The Essex Design Guide Revisited: A review by Professor Brian Goodey
| Originally published in Town and Country Planning, vol. 67 In his detailed history of the emergence of the Essex Design Guide in the early 1970s, Smales¹ quotes from an interview with the County Planning Officer of the period, Douglas Jennings-Smith: ‘I looked at the County as a whole and thought, well,...., from a landscape point of view it hasn't got much to offer... in the villages of Essex and in the small towns there was a lot to offer and they were slowly being ruined. I went from village to village and I saw new houses being built, new estates being tacked on... using imitation stone, the wrong materials, the wrong shapes, flat roofs and ignoring the surroundings. Isn't anyone taking any notice; isn't anyone doing anything about this?' |  The mixed media of a street in Great Bardfield, Essex |
The small team which Jennings-Smith established set to work to do something about it. Their resources included a creative interpretation of Cullen's 'townscape' ideas and images, a county-level culture of historical enquiry, pioneer interest in vernacular structures, and a sustained desire to do better for both the county's residents and the flow of new home-owners who sought space, and their own version of arcadia beyond London.
Each page of the 1973 Guide which resulted was hard-fought, it was new, and usually somebody else's ground. Central government was wary, highway engineers and developers were affronted, architects (although it was an architectural team) were challenged. Given the national coverage of Essex-style schemes, it is difficult to remember the problems of getting the first examples on the ground.
While the novelty detailing, repetitive cleverness of facades, cul-de-sacs and national spread of ideas met with criticism, the reinstatement of fundamental urban design layout principles became a significant element in the urban design revival. With less glamour and fewer resources than Poundbury, Essex achieved much more.
| The substantially new edition of the Guide² has been developed by members of the original team in association with planning officers in the county, and has enjoyed a long period of consultation with a very wide range of agencies and urban design interests. The fact that there is a qualified and enthusiastic county resource available at district level is, itself, a measure of the earlier Guide's success in stimulating design interest in the country. The Guide As might be expected from a 25-year gestation period, the new Guide which, it should be noted, features 'mixed use' in its title, is both more extensive and directive in its contents. It is very fully illustrated in a variety of eye-catching styles which establish its place within the 'townscape' tradition, but with layout sketches, building/plot details, and extensive axonometric examples. In these latter, it is but one stage removed from the developer's image of 'new urbanism', for this is part of the forum within which the proposals will be contested. |  Case study 7, 'Boulevard planning', from the new Essex Design Guide |
Reviewers are likely to mark it as an important book to own, and enjoy, for it portrays an Essex where cars, out-of-town shopping, the criss-cross of roads and wires are out of sight.
To retrieve old urban qualities, or achieve new, the present context is largely ignored. Superficially, therefore, the Guide may justify past criticisms that Essex Design Guide principles serve only to embellish the identity of inward looking residential additions to the urban periphery. But this is a guide to be used, and the detailed proposals do offer more in terms of contextual linkage.
The introduction includes a useful summary of the main changes from the 1973 edition, some of which are remedial, while others reflect substantial change in urban design thought over the period - to quote: '
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This last point is one of the few opportunities where future residents may play a part in the creation of their residential areas, and, regrettably in the light of critical observations on the 1973 Guide, the issues of participation and community-building, so essential in the success of new residential areas are only met through the standardised suppositions of architectural determinism.
The Guide user will find the retention of many old favourites - the theoretical context reduced still further to a spectrum of visual density examples, with Arcadia now joined by boulevard planning, the Essex vernacular palette re-photographed, and the language of facade detail reinforced at every turn.
And while Essex is still the context for proposals, the universal applicability of attractive examples will ensure that, like the first Guide, the inevitable success of well organised advice here will be spread thick throughout the country.
| As a contribution to the uniqueness of the Essex landscape, the Guide is doomed to failure, as its take-up elsewhere fails to appreciate the understated subtleties of local vernacular and morphology which were its starting point. Materials and detailing, with examples of good and bad practice since 1973, certainly demand more attention in this edition. The use of 1973 to date examples with photographs and achieved plan forms is a major opportunity lost throughout. The text is clearly divided into nine sections. Following the introduction, five sets of criteria establish the key propositions and rules to be followed for: |  Towards an instant town centre - New Urbanism at Fairfax Township, Calgary, 1998 |
- development sites larger than 1 hectare
- all sizes of development
- layout at densities below 20 dwellings per hectare
- the creation of urban space at densities over 20 dwellings per hectare
- planning buildings at densities over 20 dwellings per hectare
Within each section there are summary comments and illustrations of established urban design and urban landscape principles, with more effective discussion of space varieties and functions (although not management) than previously.
