● JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a visitor to my wife’s annual jewellery exhibition told me about a new housing development in Scotland called Tornagrain. She made it sound Utopian — a new town east of Inverness designed in a way which will incorporate schools and hospitals, solid, well-built houses which people want to buy and has not attracted the wrath of local communities.
She had been to visit it as a potential model for new housing in Oxford, which, like so many towns and cities, desperately needs housing, but finds itself thwarted by well-orchestrated, middle-class opposition and — as happened in the Chesham and Amersham by-election — hostility to government housing policy at the polls. I decided to investigate how Tornagrain had come about and what lessons, if any, it might…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023