MIDDLE-CLASS dreams of living in a smart new home threaten to turn vast swaths of England into a suburban nightmare, the country’s architectural watchdog says today.

Far from recreating John Major’s image of “invincible green suburbs”, or reaffirming the subtle virtues of classical design, many of the identical estates produced by high-volume house builders lack vital design elements needed to make them friendly and comfortable environments.

More than a fifth of new developments are of poor quality, 61 per cent are merely average and just 17 per cent can be considered good, according to a report by the state-funded Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE).

The findings suggest that, while developers and planners have picked up some lessons from the doomed tower block developments of the 1960s, they still have much to learn about designing homes based on the needs of people, rather than the planning department or the car.

Unless action is taken now, the report says, the one million-plus new homes planned for England by 2016 will result in the creation of scores more developments “indistinguishable from each other and without a true sense of place”.

Bleak parking forecourts and vast turning circles that force pedestrians to make long detours just to reach their neighbours on the other side of the street are among the worst offences, CABE’s audit of 100 estates in the South and East of England concludes.

Equally bad were faux rural touches, such as pink rendering and half-timbering, on buildings set in areas where there had been no such buildings before. The report says that Wellington Lodge, built by Kings Oak Homes, a subsidiary of the Barratt Group, in Winkfield, near Bracknell, Berkshire, was among the worst developments.

The gated development isolated the housing from the rest of the community, according to the urban design consultant EDAW, which conducted the audit for the commission. Car parking and road layout dominated the scheme and views into the development, the design path did not promote use of the street by pedestrians and the architecture was bland.

One of the best developments named in the audit was a Berkeley Homes scheme in Wellington Road in Harlesden, North London, which the report said had a strong sense of identity with the character of a modern loft apartment building.

The report blames planners, developers and highway engineers for giving too much prominence to car parking and roads, and for not using local materials that could help to create a sense of place and character.

CABE says that it wants more homes of the “right type in the right places”, built with local materials, responding to the individual architectural and cultural history of each area and fostering neighbourly relations. To help home buyers to avoid the worst developments, it has set up a website advising them what questions they should ask estate agents and house builders (www. thehomebuyersguide.org).

Richard Simmons, chief executive of CABE, said: “If people do not feel ownership of open spaces such as parking courts, litter will collect and they will not be well looked after. There should be green spaces as well as pavements and there should be no odd bits of land left over that will become wasteland.”

A Barratt Group spokesman said that the company was surprised that its Wellington Lodge development had scored so poorly in the report.

“We recycled a redundant nursing home to create 24 new homes in a lovely setting and anyone visiting now would see for themselves the transformation of the site and the quality of the building, which was a bespoke design for the site by leading architects and was welcomed by planners,” he said.

Residents were not surprised to learn that the development had been praised in the CABE report. Nina Leykind moved to Artisan Quarter in May with her husband, Max, and their baby daughter. She said: “We didn’t want to live in the suburbs and this place is perfect. There are a lot of young couples; many have their own businesses, so Artisan Quarter is an appropriate name.”

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