It wasn’t always this way.

Britain was one of the most competent builders in the world in Victorian times. In 1863 it built the world’s first underground railway.

It built a national rail network from nothing, a sewer system that still serves London today, and the largest navy the world had ever seen. That competence didn’t stop with the Victorians - it showed up again in the mobilisation of the Second World War, and again in the years right after it, when a shattered economy still managed to build millions of homes and stand up the NHS in a matter of years.

Then something changed under Thatcher.

The twentieth century had just shown the world the devastating effect of what an over-mighty state could do.

And one of the clearest ways to define who we are is by who are not, and that was the totalitarian regimes.

So Britain made a choice: shrink the state, trust the market, keep power dispersed and checked.

A smaller state and a free market were the safeguard against that danger.

It was a reasonable response.

But we didn’t stop at a smaller state - we built a state so afraid of its own competence that it can no longer function.

Every layer of sign-off, every veto point, every review-of-the-review exists because someone, somewhere, was afraid of what a state that could actually act might do.

China didn’t make that choice.

Whatever else you think of the model, it succeeded because it could build. That’s the real difference - not talent, not resources, but which fear each country chose to organise itself around.

That’s the idea behind the Platform State: government’s core job is to build and manage the infrastructure layer competently enough that business, family life, and innovation can thrive on top of it. Every economy has two layers - the infrastructure layer (roads, housing, energy, universities, the rules themselves) and the dynamic market layer built on top of it. Britain spent the last forty years opening up the dynamic layer. It never rebuilt the infrastructure layer underneath.

Let’s get building again, so we can thrive.

theplatformstate.com

What’s a house for?

In Britain today, and you get two contradictory answers depending on who you ask: a place to live, and a store of wealth for a decent pension that should appreciate for decades.

We have never resolved which of those two things housing actually is - and that unresolved contradiction is the single biggest reason Britain can’t build enough of it.

Net property wealth makes up 40% of total household wealth in Great Britain - the single largest component of wealth.

For most UK households, property and pensions together make up over 80% of everything they own.

It means a large majority of the electorate has a direct, personal financial interest in house prices continuing to rise - which means a direct financial interest in there not being too many new homes built nearby.

Zoom out from household wealth to the whole economy, and the picture gets starker.

McKinsey Global Institute, studying ten major economies including the UK, found that real estate now makes up roughly two-thirds of all global net worth, while infrastructure, machinery, R&D, and technology combined make up only about a fifth.

McKinsey’s own researchers ask the question this raises: are we storing wealth productively?

Their answer points toward capital going into productive investment instead of passive property appreciation as one of the only ways to unwind this without a crisis.

Capital that could be funding new businesses, R&D, equipment, or productive infrastructure is instead parked in existing homes, chasing appreciation on land that already has a house built on it.

We’re taught not to put money under the mattress, to invest it, to use it productively, but that’s exactly what we are doing, except worse, because it also makes the same asset harder for the next generation to buy and raises costs on the whole economy.

The Town & Country Act 1947

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 nationalised the right to develop land, replacing a system closer to zoning - build automatically if you meet the rules - with a discretionary one, where every project needs individual, case-by-case permission that can be reopened and contested on subjective grounds almost indefinitely.

Every reform since has tinkered with the paperwork around that decision. None has touched the decision itself.

That mechanism interacts directly with the wealth concentration above, and the two together explain why “build more homes” polls well in the abstract and keeps losing at the specific planning meeting. A discretionary system lets existing residents - who have a direct financial stake in scarcity - object to a specific, named project, while the people who’d benefit from it (the graduate who’d have bought that home, the family priced out of the area) don’t exist yet in any form the system can hear from.

It’s not that nobody wants more housing. It’s that the person defending the specific project standing in a specific field is always outnumbered by the people already living around it, and that asymmetry repeats at every single planning decision, for as long as more people in a constituency already own a home than are trying to buy their first one.

Why the damage compounds

Because housing sits inside almost every other part of the economy, this isn’t a housing-specific problem - it inflates everywhere at once.

A housing shortage raises rents, which raises the cost of hiring in productive cities, which pushes businesses toward cheaper, less productive locations (offshore) which lowers national output.

It shows up in graduate underemployment, in the affordability of starting a family, in the cost of care, in wage demands that outpace productivity because take-home pay increasingly has to cover housing costs first.

