Not yer typical english village

Anyone following signs to St Mary’s Village in Hackney, east London, will pick up mixed messages. The name suggests a calm English idyll, where everyone knows everyone and the pub and church are the twin centres of community life. But the route to the five-year-old development takes you past scruffy Hackney council estates to the edge of the Lea Valley – an area where the case for regeneration was so strong it helped to swing the International Olympic Committee.

But St Mary’s Village was named for more than marketing gloss. When the former high-rise Trowbridge estate was replaced with 248 low-rise homes, the intention was to create a community with the social mix of an English village. The better-off and lower-paid key workers would live side by side in “tenure neutral” homes designed and built to identical specifications. In the midst of a borough polarised into sink estates and gentrified Victorian terraces, St Mary’s would be a village for a new age.

The scheme was built under a development agreement between Lovell Partnerships, Hackney council and the Notting Hill and Metropolitan housing associations. “It was demand-led pepper-potting, the first in the country,” recalls Bernadette Rose, assistant director of Metropolitan Home Ownership. “Residents were able to choose where to live and the tenure was only decided when the properties were released. The fact that all the specifications were the same – well, that’s the way it should be.”

MHO is responsible for managing all the homes, which are evenly split between outright sale, shared ownership via the two RSLs, and the “Lovell Covenant”, where Hackney council retains 30% of the equity. Rose has never visited before, and only knows the scheme through her computerised management system. “With a scheme this size, you’d expect a number of issues, but they just don’t seem to happen here,” she says. “Anti-social behaviour, neighbour disputes – it just doesn’t exist.”

So is St Mary’s Village really a slice of rural calm in inner London? Touring the estate with Lovell Partnership’s scheme design manager Peter Pachomiou, Rose certainly found evidence of a community “as it should be”. With identical designs and specification, it really is impossible to tell which owners bought their E E homes outright, and which acquired as little as 25% under shared-ownership arrangements. Pepper-potting means that another possible indicator – the type of cars parked in driveways – is also meaningless.

But other aspects of “village” life are not so evident. A ground-floor shop unit completed a year ago is still unoccupied (although there is apparently a tenant-in-waiting). On the first day of the school holidays, the children’s play park and other communal areas are oddly quiet. And the tenure mix seems to be more varied than intended: a rash of “To let” boards indicates that some “villagers” are buy-to-let investors renting their properties.

St Mary’s Village was a deliberate attempt at social engineering. The sprawl of council estates nearby meant there was no need to build additional social rented homes, so building homes for outright sale and shared ownership (plus 12 live–work units) would draw in the economically active. More purchasing power would in turn attract more businesses and services, and turn the under-used Hackney Wick station into a destination.

But to avoid the resentment that can build up between existing communities and newcomers, the development agreement included spin-off benefits for the surrounding area. Lovell converted a disused public baths into a community centre, provided a GP surgery and relocated a kick-around area. “It was very much a community-led scheme. Local people were very much involved in the consultation,” says Rose.

The scheme was designed by PRP Architects, with architect Sprunt taking over for the construction phase. The layout restored traditional street patterns: flats and taller townhouses front onto the main road, and a series of courtyards combine two-storey terraced homes and blocks of flats. The design punctuates the end of each terrace with a dual-aspect town house or block, so that there were no left-over spaces to create maintenance problems or blank end-walls to attract graffiti.

Other anti-crime measures include boosting the lighting in communal parking, and lowering garden fences to protect sight lines from rear windows to cars. The result, according to MHO’s computer records, is that the village doesn’t have a burglary or break-in problem. “It’s a credit to the design. It has a Secured by Design certificate, and is used by the Metropolitan Police as a reference point for all other developments in London,” Lovell’s Pachomiou says proudly.

