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RHS Journals

The Garden
November 2005

Fighting for the front

Increasingly, front gardens are becoming an endangered urban environment with lawns and borders replaced by concrete and brick. As Leigh Hunt reveals, their widespread loss has repercussions that spread far beyond your front doorstep.

Many of us rightly worry about vanishing rainforests and the impacts of global warming, but all too often we ignore environmental problems on our doorstep. Look down any suburban street and you will probably see where slices of an important urban resource have already gone: front gardens. Once both status symbol and visual amenity, their loss reflects changes within society - busier lives and the growing number of cars in narrow streets ill-designed for parking. Domestic gardens in fact form a vital component of the urban landscape: they are visually pleasing, wildlife habitats and mitigate environmental problems associated with city living, flash flooding in particular.

Britain’s car society

With increasing regularity, many homeowners are today turning their front gardens into driveways for Britain’s 34 million cars and vans; lawns and flowerbeds are vanishing beneath sterile expanses of concrete or block paving. This is a scenario that, until recently, could have been put down to environmental hype, with little hard evidence, but research by the London Assembly has now revealed that more than 30sq km (12sq miles) of front gardens have been turned into car parking in the capital alone, equivalent to more than 20 times the size of Hyde Park.

The rate at which our front gardens are disappearing is still unknown. Planning permission is generally not required to replace a garden with hardstanding, and London is as yet the only city where research has been carried out. Elsewhere, only council figures for ‘drop kerbs’ (a term used to describe the lowering of pavement edges so that vehicles can cross to driveways) provide any clue, but these figures are not always a good indication of the extent of the problem.

‘These numbers are simply a rough guide,’ says Christine Eborall from Ealing Local Agenda 21, an environmental group that recently undertook its own front-garden study. ‘Some people illegally drop kerbs themselves and others use ramps to get cars into their front garden,’ she says.

It is also important to remember the loss of front gardens is cumulative. If the London Borough of Ealing grants permission for about 500 drop kerbs annually, this adds up to 5,000 front gardens being lost per decade.

Drop-kerb statistics from Birmingham’s suburbs highlight another trend. If frontages already have drop kerbs, gardens are easily entirely paved over without record. The city council’s Design Manager Martin Brown says, ‘This is having a significant impact on the appearance of some areas of the city, and might partly account for Birmingham having relatively few (234) drop-kerb applications in 2004, but we are aware there is a problem.’

The balance between cars and front gardens is weighed up differently in other UK cities. In Cardiff the council is keen to see vehicles parked off its tight streets and, not surprisingly, there was a rise in drop-kerb applications in 2004. Edinburgh, however, refused many applications in order to preserve the city’s historic character, but even this did not prevent a 16 percent rise in applications last year.

Local impacts

The most instantly obvious environmental impacts can be seen and felt at a local level.

On a simply aesthetic level, a wide expanse of hardstanding in front of a house, without softening from plants, is a bleak prospect. This is borne out by house prices, which prove there are indeed real financial incentives for homeowners to keep their front gardens. It appears that if many homeowners along a street pave over their gardens, the average house price on that road falls. Research shows that presentable a front and back garden can add up to 6 percent to a house price: £12,000 to the average home. ‘Presentable’ appears to be the key word. While some residents may feel concreting the front saves maintenance and keeps the front tidy, often this is not the case. Poorly-laid concrete soon cracks and weeds germinate between brick sets. Paving is done at different times, and contrasting styles of hardstanding lead to a ugly, disjointed appearance. Estate agents agree, although off-street parking, it is true, is highly desirable. The solution seems simple: provide space for the car without covering the entire front with impermeable standing.

Grass verges, too, often have to make way for crossovers between road and drive, and street trees cut down or their roots covered with paving. With the trees and plants gone, there is nowhere for birds to nest and insects to feed. Biodiversity is reduced. It is a dismal prospect, and this does not even include the fact that there is less space to garden.

Keeping the city cool

As well as softening a house’s overall appearance, front gardens can help keep the surroundings cool. Plants transpire large quantities of water as they grow, which is drawn from the soil and evaporates from their foliage. The water vapour they give off helps cools the air, which in built-up areas particularly helps regulate temperatures.

By contrast, hard surfaces such as brick and concrete absorb heat during day and give it off at night, raising evening temperatures and making it more difficult to sleep in summer. This is known as the urban heat-island effect, by which city temperatures can rise up to 10°C (50°F) above the surrounding countryside. Higher temperatures tend to make poor air quality even worse, particularly photochemical smogs. Indirectly, the heat-island effect can worsen the symptoms of asthma, and increased temperatures are also associated with adverse local weather such as thunderstorms. These effects can only be made worse with the loss of the ameliorating effects of urban green spaces.