It shows up most starkly in the choice young people are making not to have children.

Fertility isn’t something you fix by throwing money at it - it’s a signal, an indicator of whether people believe they have enough resources, enough space, and enough optimism about the future to bring another person into it.

When young people spend their most fertile years commuting long distances, renting, or saving for a deposit that keeps receding, the right time to start a family never quite arrives - or arrives too late to have more than one or two children instead of the number they might have wanted.

That effect, once it’s played out across a generation, is largely irreversible.

Britain’s response to the labour shortage has so far been immigration. A short term fix rather than solving the actual root cause.

They let the illusion of economic growth continue without anyone having to take the short-term pain of admitting that a large share of Britain’s household wealth is built on artificially restricted supply.

Britain’s core economic incentive is GDP growth, and GDP growth is mostly a measure of spending - not of whether that spending reflects anything sustainable or anyone actually being better off.

Rising house prices let people borrow against their homes and spend more.

Higher household debt and lower savings show up as higher GDP growth, regardless of whether the underlying position of the country has actually improved.

Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

GDP became the target; housing-driven debt became one of the easiest ways to hit it; and the fact that this comes at the cost of future capacity - fewer children, a hollowed-out productive base, young adults locked out of ownership - simply doesn’t show up in the number we’re all optimising for.

Also Britain treats public debt as something to be feared and constrained, while private mortgage debt of the same scale, built on the same restricted supply of housing, is treated as perfectly normal- even as the foundation of a “healthy” property-owning economy.

Housing As Infrastructure

Housing should be treated as infrastructure, not a place to grow money.

The definition of infrastructure is the foundational structure a society needs to function - and by that definition, housing belongs in the same category as roads and energy, not in the same category as shares and pensions.

Like a road, a home should be judged by whether it lets someone get somewhere - into a stable life, a career, a family - not by whether it’s worth more this year than last, and how it helps society to flourish.

Nobody argues we should grow the economy by raising tolls on roads.

If Britain built abundant housing and let capital that’s currently parked in property flow into genuinely productive investment instead, it would produce a real and sustainable economic expansion.

That window is still open, but it’s closing.

While we wait, we all pay the cost.

And a talented, educated generation, quietly fades away into old age, families have fewer kids and talent moves overseas.

Every year it stays unaddressed, it gets narrower, and some of its costs - the households that were never formed, the children who were never had - don’t come back once the window closes.

Tell me where this is wrong.

This is my diagnosis of why, in four parts, and how we can improve it.

1. Dumb Media - Manufactured Simplicity

We have more media and information than we had ever before, but that means there’s more noise.

Traditional media isn’t built to explain anything properly. It’s in decline and so it’s seeking to attract back viewers. A segment has to fit before the ad break; a story has to be reducible to a headline. That’s not a moral failing of journalists, it’s a structural constraint of the format, and it pushes toward simplification, outrage, fear, victim mentality, rather than the time it takes to explain complex issues so people understand and become better informed.

Social media is worse in a different way. It’s optimised for engagement, and engagement-optimisation mechanically rewards whatever is simple, tribal, and combative over whatever is actually true and complicated. Nuance / it’s complicated - doesn’t work. Clear simple outrage does. The result is echo chambers where people’s views are reinforced.

There’s no long-form middle ground that brings people with real, opposing stakes into the same room to think something through together, rather than perform for an audience.

That gap is the reason the other three problems below never get properly resolved - not because nobody’s identified them, but because there’s no format built to hold the argument long enough for it to go anywhere.

This directly influences politics and decisions - everything becomes a tug of war, a battle between two sides, and deeper harder issues like this and the next few points don’t get solved.

2. The Role of Government

What is the role of government in a modern economy?

There are two competing views, and both of these are wrong:
On the left we have the idea that the role of the state is mainly redistribution, on the right that the state should be smaller so the private sector, which is more efficient, can thrive.

Britain absorbed the assumption that anything the state does is inherently inefficient, and that the fix is to hand it to the private sector. That assumption is treated as self-evident.

But the British state used to be one of the most efficient and effective states in the world - It ran a global empire’s administration. It mobilised the entire economy during the Second World War. In the two decades after 1945 it built the NHS from nothing, built the New Towns, and built the national motorway network - directly, not through a chain of contractors. That competence was real, and it was the state’s own competence, not something purchased from the private sector.

