Welcome to Gated Britain

Just as the huge metal gates swung open I stalled the car, something I never normally do. I restarted the engine, but the gates were already gliding silently shut before me. Wearily, I climbed out of the driver's seat again to press the bell by the electronic key pad. Welcome to Gated Britain, I thought.

There are now more than 1,000 gated communities in England. More than 100,000 people live in them, predominantly in London and the south-east - but increasingly right across the country. Most of them have been built within the past five years. This one was in Alderley Edge, a posh stockbroker village associated with the bigger names in the Manchester football firmament and ladies who lunch. Your last chance to own the best address in Cheshire, said the billboard by the gate. There was just one of the 33 houses left in the exclusive development.

But the UK has only just begun. In the United States, where five years ago some eight million residents lived in gated communities, the phenomenon has mushroomed. Today 50 million - one in six of the population - live in these self-governing estates. In parts of the States 90 per cent of new housing is gated. The story is the same in many parts of the world.

Now they are springing up all over Britain: new private housing developments, with gates, electronic entry systems, CCTV and often with private security guards.

"Some of them are really delightful places to live," says Sarah Blandy, a property lawyer who was part of a team of four academics, from the Universities of Glasgow and Sheffield Hallam, who produced the first major report on the new phenomenon for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). "I went to one in Oxford which was a quiet, open cluster of houses, pedestrianised, with kids playing in the streets and people on doorsteps chatting. But others are inward-looking and cold - converted Victorian asylums, hospitals and workhouses; if I lived there I'd feel like I was living in a prison."

Gated communities fall into three groups. There are fortress developments like the Bow Quarter - a luxurious complex of 700 one- and two-bedroom apartments and penthouses set in seven acres of landscaped grounds walled off from the surrounding area (a deprived sector of east London) with round-the-clock security guards and dozens of infra-red surveillance cameras.

There are also what the academics call "leisure communities", like the one at Nether Green in Sheffield which has 180 apartments and townhouses focused around a leisure centre and swimming pool (others have golf courses, marinas, spas, saunas and their own restaurants).

The third type is dubbed the "prestige community" where gating suggests exclusivity, as the marketing literature for such places discloses: "Follow the gravel drive through to another set of gates where the concierge will welcome you to the exclusive world ..." Gates can add as much as 26 per cent to the value of each property in the enclave.

But many places - like the twee new "English village" with what the developer's marketing people described as "the village green, duck pond, pub and corner shop, but all safely tucked behind the estate walls, protected by a gatehouse entrance with 24-hour security" - combine fortress, leisure and prestige within a single development.

For most of them, security is the prime consideration. Back at the best address in Cheshire I met with a couple of residents.

"You won't print our names?" said Mrs P, sweetly, a lady in late middle-age who was clearly conscious of The Independent's burglar readership. "Security is very important to us."

"Until three years ago we lived in a bungalow up the road, in half an acre of grounds," said her husband, offering me a rather good glass of chablis. "It was in a semi-rural setting."

"When we moved there 30 years ago, we didn't even lock the doors," interpolated Mrs P, in the way that couples who have been married a long time do.

"But as time went on we felt increasingly vulnerable," said Mr P.

"The jewellers in the village have been robbed twice," cut in Mrs P. "So when we came here nearly three years ago, the gate was a very important factor."

In a survey carried out for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), 72 per cent of gated-community residents agreed that "greater security" was their number one reason for their choice of home. (Good resale value motivated 38 per cent, child safety 21 per cent, peace and quiet 17 per cent, and 6 per cent were most attracted by the fact that the other residents would be "people like us".) And security is an increasing factor.

Closer into Manchester, in the suburb of Didsbury, a place estate agents dub "highly sought-after", Janet Wiseman, a human resources manager, and at 45 considerably younger than Mrs P, revealed something similar.