The section on 'Building form', although echoing the earlier edition, further endorses an Essex regional style and benefits from experience in detailing Design Guide developments, although photographic evidence is sorely missed: Appendix E 'Indicative house types' may be a dangerous substitute.
The heart of any guide must be in the discussions of services and access, for it is the hierarchy of roads and routes which, normally, dictates the three-dimensional form of new developments. It was the road proposals in the 1973 Guide which marked a sequence of gradually endorsed changes in highway standards, and although the 1998 edition is less radical, it still provides a wealth of detail which underlines the three-dimensional significance of road layout. A hierarchy of eight road types is detailed, with a considerable retreat from the cul-de-sac form which came to dominate many earlier developments.
| The systematic discussion is drawn together in a concluding sequence of 14 case studies, presented in annotated plan and axonometric form and drawn from an initial plan for a major, urban edge expansion scheme, such certainly exists not far from the Chelmsford offices of the Design Guide team. In seeming contradiction to integration with urban form, it has few links to existing development, relying for external access on a peripheral ring road. Although full of good practice examples from the preceding text, these case studies also hint at the dangers of prescribing at the large scale without a cultural, social or environmental context in view. Case study 4, 'Major entry point', is a fairly new English form, owing much to the grandiose, space-wasting North American developer's gateway announcement or ranch entrance, while case study 5 'Urban layout', tries desperately to hang on to an informal 'market square' - neglecting the mixed use so integral to its realisation. |  Corner detail - Noak Bridge, Basildon in Essex |
The full range of established urban design layout devices - even to Bath's Circus - are brought into play in an unpopulated, residential world where the set pieces offer as much to the model building collector as they do to any established community of individuals.
A place in history
With counties on the wane (Essex lost Southend and Thurrock in April 1998), the pattern of local and regional identity in Britain is about to experience major changes. There are few effective guides to planners, developers and the public in their mutual task of reconciling natural and global information and supply sources with a more basic need to identify with places.
The design and function of 'home' is a starting point, where belonging is almost always associated with trappings drawn from the past, be they authentic memorabilia or contrived references.
The overwhelming graphic image of the new Guide is of traditional environments, although, as with the pioneer built example at South Woodham Ferrers, the geographic cover is wider than Essex (with Chafford Hundred and Raphael Samuel's³ 'brand new vernacular villages' in his 1984 critique of retrofitting).
It is all too easy to poke fun at the Toytown ensemble that results from Essex Design Guide applications, but for every stuck-on, cardboard estate, there is a Noak Bridge, Basildon's successful test-bed for extending the basic principles.
What Essex, and many other counties might have been without the first Guide, the versions produced elsewhere, and the changes to mass housing design and finish is not difficult to imagine. In a public sector context, the County Council's senior officers and members have kept faith with a team, once including Mel Dunbar, always including Tony Aspinall, Dave Stenning and Alan Stones, which mounted a unique urban design workshop with principles which have matured with the growth of the subject.
In the 1970s I outlined the key roles of 'the urban designer as co-ordinator'. These were:
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The Development of the Essex Design Guide and its increased involvement of professionals and developers in the county have gone some way in meeting this concept of urban design.
The challenge for the post-1998 generation is to achieve as effective guidance for the active participation of residents and users in the evolution and management of their environments. Regrettably, this essential step is hardly hinted at in the 1998 Guide. DIY guidance as to how people make the places which only professionals think they have made is long overdue.
The last research issue in a posthumously published list of Kevin Lynch's ideas in the first edition of the US magazine, Places, was 'How to make public the analysis of local place quality'. In Essex, as elsewhere, this remains the major challenge to those who claim to design the urban.
Brian Goodey is Professor of Urban Landscape Design in the Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University |
 | Originally published in Town and Country Planning, vol.67, no.5, June 1998, pp. 176-178. |
 | The Essex Design Guide for Residential and Mixed Use Areas. Essex Planning Officers' Association. Chelmsford, 1998. Copies are available at £30 (£18 for students) from the Environmental Services Directorate, Essex County Council, County Hall, Chelmsford SM1 1LF. |
Notes
1. L.S.Smales: An Appraisal of the History, Impact and Effectiveness of the Essex Design Guide for Residential Areas Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Joint Centre for Urban Design, Oxford Polytechnic (Brookes University), 1991.
2. The Essex Design Guide for Residential and Mixed Use Areas Essex Planning Officers' Association. Chelmsford, 1998.
3. For a provocative consideration of Essex design guidance within its cultural context, see Raphael Samuel: Theatres of Memory. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. Verse, London, 1994.
4. B.Goodey: The urban designer as co-ordinator. RIBA Journal, 1978, Feb., pp.667-668.
©Professor Brian Goodey, 1998
©1998 Essex County Council & Essex Planning Officers Association
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