What changed wasn’t a discovery that the state is bad at things. It was a mix of rising complexity, decades of legal and regulatory accretion, risk-aversion after a few high-profile failures, and a genuine ideological shift that decided “the state builds and runs it” was the default failure mode to design around - rather than a real capability worth keeping.

The state still builds the roads The same logic used to apply, without controversy, to rail, water, and energy.

3. Economic Thought - GDP has distorted the Economy

Somewhere in our economic thinking, we’ve become obsessed with growth for growths sake, rather than value creation and long term vision.

We’ve shifted debt to the private sector, we incentivise spending and velocity of the number of transactions in the economy, which pushes up costs and makes everything less efficient, and Britain less competitive.

We’ve confused rising asset prices with rising prosperity. A huge share of what counts as growth in Britain over the last few decades has come from housing and land appreciating in value, and people being able to borrow more, not from making more useful things or getting more productive at making them.

That’s not wealth creation in any meaningful sense - it’s a transfer, mostly from people who don’t yet own property to people who do, dressed up in the language of a growing economy.

The tax system reinforces this: it’s more lightly taxed to hold an appreciating asset than to build a productive business, which tells everyone with capital where to put it.

We now have so much money in housing that prices can’t fall, without serious economic problems, and there’s nowhere better to put the money. Otherwise, capital is increasingly attracted to US where markets are growing.

But housing also can’t rise without becoming completely unaffordable - it’s reached its limit.

The result is an economy where being rich increasingly means owning something scarce, not making something valuable, where GDP grows by extraction rather than value creation - and where the headline growth figure can rise while most people don’t feel any richer at all, because the growth was never really theirs to share in, it was being taken from them.

4. Housing: Financial Assets Rather than Infrastructure

Britain’s housing shortage isn’t an accident of geography or demand. It’s manufactured with the economic incentives above - Green Belt designation, viability assessments that make “unaffordable” a negotiating position rather than a fact, judicial review used as a delay tactic, Section 106 negotiations that can drag for years. Each of those is a specific, nameable cause, not a vague failure of the market.

Housing is infrastructure in the same literal sense that roads are, and Britain used to treat it that way - council housing and the New Towns were the state building housing directly, not a market outcome left to sort itself out.

When that stopped, housing didn’t become an efficient market either. It became the worst of both worlds: scarce like a state monopoly, priced like an unconstrained one.

The cost isn’t just personal - it’s structural. When housing is scarce and expensive in the places with the most productive jobs, people can’t move to where the work actually is, and the country loses the output of people stuck in the wrong place for their skills.

When housing eats an outsized share of household income, that’s money that isn’t going into consumption, saving, or the risk of starting something new. Housing isn’t just expensive. It’s a drag on almost everything else, the way a bad road network or an unreliable grid would be.

Why this needs a new kind of media, not just a new policy

None of these four problems are secret. Each has its own body of serious writing, its own experts, its own decades of argument.

What’s missing isn’t diagnosis. It’s a format that can hold the argument long enough, with the right people in the room, for something to actually get resolved rather than performed. That’s what’s missing and that’s what helps to resolve the underlying issues and reinvigorate the state and public discussion and understanding.

So here’s the proposal:

Create a new format and type of media.

Bring the people who actually have a stake in each of these mechanisms into the same room for the most important issues of our time and discus them together with the view of trying to solve it so the country can thrive, not to argue and win a position. Eliminate the tug of war.

• What’s happening with housing? Why are we not building enough? Let’s speak to the planning officer, the resident, the first time buyer, the developer, the economist, the retiree with a pension who can’t sell their house

• Why can’t we build HS2? Let’s get to the bottom of this.

• Why are energy prices so expensive? Let’s speak to everyone involved in this to find where the bottleneck is.

It could also go into other issues that are sensitive, but important, because we've lost the ability to discuss hard things without it collapsing into tribal tug-of-war. This can raise the understanding .

• Borders and immigration - why can’t we stop the boats? Let’s speak to everyone involved in this to understand and make sensible conversation about what works.

• Guns and freedom - how does it compare between UK and US. What are the pros and cons of public safety vs individual and state power.

• Freedom of speech - is it important? What can and can’t be said? Where are the limits.