"We've been here 10 years," she said of the enclosed yellow-brick development of modern townhouses that face each other across a central courtyard. "When we came the gate was a secondary factor - we bought because it was the kind of house we wanted - but over the years we've been increasingly reassured by its presence. As a woman there's something quite satisfying about the gate clanging behind you. You feel you're home, and safe."

Many of those in gated communities are younger still. The Rics survey showed that 65 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds stated that gated communities were a good thing, compared with 44 per cent of the over-sixties, though younger people say they like greater security because they reckon it increases the resale value of their property. It is an instinct that developers exploit in their promotional literature. So much so, says John Flint, another of the authors of the ODPM study of gated communities, that "it's hard to know where the circle begins - with increased demand for security from buyers, or with the developers marketing it".

The growth of gated communities has provoked highly polarised responses. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has called them "invidious". "We want an open society which is at ease with itself," he has said, "not one from which groups of people withdraw." But the former Home Secretary David Blunkett has said that the answer is yet more gated communities in deprived areas to "make available to the many what is currently available to the few".

There has been a flurry of academic f studies. The ODPM report, in 2003, first charted the rapid growth of gating, but was inconclusive on whether it was a good or a bad thing. The general assumption was that gated communities ran counter to government planning policies aimed at creating a more open and inclusive society. Closed neighbourhoods seemed to sum up what G K Galbraith had predicted in 1958 when he spoke in The Affluent Society of private affluence and public squalor. Gating, the report said, seems "anathema to a British planning tradition and urban context in which street vitality and neighbourhood life are increasingly linked to social diversity and porous urban design in which freedom of movement and diversity of social contact are important aspects of daily life".

"We were all relatively opposed to the idea in principle," said one of the authors, John Flint, a political scientist specialising in housing and anti-social behaviour. They found plenty of allies. Local authority planners, though few had a specific policy on gated communities, were not keen. Twenty authorities had rejected applications for new gated developments. One planner described them as "sod-off architecture". Environmental services departments complained that they made refuse collection difficult as crews struggled to collect and keep up to date with cards, keys and padlocks. Police expressed concern that the need to get security codes from the control room delayed response times.

Things were not helped by the fact that Flint's fellow researchers allocated him the UK's poshest gated communities to investigate. The multi-million-pound homes in the secluded enclaves around Virginia Water in Surrey - one of which was Wentworth, where General Pinochet sought sanctuary when he was fighting his extradition battle - were so exclusive that they wouldn't even let an academic in to talk to them, not at any rate one from so down-market a university as Sheffield Hallam. "I had to make do with telephone interviews. Some residents even told the guard at the gate to deny they lived there," he says.

His conclusions are, unsurprisingly, negative. Gating grew from a social ecology built on fear. It worsened social cohesion. And it represented a privatisation of the public realm. Gates were a metaphor for a breakdown of community ties and the fragmentation of the nation's political landscape. Small wonder that the ODPM in 2004 issued advice that "it is normally preferable for new development to be integrated into the wider community ... the gating of developments should only be considered as a last resort".

But the debate changed. Right-of-centre academics hit back. Gating is a good thing, concluded Bill Smith-Bowers and Tony Manzi of Westminster University. Where many previous decades had seen most of the middle classes move out of the city - a flight to the suburbs of which in London the Metropolitan and Central lines were the barometers - gated communities were encouraging more affluent individuals to return to the inner cities. This lifts property prices in the adjacent area, raises council tax income for local authorities, creates jobs in deprived areas, increases spending in local shops, and brings the lobbying power of middle-class activists to bear on the police and council to improve services. And it also creates adult role models for local youngsters who had previously been surrounded by third generation unemployment and crime.

"A lot of the previous critique was a re-run of the criticisms that were made of suburbanisation in the 1940s and 50s," says Bill Smith-Bowers. "But the evidence contradicted many of the claims made against gating. Rather than increasing segregation it does the opposite." Gating is thus the new form of gentrification - but masterminded by developers rather than occurring organically through the actions of pioneering middle-class individuals moving into a rough area off their own bat.

