In just 15 years, the free citizens of the United States and South Africa have, in extraordinary numbers, chosen to lock themselves behind bolted gates. If you want to understand why, a trip to the Birds of a Feather territory of Chigwell is in order. Half an hour from the centre of London, one of Britain’s first “gated communities”, Repton Park, is now open for business.
It is an “exclusive community” containing “a discrete collection of substantial homes furnished in a range of individual period designs that glory in their rich surroundings”, proclaims the advertising brochure provided by Crest Nicholson, the property developers. The sales assistant who shows me round the property is more blunt: “People move here because of the gates.” He adds that once the development is fully complete, in two years’ time, the whole site will be fenced in. “People won’t be able to get to any of the 770 properties in this community without a security pass. And in case any of them do get in, there will be 24 CCTV control and security patrols . . . it certainly keeps out the riff-raff!”
As we drive through the immense steel gates to the complex, my cab driver tells me that “there’s a lot of posh wankers here. Not proper posh – they’re all East End types made good. They move to a place like this to shut out the kind of people they grew up with.”
Certainly, all the residents I spoke to made Chigwell’s most famous fictional resident, Dorian Green, sound like a member of the urban proletariat circa February 1917. “We came here because it isn’t nice to know your kids are mixing with yobs,” said Liz, a middle-aged woman caked in orange foundation. “You can let them play outside and know that they aren’t going to be influenced by hooligans.”
Residents have access to an exclusive gym and leisure centre. Here, children are banned, and massages and homoeopathy are the order of the day. The area’s church has been converted into a swimming pool. As the guide boasts, without a smile: “We left in the stained-glass windows so you can feel sort of holy while you’re having a swim. Our residents are very busy people and don’t have much time to go to church.”
A property in Repton Park will set you back a modest sum, ranging from £500,000 to £750,000. Some of the homes overlook a public forest: “Unfortunately, we can’t gate the forest for residents. It’s had public access for a long time and we just couldn’t persuade the council. But anybody who enters the forest will be kept out of the compound,” one of the guides reassured me.
How many of these developments are there in the UK? Professor Chris Webster of Cardiff University, a leading expert on gated communities, says national estimates are impossible. However, in his own city, Cardiff (hardly a hotbed of seething violence), there are six inner-city condominium-style gated communities, each housing around 1,000 people. In addition, there are two American-style gated suburbs, one of which lies in the seaside district of Penarth. This pattern is, he says, likely to be replicated in cities across Britain.
A Britain filled with these compounds might seem distant. In 1985, there were a handful of gated communities in the US, and nobody predicted their rise. Now more than eight million people live in them, and inquiries have soared since 11 September. Stand in Repton Park and you may well be standing in Britain come 2015.
Critics suspect that the warm rhetoric of the developers hides some ugly sentiments, the likes of which were exposed in a Miami suburb in the early 1990s. Wealthy (overwhelmingly white) parts of Coconut Grove were lobbying to have gates installed, to keep out the (overwhelmingly black) poor residents in the west of the suburb. But then many wealthy residents publicly called for an “easier solution” to this problem: “Rather than place barricades in our neighbourhoods, we should build gates around the West Grove.” This would “contain crime and poverty and all the resulting problems”.
The novelist J G Ballard was one of the first public figures to warn against the inherent dangers of gated communities. In his mid-1980s novella Burning Blue, he anticipated the risks of this isolationism. “The most educated, creative and able people, in whom society has invested a great deal,” he says now, “are going to step outside society and lock the door.” He has expanded on this theme in his latest novel, Super-Cannes, set in a dystopian France where business executives insulate themselves from the plebs they rule over, mixing with them only in a vicious underground sport where they assault and beat the Untermenschen who live beyond the gates.
Yet the defenders of these developments argue that they are a way of rediscovering the Holy Grail of community. One Florida gated community, for example, boasts in its brochure that “we are rebuilding the old-town community spirit just a few miles from the centre of the city . . . Here, you will know your neighbours. You’ll see them in the golf club, the leisure centre and all the shared spaces that we as a community cherish.”
In one sense, gated communities do seem to have been successful at stirring back in a certain amount of social glue. In the definitive (and by no means sympathetic) study of gated communities in the US, Fortress America, the authors, Edward Blakely and Mary Snyder, admit that, in most of the gated complexes they visited, there was greater communal spirit than in the wider America.
But David Halpern, a senior policy adviser in Tony Blair’s Forward Planning Unit, argues that the left should reject this twist on one of the Prime Minister’s favourite themes. “Gated communities are a way of increasing social capital, but they don’t bridge social capital, and it’s bridging that brings social benefits.” A bunch of rich people feeling united and supporting each other, though nice for the individuals involved, does not benefit the wider population. It is where the rich and poor meet in shared public spaces, and the rich bring their clout to improve the services we all use, that community becomes a useful social tool.
When Imperial Wharf in Fulham was launched, London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, announced that he would bar any more gated developments while he was in office. And Halpern speaks for many in the government when he expresses deep scepticism about gated communities: “All the US studies show that they don’t reduce crime, they just push crime out along the transportation routes. It’s an abdication of responsibility [by the rich] and it doesn’t deal with the problem for the whole population.” Indeed, if we accept the research indicating that inequality increases violent crime, then “gated communities actually aggravate the problem”.
John Prescott’s stewardship of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions has been much ridiculed, but his 1999 housing blueprint, Towards an Urban Renaissance, set out an intelligent alternative to the retreat of each social class into its own ghettos. This vision is embodied in another housing development: ten minutes from Canary Wharf, you can find Greenwich Millennium Village. Overshadowed by the Dome, the village has received little press attention. It has been described by experts as “the most exciting and innovative residential development in Europe”. Central to the design of the village was the principle of bridging social capital.
The designers are acutely aware that a mix of social classes and income brackets improves facilities for the poorest without lowering the standards for the rich. So one in five of the village’s 1,377 properties will be managed by housing associations to provide affordable homes for people who cannot afford to buy on the open market. This works through a “shared ownership” scheme. Tenants make a start in home-ownership by taking a 25-75 per cent stake in their property, and they pay rent on the rest. This is ideal for people on lower incomes who can’t afford a full mortgage, but who aren’t at the top of the waiting list for council houses. Who are they? The very public sector workers we find so hard to keep in central London. The government proudly holds up the Millennium Village as a golden example of socially responsible housing, the polar opposite of the gated community.
So here is a clear-cut battle between the private good of the few and the public good of the many. The government can now shout from the socially integrated rooftops of the Millennium Village about the importance of housing. And it can warn that the danger we now face is not from the barbarians at the gate, but from the barbarians building them.
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