MHO is responsible for maintaining all communal areas, gardens and landscaping, and five-yearly cyclical repairs and repainting. The arrangement has probably contributed to social cohesion. “If we were just to manage this bit,

and Notting Hill managed that bit over there, there’d be a complete inconsistency of service,” says Rose. “Then there’s the “who do you call?” factor. It could have become an issue on the village green.”

But she agrees that not having social rented stock pepper-potted around the site has simplified the management. “There could be some issues if you had a block with some rented tenure in there – I’m not green enough to stand here and tell you everything’s wonderful. We have our fair share of issues with regard to management on some mixed-tenure developments, but generally we’re able to resolve them.”

Are they being served?

You’d expect issues, such as anti-social behaviour, neighbour disputes – but it just doesn’t exist

Bernadette Rose, MHO

The average service charge is £55 a month, including buildings insurance and a maintenance fund. In exchange, villagers enjoy a neat, well-kept environment. Brickwork and render have weathered well, and detailing such as steel porticoes above the door looks robust. Front gardens have hard landscaping rather than harder-to-maintain grass, but are separated by low-level shrubs to help demarcate them as private space.

Metropolitan’s grounds maintenance standards get a ringing endorsement, although ironically it comes from a Hackney council tenant in one of the estate’s retained blocks. Pensioner Leonard Mills is fed up with an overgrown hedge blocking the path outside his front door. MHO’s contractors once mistakenly cut it back, and Mills wishes they’d make the same mistake again. “The first time they came, the boys cut it for us,” he says. “Did a lovely job, nice and low. I saw him a few months later and he said, ‘oh no, I shouldn’t have cut that – that’s the council’.” Rose takes a note of his name and address, promising to contact Hackney with a “competitive” offer to maintain the hedge.

It’s surprisingly quiet in St Mary’s Village, with few cars or pedestrians on the move.

So quiet, in fact, that the appearance of the Regenerate team starts curtains twitching.

Mr and Mrs James open their door to ask what’s going on. They paid 70% of the open market value of their home on the “Lovell Covenant”, and are pleased with their decision. “It’s a good development, especially with the park, and it’s safe as well,” says Mrs James.

But in the next street, we meet Penny Bernstock, a St Mary’s resident who finds it all a bit too quiet. “If you just want to live in your house, then the houses are nice, you’ve got a bit of garden. But if you want some kind of neighbourhood, and a sense of life going on around you …” she breaks off and shrugs. “It’s three years we’ve lived here, we’ve given it a chance, but there’s no community. Nothing happens at the community centre, the GP surgery only has a locum service. All of us were hoping for much more.”

A bit of a letdown?

Bernstock, who also bought via the Lovell Covenant, is now planning to buy out Hackney Council’s share, rent her house privately and move away. But by adding to its population of short-term tenants, she’s aware this could further erode “village” life. “All of these have been rented out,” she says, pointing to the block of flats overlooking her house. “You’ve got up to six people living in a one-bedroom flat. It’s totally overcrowded and people who bought aren’t happy. It’s very disappointing.”

When asked about buy-to-let in St Mary’s Village, Pachomiou appears on the defensive.

“I don’t know how many of the open-market properties were bought as buy-to-let investments, but it was a very small amount,”

he insists. “We monitored whether it was companies or individuals buying the homes. One or two was OK, but not five or six.”

Nonetheless, estate agents’ signboards are the most visible evidence of economic activity in St Mary’s Village. Just two new businesses have opened on the boundary road close to Bernstock’s home – a general store and a cheap and cheerful cafe – while other warehouse-type buildings appear disused. Hackney Wick station is still dilapidated, and is now just waiting for the Olympic gravy train to pull in.

So has St Mary’s Village been a success? As a regeneration catalyst, or the kind of cohesive community the Bernstock family were hoping for, the answer is probably no. But as a housing development that erased all divisions between homes purchased by the better off or on shared-ownership by the less well paid, St Mary’s has shown it is possible to design, build and manage on a tenure-neutral basis. It may feel too quiet and introverted for some tastes – but then that’s the downside of village life.