But if the ideological battle-lines on gating are clear, proof is in shorter supply. There is anecdotal evidence that gated communities reduce crime - burglaries plummet - but some suggest that they are just displaced to other areas. Gated residents may spend more money, but they don't always go to local shops to do so. Some gated communities demonstrate strong community spirit, but others seem devoid of it.

Elsewhere in Manchester there is another gated development named Regent Park. Twenty years ago it was called Ordsall flats and was viewed as the worst estate in the city by Salford's chief housing officer. It was almost two-thirds empty in 1983 when the 200 flats were sold to a private developer and revamped for sale to owner-occupiers. A high wall and fence was thrown around it, along with CCTV, a caretaker by day and security guards at night. It proved to be the engine for a revitalisation of the run-down area.

"Ordsdall estate nearby still has a bad reputation," says Paul Thompson, the chair of the Regent Park residents' committee, who has lived in the flats for 18 years. His fellow residents are a mixed crew. "There's a lot of professional people: architects, accountants and some students. The flats now go for around £140,000 for a two-bed, and the area has acquired a supermarket, hotel, restaurants and even a casino."

Something similar is now happening in Cardiff Bay, according to Chris Webster, Professor of Urban Planning at the city's university and an expert on gated communities in other parts of the world. "There are now four supermarkets within walking distance of traditionally deprived areas where previously none would have been built," he says. "There's plentiful evidence that the infrastructure, services and facilities - shops and schools - have been vastly improved with the arrival of middle-class gated apartments in deprived inner-city areas."

Will gated communities in the UK develop f on the same scale as in the US, China or Eastern Europe? "It's hard to say, but if you go to south China where all the new housing is in gated communities, you come away with quite a positive view."

One of the things that drew Sarah Blandy, as a lawyer, to study the phenomenon was the extensive restrictive covenants which residents sign up to. Among the things that are commonly banned are animals, washing lines, vans, SUVs, caravans, toys left out overnight. There are prohibitions of erecting extensions, fences, TV satellite dishes, pots on external windowsills, on car maintenance in the drive, on children playing in non-designated areas, on parking in the wrong places. Then there are the requirements: that properties be painted every three years, that front doors be a certain colour, that windows are washed inside and out every four weeks and so on. What they all says is: "This is an exclusive development, we do not want any behaviour that lowers the tone."

"I was intrigued," says Sarah Blandy, "as to why people who were comparatively affluent were prepared to sign themselves up to fairly draconian restrictions."

Mr and Mrs P are clear enough about that. "We wanted somewhere more secure," she said.

"With a guaranteed parking place," he added.

"Where we could walk into the village."

"Where I had less responsibility for the path that needs resurfacing or the lawns that need cutting."

Janet Wiseman is just about to move out of her gated community in Didsbury for a non-gated house in the same area. So why is she moving out? "The success of a place like this depends on your neighbours," she says. "People have to pull their weight."

There is no doubt the Wisemans do. Her husband Ian, a banker, has been a director of the residents' association for some years.

"But some do more than others. There are some residents who seem to think there are bin fairies who put the dustbins out of the alley and on to the street the day the binmen come."

But there aren't. The bin fairy is Janet.

"It's sounds terribly petty but over the years it gets to you." That and the rows about whether the gardener is over-paid, or when the houses are due for painting, or the people who park in other people's spaces.

It is not an untypical response. Conflicts between residents or with management companies are reported in most studies of gated communities. The most common disputes concern dogs, unkempt gardens and car parking.

"There's been a deterioration over the years," says Janet. "People seem less public-spirited, less prepared to do their bit. Maybe at 45 I'm just turning into a grumpy old woman but I need more privacy."

There is an irony in that, since privacy is one of the qualities which the marketing people say gated communities best offer. But the walls that are designed to keep undesirables out can also keep undesirables in. Hell is other people, I remind Janet Wiseman.

In the corner of the room, her husband Ian quietly raises his eyebrows to agree.

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