Bring them together for three to five hours, with a smart moderator long enough that posturing runs out and real problem-solving starts.

Facilitate it as a working session aimed at a recommendation, not a debate aimed at winning a point with open questions and work in progress.

Publish a real report and a set of recommendations afterward - something a policymaker or a journalist could actually cite.

Cut the short clips from what actually happened in the room - of people genuinely trying to solve something, not the highlight reel of a fight.

Not that Britain lacks the talent, the ideas, or the raw material to fix any of this - it has all three in abundance.

Just that it currently lacks anywhere serious enough, and patient enough, for the people who could actually fix it to sit down together and try.

The ambition is real, the need is urgent, and the political will, is there.

The question planners and politicians need to ask is not “where will these people work?” as if work is a thing that happens elsewhere and the town just needs good rail links to it.

The question should be “what kind of place do we want this to be, and who do we want to build their lives here?”

What follows is an argument for building new towns around identity, industry, and creative energy rather than around proximity to a motorway junction to get to London, or the nearest city.

The Creator Town

The creator economy is real, growing fast, and it needs somewhere to go.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in Britain who make their living, or are trying to make their living, through YouTube, podcasting, newsletters, online courses, and content of every conceivable kind.

Most of them work from bedrooms, spare rooms, or rented desks in cities where the cost of living is crushing them.

They can go to London, but in truth, the costs and isolation of being in a big city is good for some but pushing many people to Thailand, Bali, or US.

A new town that took this seriously would build professional podcast studios that residents could book by the hour.

It could be a place people go to start their careers in the creator economy, rather than going to London, together with like minded people, or for creators to move to, or visit and build families.

It would have video production spaces with proper lighting rigs, soundproofing, and broadband that actually works.

It would attract the ecosystem around creators, the editors, the thumbnail designers, the social media managers, the agents and the equipment suppliers. Creators are not loners.

They form communities. Give them a place to form one and they will come.

Cities like Austin and Nashville have attracted creative communities not through accident but through deliberately building the infrastructure those communities need. Britain’s new towns could do the same at lower cost and with more intention.

Artist Town

Artists Need Affordable Space More Than They Need Prestige

Artists move into an area, make it interesting, property prices rise, artists are priced out, the interesting thing dies.

Repeat endlessly.

A new town designed for artists would break this cycle at the start.

It would build affordable live-work studios as a permanent feature of the planning, not as a temporary concession.

It would have gallery space that is accessible to residents rather than purely commercial.

It would run classes, host residencies, fairs, festivals, and exhibitions, sculptures, to create the kind of low-level daily contact between working artists and the public that makes art feel like a living part of a community rather than something that happens in institutions in other cities.

The economic case for this is stronger than it sounds.

Towns with genuine creative cultures attract tourism, attract media attention, attract the kind of educated professional workers who want to live somewhere with character.

Art is not decoration. It is infrastructure.

Music City

Music is an Industry and It Has Been Ignored in Planning for Decades

Britain has one of the most extraordinary music cultures in the world.

It also has a crisis of venue closures, unaffordable rehearsal space, and musicians priced out of the cities where the industry is concentrated.

A new town with real performance halls, theatres and affordable rehearsal rooms, with recording studios available to residents, with a music venue that is part of the civic fabric rather than an afterthought, would attract musicians.

Musicians attract audiences.

Audiences create economies around them.

The town becomes a destination rather than just a dormitory.

This has happened organically in places like Margate and certain parts of Leeds.

It can be designed deliberately in a new town if the will is there.

Founders & Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs Do Not Need an Office Park

They Need a Community

The old model of attracting business to a new town was to build an office park on the edge of it and hope companies would lease space there.

This approach produced some of the most depressing built environments in Britain and has largely failed to create genuine economic vitality.

Entrepreneurs, particularly the growing population of people running small businesses, freelancing, or building startups, need something different.

It is growing incredibly fast. With reports that 1 in 3 people in UK want to become entrepreneurs.

They need coworking spaces that are affordable, not London prices with a regional discount.

They need housing they can actually buy or rent on an irregular income.

They need to be near other entrepreneurs because proximity to peers matters more than proximity to a motorway.

One of the best ways to learn is with the right peers.

A new town that designed itself around this community would attract risk-takers, builders, and innovators, and investors.

These are exactly the people you want in a new town because they create employment for others rather than simply occupying it.

