As the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote: “There are few things I find more beautiful than cranes”.
Officially, the symbol of Manchester is a bee – but it might as well be a crane. These skeletal structures are symbols of the skybound rise of England’s third largest city which this week smashed Welwyn Gardens out of the park to receive the coveted title Yimby City of the Year by campaign group Priced Out.
Once a dirty word, Yimbyism has experienced a resurgence amongst a swathe of policy wonks and columnists online, where it litters bios on X. Such is the Yimby influence – and, in fairness, the blatant lack of affordable or appropriate housing in Britain – that politicians have started to grab club badges with aplomb. Keir Starmer this year announced his membership; Michael Gove, the housing secretary, this week surprised activists by claiming he was also a Yimby, loud and proud.
Yimbys on Twitter deplore the lack of housing in this country. And rightly so. Britain’s highly restrictive ‘discretionary’ planning system has left us with a shortfall of 4.5m houses in the period since 1945, according to the Centre for Cities. In the 1960s Britain built 3.6m homes but in the 2010s we built 1.5m homes – despite significantly........