HEADLINES:

Now for some good news. It is just conceivable that we might soon enter a golden age of housing. Or at least a slightly gilded one. Or gold-ish. Or, at any rate, better than the tin age, the plastic age - I am searching for a material sufficiently lowly to do justice to it - the binbag age, the old-newspaper-used-for-cat-litter age, that we have just passed through.

The era of buy-to-let, combined with the last Mayor's fixation on density at any price, combined with this Government's obsession with pumping up housing numbers, combined with highly geared developers whacking up blocks as fast as they could so as to pay their interest costs has bequeathed us some of the worst housing of the past 100 years.

Take Central House, Stratford, a Barratt development in sight of the Olympic Stadium. I have no special desire to persecute this particular block, as it is one of many, but it is hard to ignore the fact that it is a dead ringer for HMP Weare, the prison ship that was briefly moored off Portland, Dorset. Or that it is the dingy off-white of unwashed underwear.

It is monotonous as a stack of Porta-kabins, revealing all too clearly the fact that developments like this are made of repetitous elements craned into place. Its windows look like the cheapest that could be found. Taken alone, each floor would display a poverty of imagination: they are then multiplied nine times without variation, apart from the colouring - the bottom two levels are beige. To be sure, it has balconies and, unlike those in some developments, they are large enough to fit a small table and chairs, but somehow they have not inspired many residents to populate them with plants or furniture.

Its geometry is all right angles, again for cost reasons, which leaves slivers of its non-rectangular site to be populated by plant rooms, oddments of landscaping and other scraps of spatial detritus.

Like many recent developments it is squeezed into a horrible location, hard against a flyover. A fenced-in car park buffers the flats from the road but the block does absolutely nothing to improve the environment surrounding it. It gives no incentives to people to linger in the streets around it, or do anything but get in a car and drive away as fast as possible.

Developments like this tick the boxes of Ken Livingstone's London Plan. They are high-density and built on brownfield sites. They fulfil quotas of affordable housing. They conform to building regulations requiring greater energy efficiency. They have passed through a planning system that theor-etically attaches importance to design. But they add nothing, connect to nothing, relate to nothing. They give no sense of pride or pleasure in a home.

Then there are the interiors. On average, Britain builds the smallest homes in Europe, with the smallest rooms, at the greatest cost. Ceiling heights are low, windows tiny, floor plans inept, storage inadequate. One planner describes how a developer proposed flats with wholly internal bedrooms - no windows - on the grounds that people mostly used bedrooms at night. Some bedrooms are built at 4.5 square metres, which allows for a single bed and a little space to walk around it, leaving no room for toys, or a place for a child to do homework. Some homes are built with an area of 19 square metres, not much more than a room in a student hall of residence.

Such homes are the creation of our bulimic property market, one that binges and starves, soars and crashes, on a 15-to-20-year cycle. It is driven by a perpetual shortage of building land, which raises the costs of sites and encourages housebuilders to make their money by speculating on sites rather than building houses. As a result, they are not very good at the latter.

In this market the Englishman's fabled love of his home takes second place to his fondness for dodgy, too-good-to-be-true deals. Homebuyers, usually stretched to their financial limit, are denied real choice: they take whatever they can just about afford in the places where they more or less want to live. The quality of their purchase comes a poor second.

The reason to be cheerful now is that the forces that created the likes of Central House have temporarily abated. The buy-to-let bubble has burst and no one, for now, is building homes purely as investment vehicles. Some of the big housebuilders are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, punished, at last, for the poverty of their product.

Now the main initiator of new homes is the Government, in the shape of the Homes and Communities Agency, which officially started business yesterday. The HCA comes from the merger of English Partnerships, which was in charge of regeneration, and the Housing Corporation, which was in charge of affordable housing. In London there is £5billion of HCA money to be spent: not enough to solve all London's housing problems but enough to build a significant numbers of new homes and set new standards with them.

The HCA has the chance to change British housing for the better. It is the main player at a time when almost no one else is building at all. In the deals it does with developers and contractors, it can insist on quality. It owns land and has money, which relieves it of some of the pressures for quick results that debt-laden developers feel.

The agency's predecessors have already contributed to some of the better homes of recent years. Adelaide Wharf, an award-winning development of 147 flats in Hackney, was created by English Partnerships working with the developers First Base and, unlike Central House, it has communal spaces that are enjoyable. In its centre is a peaceful courtyard. The development is a mixture of affordable and private sector housing, but it is impossible to tell which flats are which.

Designed by the architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, its larch-clad elevations give the sense that someone has thought about their appearance, and they are animated by colourful, generous balconies that work as true extensions of internal rooms. It makes surrounding streets brighter and livelier than they were before. Inside, the flats are of relatively decent proportions, well lit, well planned, and well finished.

First Base says it built these flats for 30 per cent less than the standard cost of residential development in London. It achieved this by bringing a higher than usual level of competence to bear on the construction and management of the project, which in turn was helped by the fact that development was a partnership with English Partnerships. EP owns the freehold of the site, meaning that First Base was spared the pressures of borrowing to buy it, meaning that it could concentrate on building well and efficiently.

If the HCA could create more Adelaide Wharfs, it would show up the likes of Central House for the junk that they are. When the private sector picks up again it might make buyers more demanding of developers, if they can see what good housing looks like. The agency will not be able to do this, however, if the Government sets it absurd targets of housing numbers at high speed and quantity is allowed to crush quality.

Ultimately the country's soaring and crashing housing market will have to be changed, or future booms will generate future versions of Central House. This will mean, somehow, making more land available, so as to remove the incentive to developers of hoarding and speculating on sites. But this task is beyond the remit of the Homes and Communities Agency, or the scope of this article.

Nice places:

7. Lillington Gardens
Estate, SW1
If the Mayor wants our era to be seen by historians as a golden age of housing design, he could do worse than look at that still-reviled decade, the Sixties. Or at least one project from it: the Lillington Gardens Estate in Westminster.
It was designed in 1961 by 26-year-old John Darbourne and 32-year-old Geoffrey Darke and was a determined reaction against the sterility of modern architecture. It is ruggedly romantic, a craggy cliff of deep red brick and concrete that projects and recedes, rises and falls, as it winds alongside Vauxhall Bridge Road. It has bridges and hollows, light and shadow. It takes some picturesque DNA from the Victorian church of St James the Less — which stands in the heart of the estate — and breeds from it several hundred yards of housing.
It showed how large, high-density housing estates (2,000 people accommodated at 210 people/acre) could be built without being either tall or overbearing.
Nor was it just a case of cranking out numbers of flats: pubs, shops, surgeries, a community hall and a library were all included in the brief. Perhaps best of all, the design creates enclaves of exceptional peacefulness, enriched with a lush and undulating landscape, a short distance from one of London's noisiest and most charmless roads. Unlike gated Georgian squares, these places are open to all.
The Lillington Gardens Estate is not perfect. Pevsner called it “tough not amiable”, and it would benefit from being a little more cuddly in places. As I write, I can hear the voice of Flo Mellish, an old lady I once knew who lived there, who had a permanent puddle outside her front door which the finest minds of the council's maintenance department knew not how to fix. That said, I doubt if the papery prisons put up in the past few years will last so well.

Comment and opinion

On the blogs...

Don't miss...

• 

  Essential summer reading - best books for the beach

  It's crucial to choose your holiday reading wisely. Here are some books that truly deserve to make the cut

  ---

• 

  In search of the perfect bottom

  At this time of year, a pert bikini bum is vital - so time-poor City girl Alice Morley tried the latest lunchtime lipo treatment to get her bottom in shape

  ---