It would become self-sustaining very fast.

The low cost of land in a new town is a competitive advantage.

Use it to offer below-market workspace on long leases.

The returns will come indirectly, through the economic activity these people generate and the reputation the town builds.

AI, Robotics and Manufacturing

AI and Robotics Need Physical Space and Britain Is Not Building Enough of It

There is an emerging crisis in British AI and robotics research.

The talent exists.

The ambition exists. The physical infrastructure for companies that need to build and test physical systems, rather than purely write software, is scarce and expensive.

A new town could deliberately position itself as a home for this sector.

This means building labs, not just offices. It means tolerating the slightly chaotic, industrial-adjacent character of hardware development. It means building housing that researchers who are often mid-career, often with families, actually want to live in. It means creating the kind of place where someone would choose to locate a robotics company because it is genuinely easier to operate there than in Cambridge or London.

The government is already trying to build AI infrastructure.

Building it into a new town rather than dropping it into an existing overcrowded city is a logical extension of that ambition.

Health & Wellness

Health and Wellness is an Industry, Not Just a Lifestyle Choice

The wellness economy in Britain is worth tens of billions of pounds and is growing.

Yet new towns are planned as if residents’ health is an afterthought, with a leisure centre if they are lucky and a gym franchise if they are not.

A new town built around healthy living would have yoga studios, climbing walls, running trails that are actually designed for running rather than squeezed between car parks, outdoor fitness facilities, spaces for martial arts and dance. It would attract instructors and therapists and the businesses that cluster around active communities.

More importantly, it would attract a particular kind of resident.

People who prioritise their physical and mental health are, as a group, economically active, community-minded, and invested in where they live. They are precisely the demographic that turns a collection of houses into a place.

Sports

Sport Creates Identity and Identity is What New Towns Historically Lack

Milton Keynes has a hockey team.

It is not a coincidence that hockey has become part of the town’s identity in a way that few other things have.

Sport gives people something to belong to.

A new town that took sport seriously, not as a facility to tick a box but as a genuine civic institution, would be building identity from the ground up.

It would invest in training academy, a stadium or sports complex that could host competitive events and attract visitors.

It would build facilities for minority sports that are desperately underserved, things like cycling velodromes, athletics tracks, water sports facilities, outdoor climbing.

It would create elite pathways for young athletes and the coaching infrastructure around them.

Sport brings people together across every other demographic division. It creates local pride in towns that sometimes struggle to find anything to be proud of.

Not Another Commuter Town

Why All of This Is Better Than Building a Commuter Town

The commuter town model has a fundamental problem.

It makes the town entirely dependent on somewhere else.

If the jobs in the city change, if working patterns shift, if the rail connection deteriorates, the town has nothing of its own to fall back on.

It is a parasite on an economy it does not control.

Every one of the industries described above can exist within the town itself.

The creators create there. The artists work there. The musicians perform there. The entrepreneurs build businesses there. The researchers research there.

The town generates its own economic activity, its own culture, its own reasons to visit, its own identity.

They give back.

They attract talent from around the UK, and the world.

The commuter town model produces places that are efficiently dull.

The creative industries model produces places that become destinations.

There is also a housing argument here that is often missed.

People in creative and entrepreneurial careers often need housing that is flexible, that allows them to work from home, that does not require a two-hour commute to justify the mortgage.

Building for them means building places where life and work are integrated, which is a more humane and more economically resilient model than building suburbs that empty out every morning and fill up every evening.

Why Not?

The Objection and Why It Is Wrong

Someone will say that this is all very well for a certain kind of person but that most people need ordinary jobs, ordinary housing, ordinary amenities.

This is true. A new town needs supermarkets and schools and GP surgeries and all the rest of it.

But the creative industries model does not exclude any of that.

It adds to it. The yoga studio needs cleaners. The podcast studio needs administrators.

The performance hall needs security staff and catering and technicians.

Every creative business that locates in the town creates supply chains, service needs, and employment that reaches well beyond the creative sector itself.

It creates new jobs too.

The argument is not that everyone in the new town will be a podcaster.

And that might be a bit too much!

The argument is that building the town around a creative identity rather than around a train timetable will produce a more economically diverse, more resilient, and more genuinely desirable place to live for everyone who ends up there.

The Cost

It will cost too much?

