that.

Here is an aerial view of Jaywick’s Grasslands and Brooklands areas. (The full Google Maps version has Streetview pictures of all the roads so you can explore from eye level too):

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d2976.1080848167016!2d1.1048215652277837!3d51.773454117645585!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e1!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1412359335019&w=600&h=450]

In 2012 Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope made a documentary, Jaywick Escapes, about the area which shows many of its problems and the community spirit which prevents some of the solutions (like mass demolition) proposed by the council over the years.

Postscript (23 October 2014): I had a chance to visit Jaywick after the by-election. There are some homes which are well looked after but the area, especially Brooklands, is genuinely run down and the Daily Mail pictures aren’t misleading. I saw some houses being rebuilt and it looks as if the process of cladding wooden chalets in pebble dash and replacing wood with concrete blocks and tiles is still ongoing. Here are a couple of pictures of houses that still betray their chalet origins:

6 October 2014

Nick Gibbs’ “Le Shack” in France

Those of you who read “Living Woods” magazine may be familiar with the regular articles from its editor, Nick Gibbs, about his one room riverside hut in northern France. Google turns up some of his blog posts if you want a flavour of what they do and a few more pictures, and one of the best posts is from November 2011. Not really a substitute for reading the articles in the magazine though.

While searching around for this post, I found out that Nick had been in a serious traffic accident this summer and has been spending the months on his recovery. He’s blogged about it all and it sounds like he’s been through the wringer, but thankfully he’s coming out the other side now.

Author: iainmcnabuk