A more costly issue for homeowners is subsidence. To cover ground around your house with paving, rather than permeable materials, may increase the risk of subsidence. The amount of water reaching the soil is reduced, which can worsen the problem, particularly on shrinkable clay soils.

The wider environment

It is crucial to understand that an individual front garden is not isolated. When multiplied by the number of houses in a town or city, the area covered by gardens is vast. Any major changes in the way we use them can have major consequences, the most serious of which is an increased risk of flooding. While gardens readily soak up rain, solid paving, tarmac and concrete comparatively are much less porous and increase peak rainwater runoff by about 50 percent. This additional water usually flows into street drains, which do not always cope with the thousands of extra litres in a storm. The excess can back up into people’s front drives and flood their homes. ‘The water has to go somewhere,’ says RHS Principal Environmental Advisor Rebecca Matthews-Joyce, ‘and even if you are not flooded, it can affect neighbours further down any hills.’

In most British cities, torrential rain (and any pollution it picks up) is channelled into storm drains. In London, the runoff heads straight for sewage works, which are unable to process such a huge surge of water, so the excess has to be jettisoned directly into rivers. This has notably happened twice to the River Thames in the last two years, causing many thousands of fish to die.

The company responsible for managing this situation, Thames Water, expects up to 50 such discharges a year. And while it hopes that two schemes costing a combined £2.1 billion will help prevent them, it has added £40 to the average water bill - and there yet could be a further rise of £40.

Next stop for the pollution is, of course, the sea. Rebecca says, ‘it is common sense that the water eventually goes out to sea, which then has a knock-on effect on the wider environment.’ Indeed, six of Scotland’s beaches lost their place in the Good Beach Guide 2005 after polluted water reached the sea last summer.

Finding solutions

Most people seem quite unaware that the trend for losing front gardens is becoming a problem. People outraged by the loss of forests in Tasmania could well be directly responsible for reducing biodiversity rather closer to home, but raising awareness can prove tricky. In London, the Kensington and Chelsea council is leafleting residents, while Ealing Local Agenda 21 is working hard to produce data that grabs headlines and alerts people. Christine Eborall also suggests that a high-profile spokesperson is needed. ‘We could really do with a figurehead like Prince Charles who would make people realise what a big issue this is,’ she says.

However, the average homeowner needs practical solutions and alternatives. It is no good telling a mother with two toddlers she has to trail up and down the road looking for a parking space, rather than turning straight onto a drive. As Rebecca Matthews-Joyce says, however, gardens can be multi-use: ‘cars don’t need the whole front garden. Just pave the area required for the car to stand on or, even better, only the wheel tracks.’

Clever and inspired garden design, hand in hand with the development of new, more permeable materials that allow rainwater to soak through, surely hold the key. Some are reclaimed or recycled, yet just as good as conventional materials, although choice is still limited. Among these are innovative, recycled plastic ‘trays’ of honeycomb-matrix cells that hold resin-bonded aggregate. Tiles are also available made from chipped recycled rubber that allow water through.

For people who prefer traditional-looking block paving, bricks are now manufactured with channels down the sides to allow water to permeate, and they are around the same price as normal paving blocks (although they are more costly to install if existing concrete has to be dug out and a proper drainage layer laid underneath). A much cheaper option is a simple layer of gravel laid on compacted (but permeable) hard core.

Remaining space not needed for parking may be planted. Even the space beneath the car can be planted with low-growing thymes, bugle and creeping jenny, as long as the car is not in situ, shading them all day.

Challenges ahead

Some are calling for tougher measures to deal with the problem. Darren Johnson, Chairman of the London Assembly’s Environment Committee, hopes the London Assembly’s report (published this summer) proves influential: ‘I hope local authorities take the opportunity to protect front gardens, or at the least put the issue higher up the agenda and take it seriously.’ These sentiments are echoed by planners around the UK, so there is hope something will be done.

If the worrying loss of front gardens is to be halted, we simply must change the nation’s mind-set to expect more than just car parks and paving. It is possible to achieve a compromise: gardens can be versatile and practical, yet green and pleasant. And, after all, who really prefers to look at concrete?

Leigh Hunt is a horticultural advisor with the Gardening Advice Service at RHS Garden Wisley

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