When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and unventilated ‘heritage’ world-view, the word ‘developer’ is spat out with contempt. It is as though they are speaking of Satan and his diabolical agents, who used to appear in the horror novels of Dennis Wheatley that I so enjoyed in my youth.
To hear Simon Jenkins, for example, refer to a ‘developer’ is to appreciate the impressive range over which the human voice can express contempt. To Jenkins, a ‘developer’ is a loathsome thing bent on profaning all that is sacred. ‘Developers’ despoil the countryside and debauch the city. They are cruel and ignorant exploitationists whose motivation is greed and whose business is corrupt and corrupting. They are merchants whose trade is ugliness.
I wonder if this is altogether true. Surely there is a more generous view of what a developer might be? The Town and Country Planning Act of 1990 offers a forensic definition: ‘the carrying out of building …or the making of any material change to a building’.
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