Mews Lanes
Common Ground Studio
Mews lanes, or rear vehicle entries – “they’re way less efficient and more costly than vehicle access from the front. It stands to reason”. We’ve heard that a lot over the years, most recently from a B.Plan/M.UD student with whom I have a mentoring relationship. I was looking over some of his recent design work and commented – it’s looking really good, but see, if you swap that road with the greenway and give the block mews access… He said – yeah, that’s what I had. But the teaching staff said no, you shouldn’t do that because it’s too inefficient [etc, blah blah].
Uh oh. Just when I thought things in the profession were getting better.
Read More
Cars might be a bit dirty and smelly, but back when your transport more obviously poo’d and pee’d, coal was dumped into your cellar and all sorts of semi-industrial activities had to take place close to the house, then an access lane and space at the back of the house was the way to go. It protected the front and public realm space of the street for more genteel coming and going and social engagement.
This arrangement has been around for as long as the modern city. In 1766, the 26-year-old James Craig won a competition to design a ‘New Town’ expansion of Edinburgh, leaving the hoi polloi back in the crowded and smelly ‘Old Town’. His plan reads like a textbook schematic, only prettier (see image below). The streets were for civility, the backs and mews were for the mucky stuff, and the gentry took their recreation in separate semi-private fenced gardens opposite the front door on the other side of the road.
So what’s changed since 1766. Our cars are more continent than horses. That’s a big plus. We don’t have coal fires. We’ve all acquired, mostly, the appurtenances of the upper classes – lawns, gardens, leisure time. And since we work less, we need a space in which to unwind from all the work we no longer do. We can’t afford the big communal garden so instead we invent the back yard. At some point it just seemed more sensible, more pleasant and spatially efficient therefore, to get rid of the mews and bring the car ‘round to the front. Especially since we stopped walking to where we engaged socially, and drove there instead.
What’s not to like about this arrangement? Stepping back a bit, enough for an overview, we see that everything the mews did historically – putting out the rubbish, receiving deliveries, coming in with the ‘car’ – has been transposed to the street. We’ve now got a giant Mews Road instead of a lane. We don’t bother with much social activity in the street because it’s not a quiet, person-friendly place anymore. It’s no longer a ‘street’ in the urban design sense but is transforming into the mews in the header image – high solid fences, secure gates, a bit of rubbish, no people. And this arrangement is okay because we’ve now got a private yard in which to socialise – with visitors who’ve fought their way through the rubbish bins and parked cars to get there. We have more individual amenity. Surely that’s a better use of precious land?
But did anyone ever check to see if front vehicle entry is actually a more efficient use of land? Have we retained sufficient amenity? In the early 2000’s we drew up a schematic for Taupō’s EUL to support our masterplan that included a lot of mews. That showed you would achieve about the same amount of on-site amenity that you get in a typical front entry lot on a mews entry lot of half the size. The mews means you can double the yield without surrendering any amenity for residents. The schematic was plausible, based loosely on a real design, but it wasn’t real, and it didn’t include the area of the mews. This was repeated on and off, revised, and revised again without being real ten years later in Christchurch. Same result. In 2019, another crack in Whangārei. 2022 in Waiuku. This time the community gave us a spec of what they wanted their properties to contain and so we went further and did a tissue study of their existing suburbia so that at least we now had real baseline data for a comparison – proposed scheme vs existing development.
Finally, in Hikurangi (2024) we combined everything using a real design for the mews (with real house designs) and undertook a full analysis. Another difference – for this study, rather than calculating the difference in lot size for the same amount of amenity, we took the opposite view. We looked to calculate comparative amenity, but using the same approximate sized blocks/lots. Because the mews is technically not part of the lot area (some of the driveway for each lot is contained within the mews), we calc’d both block and lot analyses. This made it a fair apples-for-apples comparison.
