Spring has arrived on the North Coast of Zealand, and my fellow Danes are busily scrubbing down their summerhouses for the season. Villages which were nearly deserted during the winter – Danes can generally only occupy their summerhouses for 180 days a year – are gradually filling up.
Sadiq Khan said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium
Yet I rather doubt Sir Sadiq Khan, who earlier this month said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium, will be on anyone’s prospective guest list. The current war of expropriation on British second homeowners is incomprehensible to Danes: there are 225,000 Danish summerhouses, often shared among extended families; enough that half the population of six million is said to have access to one. That would be an awful lot of voters to punish.
Denmark’s summerhouses – emblematic of the mentally and physically healthy contemporary Danish lifestyle – took their time to get going. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, cities, with ramparts and soldiers as protection, were seen as the safe and desirable places to live; only a few aristocrats had both city and country homes. But Denmark’s deadly 1853 cholera epidemic persuaded many that country air was healthier. In 1886, the State sold off a strip of forest land alongside the gorgeous white sands of Hornbæk, a fishing village thirty miles north of Copenhagen, and the first Danish summerhouses appeared – substantial Italianate villas created by Copenhagen’s merchant elite.
Democratisation soon followed. In 1912, the Danish liberal newspaper Politiken launched a competition for ‘good, cheap and practical’ summerhouse design, ‘in every way suitable for being built in Danish nature’. It noted: ‘the need for one’s own summerhouse in the country is one of the most striking phenomena for anyone who observes modern city life. Everything that reminds people of the country…is getting worse in the midst of the city’s stone masses’. Danes, meanwhile, were gaining enough time to enjoy summerhouses: from 1891, workers had Sundays off, and by the 1920s most white-collar workers had a formalised eight-hour workday plus weekends. Summer villages started to spring up within cycling distance of major cities.
But the most significant driver of the growth of Danish summerhouses was legislation – or more precisely, the lack of it. Denmark’s 1938 Town Planning Act had ignored country villages (only parishes of at least 1,000 people were subject to town layout plans) and its 1937 Nature Conservation Act protected only a narrow strip beside the sea. Local councils also had meagre resources to enforce the limited legislation. Little stood in the way of farmers, who could profit handsomely from parcelling off their coastal fields for sale to city-dwellers, who would build basic wooden summerhouses, with wells for water and septic tanks for sewage.
Even so, by the late 1940s there were fewer than 10,000 summerhouses in Denmark. Explosive growth had to wait for the post-WW2 economic boom, and the associated rise in car ownership, which saw around 100,000 summerhouses built by 1966, and 150,000 by 1974. Companies were founded to factory-build modern wooden summerhouses, which could be set upon trailers and trucked fully-formed onto sites. Always, the lack of planning regulation was key: Danish landscape architect Jørgen Primdahl has described this as a period where it was in practice “impossible to say no to development without it triggering compensation for the owner”.
Unfortunately for Brits, while Denmark was enjoying a nearly unregulated second home building boom, the UK’s 1947 Town & Country Planning Act gave birth to the current lethargic planning permission regime, from which UK housebuilding has never fully recovered, and which has contributed to the current deficit of 4.3 million UK homes, according to the Centre for Cities. Not enough homes of any kind were built in the UK in the postwar era – let alone second homes. The UK’s second homeowners never became a group large enough to be worth defending by politicians.
Denmark, meanwhile, eventually reined in its postwar summerhouse boom. Conservation legislation in the 1960s limited the growth of summerhouse areas, forcing existing plots to be subdivided to create additional homes. And since the 1970s, construction of summerhouses has only been allowed in ‘recreational’ zones, where councils are not required to build full-year facilities such as schools and hospitals. But few Danes would agree with the Guardian’s George Monbiot, who has called second homes ‘a luxury that deprives other people of a necessity…a gross injustice’.
By this point, you might be thinking that Danish summerhouses sound idyllic and imagining buying one as an alternative to suffering financial exhaustion as one of the UK’s second homeowners. Tough luck, I’m afraid: not only is the market undersupplied – Danish summer homes typically stay within families far longer than primary residences – but also, upon entering the EU Denmark negotiated an opt-out preventing foreigners from buying second homes in Denmark. This restriction also encourages a healthy summerhouse rental market, which helps Danes pay their second home bills.
Denmark consistently ranks among the world’s happiest countries, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to posit the causal link that Danes’ access to summerhouses is a good reason for them to be happy. Nothing, of course, prevents the UK from re-zoning its mostly empty coastal areas for part-time use as second homes; nothing except rampant nimbysim and the politics of envy. If any UK politician is brave enough to challenge the consensus of the postwar period, I look forward to cheering them on – remotely, from the comfort of my family’s Danish summerhouse.
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