No

And here is why that objection does not survive contact with the actual numbers.

A podcast studio is a soundproofed room with decent equipment. A coworking space is a building with desks and fast internet. A rehearsal room is four walls and acoustic panels. A yoga studio is a sprung floor and some natural light. This is not expensive infrastructure. It is cheaper than almost everything we already build in new towns without anyone calling it unaffordable.

We spend hundreds of millions on road junctions. We build retail parks that sit half empty within a decade. We construct leisure centres with swimming pools that councils cannot afford to heat five years later. We subsidise office parks that never fill. Nobody applies the cost objection to any of that. The objection is selective. It gets aimed at things that feel unconventional, not at the things that have demonstrably failed.

The government does not have to pay for most of this anyway. Zone land for a creator district, make the planning straightforward, keep rents affordable, and the private sector builds the studios. Create an entrepreneur quarter with below-market workspace and investors will back it because the demand is real and growing fast. The public sector creates the conditions. The market does the rest.

And consider the cost of the alternative. Every commuter town requires massive road and rail investment to connect it to somewhere else. It needs ongoing subsidy for public services in a place with no economic base of its own. Its residents work elsewhere, spend elsewhere, and feel no particular attachment to where they sleep. That model is expensive. It is just expensive across budgets and decades in a way that nobody adds up.

A town with its own identity generates business rates, generates employment, generates visitors who spend money there. It pays for itself. A commuter town structurally cannot do that.

The expensive mistake is not building with intention. It is building without it and spending the next fifty years wondering why nobody actually wants to be there.

Conclusion

We’re in a new era.

The big supercity is great, but its overflowing and house prices from money from high paying jobs are a barrier to the emerging creative industries.

All trying to compete.

Let’s build new cities and towns around specific identities, with intention.

One of the most powerful things you can do is put talent together.

People yearn to be with their tribe.

Britain is going to build new towns, (but not enough of them)

BUt nobody wants another commuter towns.

We can build more Milton Keyneses, competently planned, well connected.

And we can build more commuter towns.

Or we can build places with real identities, places where industries cluster because the conditions for them have been deliberately created, places that people choose rather than settle for.

The infrastructure of the creative economy is not expensive.

Podcast studios and coworking spaces and rehearsal rooms and yoga studios are cheap compared to road schemes and railway stations.

\What they require is not just money but identity, the willingness to ask what kind of place we are building and to answer that question before we pour the concrete.

We have not asked that question seriously before.

This is the moment to start.

Returning to the UK after living abroad often means choosing between London or an old-run down / dead commuter town - poorly run, lacking character, and without much sense of community.

Most high quality housing is old, and the majority of new builds are soulless and poorly constructed to save money and make a quick buck, if it receives planning permission at all.

The UK desperately needs new housing, but nobody wants it built near them.

Communities are quietly declining as people commute in and out without ever truly belonging anywhere.

But why can’t it be solved?

Subscribe now

Millions of remote workers sit at home, productive but isolated.

And elderly people, often overlooked in how we think about place, are among the loneliest people in the country.

These problems are connected. We’ve built places optimised for cars and we’re not incentivised to build beautiful communities.

The Solution

There are 330 million remote workers around the world, with 14% fully remote in UK, this is growing fast.

But everyone usually thinks of themselves as individuals.

What if the people who could afford to leave - creators, musicians, remote workers, entrepreneurs, artists, builders - instead came together.

Not as individuals drifting to wherever is affordable, like Bali or Dubai, for a few years, but together as a coordinated group with real economic weight, shared values, and a clear vision for what a place could become, in a real English-speaking country, with people building for the future.

The idea is simple.

Come together, that gives us negotiation power, and the ability to build something extraordinary.

Choose a town, or build one, come together, and make it extraordinary.

Work with developers or build directly to create high quality, community-focused housing.

Negotiate with the local council the way large companies do - bringing jobs, money spending, media attention and talent in exchange for planning support and investment.

Pedestrianise the town square. Build a theatre, an art gallery. Bring in independent shops. Connect it to nature with parks and thoughtful architecture.

Make it beautiful.

And also make it intergenerational.

Not a gated community for the young and wealthy, but a place where elderly residents, families, and people at every stage of life belong and contribute.

With housing for people at every stage.