The prejudice against mews seems primarily founded on the unquantified assumption that it uses more land for the same use and amenity benefit. But there’s also an uninformed prejudice of what a mews looks like, driven by remembered pictures of Victorian London. Some of those mews, ungentrified, possibly still exist. The assumption in this case is that such configurations are the only possible form a mews can take. Given that the mews is a species of road, it needs to be properly defined and included in a council’s engineering standards. The assumption that a council would assert a Victorian recipe for horses on a modern-day subdivision seems odd, but considering modern development (cynically), maybe it could happen.
Working on the Hikurangi project, the council asked if we could do a full building and landscape design for a five or six lot cluster that would help them understand better how mews, greenways and living streets worked. Sure we could. Even better, we could take the earlier tissue work from Waiuku, reformat the data, and use it as a real comparator. A basic write-up of that work was included in the Hikurangi Urban Design Report as an appendix, and can be accessed here if you want to look at the detail.
o
Come On, Give Us The Results Then
Here’s the summary. Compared to traditional front-entry suburban lots, for the same lot size mews lots have:
25% LESS building coverage
Nearly 2x MORE green open-space within the block
2x MORE living space /lot
Same number of bedrooms
2—3x MORE utility space /lot
75% LESS driveway
<2x MORE on-site parking
80x LESS waste space within the lot
Those figures are not insignificant. They demonstrate that you can increase density to medium density levels and actually improve amenity outcomes for residents and the neighbourhood. It’s not counterintuitive. Rather, the anti-mews sentiment from teachers, council and the development community is simple ignorance. When a designer looks at what happens on the lot when vehicles come in from the back it’s obvious. Vehicles are confined with no extra space required beyond their footprint. The house moves to the front and creates a second outdoor living area, ensuring access to all-day day sun somewhere on the site. The gap in between house and car is all usable amenity that, on smaller lots, lines up with the neighbour’s open-space and avoids effect conflicts.
In many ways the mews arrangement pre-empts the spatial layout of the lot, especially when coupled with maximum front setback controls that force an engagement by the house with the street. It lines the buildings up, minimises the potential for over-shadowing, and results in the site having a hollow centre for which the only remaining use is open-space amenity. The mews arrangement doesn’t so much prescribe a design – all the Hikurangi houses are different – as it creates an outcome with a considerable degree of certainty.
o
In Summary…
Flicking the amenity/lot-size thing around again, we could also see that a 300m2 mews lot is the potential equivalent of a 500m2 traditional lot elsewhere. In fact, if the overall Waiuku tissue data are used, they reveal that a 300m2 mews lot contains as much or more amenity than a traditional 600m2 property (or 700m2 when the unclipped data are used).
So yes, quite a lot of work there to confirm the conclusion of the original schematic back in 2003. And there’s more of course. Much more. Several things we discovered here have gone on to inform the Residential Lot Performance (RLP) tool and further work on infill>brownfields transitions and cluster development patterns.
But the real message that needs to come out of this page is that designing a mews is not rocket science. It goes back to our teaching institutions (looking at you UA!) where we’re failing to educate yet another generation of planners and urban designers to do the job properly. The low quality of our urban environment is unacceptable, especially given the answers have been around for… Decades? Centuries? Millenia? How often do we have to reinvent the wheel? How often do we have to repeat elementary analyses like front vs rear entry?
o
REFERENCES
Residential Lot Performance Tool. 2025 Common Ground Studio
Urban Design Report – Hikurangi. 2024 Common Ground Studio
PC73 Primary Urban Design & Concept Evidence – Environment Court. 2024 Tim King
Urban Design Report – O’Hara. 2022 Common Ground Studio
Urban Design Report – Sands Road. 2019 Common Ground Studio
Design & Development Manual – Meadowlands Neighbourhood Plan vol.3. 2014 Common Ground Studio
Taupō East Urban Lands Report vol.3. 2008 Common Ground Studio
James Craig’s Plan of the New Town, Edinburgh – 1768 Patrick Begbie. National Galleries of Scotland
