I’m back, and asking: why shouldn’t Cambridge be the size of Bristol?

Also this week: a recurring theme in English history; and a map of “main rivers”.

A few years ago a planning consultancy named URBED made headlines in, well, the sort of circles that care about planning, with its proposals for “Uxcester Garden City”. The British planning system has historically tended to be an all or nothing sort of affair, letting the market rip and fears of urban sprawl be damned until 1947, then making it almost impossible to expand any sizeable city through policies such as the green belt ever since.

With Uxcester, URBED was trying to show there was a third way. Using a trio of planned urban extensions, separated by country parks, you could double the population of any city roughly the size of Oxford or York. By turning chemical-drenched arable fields into parkland, and connecting the new city up with trams, the results would actually be greener, too. 

Image: URBED. 

The plan won an award, the £250,0000 Wolfson Prize. And then, as is the way of these things, everyone ignored it. 

But perhaps not quite everyone. Because this weekend the Times reported that communities secretary Michael Gove had drawn up plans to turn Cambridge (population: 150,000) into Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley, by adding as many as 250,000 new homes. The new developments, we are told, would be “in-keeping with local architecture and the government’s ‘building beautiful’ strategy, to build community support”. They’d also be accompanied by rail, tram or bus links, not to mention lab space, business parks and so on. And all this, in a country where it can take decades to not actually build a tram, by 2040. Sure. Why not.

To my mind, this would, given the obvious pent-up demand suggested by Cambridge house prices, be a good thing. But I am unconvinced it’ll ever happen. For starters, this government is on its last legs, and while Keir Starmer has been making positive noises on housing, bold plans like this won’t necessarily survive the changeover. Then there’s the fact we’ve historically been terrible at this sort of thing: land is slow and expensive to acquire; lobbying from the housebuilders reduces regulations and leads to the same ugly boxes they build everywhere else; lack of Treasury support means trams become bus lanes become regular buses. (In fact, an existing example of all this happening just up the road in South Cambridgeshire hit the headlines just this morning, when the BBC reported on Northstowe: “The broken-promise new town with no heart”.)

And then there’s the simple, inescapable fact that NIMBYs win elections and radical pro-housing policies do not. Already the LibDems, reliable as ever, are mobilising to oppose this plan in the seats around Cambridge, where they hope to beat the Tories. Coming soon to a leaflet near you.

But there’s another argument against the plausibility of this plan – the one, I suspect, we’ll hear most often – which I’m rather less convinced by. Some of the opposition, like this tweet from the city’s former LibDem MP Julian Huppert, suggests that the problem is that it would ruin “what is special about Cambridge”. Assuming, generously, that this isn’t just a dog whistle, then what this seems to mean is that it would turn Cambridge from a small city, of just under 150,000, into a pretty big one, of perhaps 600,000, placing it on a par with places like Bristol or Sheffield. It wouldn’t merely be an Uxcester-style doubling, but a quadrupling. The likes of me may roll our eyes, but it probably isn’t just retired people with massive houses who’d feel a touch thrown by this.

And yet, if you stop to think about it, there’s absolutely no reason why that should be so. As I’ve written before, the list of largest English cities by population has changed radically over the centuries. London has always been biggest, but in the next weight class down only Newcastle and Bristol featured much before the industrial revolution, when the likes of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham boomed. Meanwhile, the great cities of medieval England – Norwich, Lincoln, York – have tumbled down the league tables. Economic change used to mean that people moved, and some cities grew while others did not. Until, in 1947, we decided that the rankings should be roughly fixed forever more: never again would a small city be threatened by growth.

Well: the economy has changed again, and today it’s university cities which stand poised to be the new boom towns. The idea of Cambridge as a sort of Silicon Fen sounds ridiculous, as nouns tend to when you prefix them with the word “silicon”. But it has the research base, business links and geographical position that make it entirely plausible. The only things standing in the way are a shortage of decent lab space, and the fact nobody can afford to live there.

These are not insoluble problems – and solving them would do a lot for the economy as a whole. Manchester boomed thanks to the cutting edge technologies of the 19th century – why shouldn’t Cambridge do the same in the 21st? Perhaps it’s time we built Uxcester after all. 

The personal bit, with links 

Anyway. You’re probably wondering how I am.