Mainly in a transitional style - mixing heritage of the local area with modern but making it beautiful.

Everyone gives back in their own way, everyone feels connected to it.

Who This Is For

People who are not looking to buy a house to make money from it, but buy a place to live.

People who are not daily commuters, but those who can work remotely, create online, run businesses, make art, or build things, and want to be around other talented people.

People who care about beautiful architecture, about community, about living somewhere with soul.

Markets, performances, walking, festivals.

People who are tired of the choice being London or nowhere.

Where

Within an hour of a major city like London.

Close to countryside, with a river or lake, otherwise we can build one.

Accessible to an airport, with good transport links.

Preferably UK, but open to other attractive options.

The UK is trying to build new towns - it is in the research stage.

Independent demographic and migration-based analyses (such as by the Financial Times or Centre for Cities) suggest that between 420,000 to 500,000+ new homes a year are needed to fully match the rising population and stabilize the housing market

Collectively, the new towns plan has the potential to build up to 191,000 homes over the coming decades vastly below what is actually required to fix the UK’s structural housing deficit

A new proposal in Tempsford in Bedfordshire is one possibility - well connected, affordable, buildable.

But the right location follows the right people, not the other way around.

We can also choose an existing location and build an extension and work to improve it. Like this for example

Why This Could Work

By creating a beautiful town that adds value to the community, and money and jobs, and facilities rather than a dry commuter town, we can eliminate the planning permissions problem, and planning permission can stream through.

They don’t want the hassle to review individual houses, but 100+ houses, they look at very seriously.

A group of a hundred people with serious income and aligned values represents real economic power.

Cities and councils compete hard for that kind of inward investment. The difference here is that instead of waiting to be invited, this group arrives with a plan, capital, and the collective will to see it through.

The remote work era has given people freedom of location that previous generations never had.

Most have used that freedom to stay comfortable.

This is about using it to build something worth staying for.

Where Do Similar Ideas Exist Already

• Poundbury, Dorset

• Seaside, Florida

• Cabin

• Culdesac (Tempe, Arizona)

• Ponta do Sol (Madeira, Portugal)

• Marmalade Lane (Cambridge)

• Diggers & Dreamers

• Network State

• Orania, South Africa

• Semkovo, Bulgaria

Let’s Connect

If you’re interested in this idea, leave a comment, like or send a message.

Subscribe now

Currently we have people 5 people with $4 million USD+ revenue of businesses interested in this.

If we can get this up to $80 or even $250 million USD then it can give us some serious negotiating power, or just 100+ freelancers or remote workers could be enough.

How can it be upgraded? The main challenge is cost

One solution is to use glass or mirrors.

These are usually expensive but there are some low cost options.

Glass is very inexpensive - between $3 to $35+ per square foot

Such a redesign could be highly worth it for increasing the value of the property, ability to charge rent, and also the effect on the surrounding areas.

Another advantage is that it can help with insulation, and energy efficiency.

If the price of a completely new facade was too much, a cheaper redesign still could be to paint the concrete and upgrade the existing windows or add reflective glass to sections.

Such as below.

Estimates for this redesign could cost around £1.6 Million – £2.85 Million
On the glass one above it would be £3.5M – £6.5M.

The building cost around £3.5 Million and £5 Million to build in 1968 which is around £40 Million to £45 Million today due to inflation. The value of the building was recently estimated at £42 Million and £48 Million.

For a well-located brutalist building that’s been depressing rents due to appearance, a quality facade upgrade is probably one of the highest return-on-investment interventions available in real estate - precisely because you’re solving a perception problem on an otherwise solid asset.

At a cost of roughly 10% of the asset value it’s highly likely there would be an immediate boost on the asset value of far more than the initial investment, not taking into account energy savings.

The building likely pays around £500,000 to £800,000+ in electricity and heating, and this could save 30% of energy to reduce 150k-250k per year, which could see a return on investment in 10 years on energy savings alone.

What’s more important, is that it also signals to us and each other that we live in an abundant society, and one that is flourishing and going somewhere.

The quality of buildings and spaces and environment we live is incredibly important. It shapes how we think, and who we become, and that often this is more of a mindset shift and organisational issue.

We can make beautiful buildings, and it is important that we do.

That’s what we built when we lived in smaller communities, and we’ve lost that now.

That’s something that we can’t measure in money alone.