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OVER the past few years, at the peak of a boom, Britain was building worse new homes at higher prices and at a slower rate than most of Europe.
Annual targets set by both national government and the London Mayor went unmet. The private sector failed significantly to increase the roughly constant rate of building it had kept up since the late Forties.
The design of most new homes was abysmal, with slabs of tarmac instead of proper streets, tiny windows, awkward floor plans, meagre and clumsy details and little consideration given to orientating rooms so they faced the sun. New homes that will outlast all of us but where no one will ever really want to live have been created by the tens of thousands.
This was despite an elaborate planning system intended to uphold standards. There was a failure of both quality and quantity. But now, with a collapse in banks' willingness to lend, it has got much worse. According to the Construction Products Association and Ernst & Young, 2008 has been the worst year for new housing starts since 1924. There is every reason to believe that 2009 will sink lower. Brown's plan for three million can now be put away in a file marked “delusional fantasy”.
The home, supposedly at the heart of British culture and the British economy, has become the victim of a dysfunctional market. Consumers in many cases can't buy anything at all, and those that can have little real choice in what they can buy. At the core of the problem is lack of supply: the amount of building land is highly restricted by the planning system, which pushes its price up.
Yet there was a time when the British housing industry was hugely effective at building large numbers of homes, which responded to occupiers' needs and created wholly new neighbourhoods, whose streets and squares became real places, rather than leftover oddments between buildings.
Over time these homes showed a remarkable ability to adapt, from single houses for large families with servants to subdivision into flats to reconversion back to family houses. Many are now among the most desirable in London.
This time was the 19th century, the period that gave us most of the London we have now. Over two decades in the middle of the century, the districts of Kensington, Notting Hill and North Kensington were created out of almost nothing, a feat that the architectural historian Fred Scott compares to the building of the Pyramids.
One should not be too starry-eyed — the flipside was the creation of slums, and Victorian house-building was not immune from boom and bust, which left some properties empty for decades. But the ability to get decent houses built successfully is looking increasingly enviable. It was achieved in conditions almost opposite to those we have now. There was little restriction on land use — these areas were green fields before they were built on — and no planning system. New housing was built with a minimum of involvement by architects, and with very few architectural drawings. Instead, there were a few clear regulations governing things like materials and the spacing of windows.
These were ordained for practical reasons, such as stopping the spread of fire, but they had the side-effect of creating a distinctive and successful aesthetic. There were also established patterns of building that developers had worked out over time and which gradually evolved. It was clear what was and was not allowed and there was not the wasteful pushing and pulling between developers and planners that happens now.
The question is why we should not try a similar approach. If quality is partly a subjective matter, questions such as room sizes, ceiling heights and window sizes are less so. It is also possible to quantify building height, ratios of open space to building, and density. What are better and worse floor layouts can be defined.
Boris Johnson has ordained a housing design policy, the first draft of which is coming out soon, which could try out some of these ideas.
There is already something called the Building for Life assessment, created by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Home Builders Federation, which aims to describe what a well-designed home is. With this and other precedents it should be possible to produce a definition of a minimum standard home, recognised by the planning system. Developers would then know that, if they kept to these standards, planners could not argue with them about design.
At the same time, regulation should be about preventing the bad but not inhibiting the good, which would mean that the creative minority among housebuilders should be allowed to demonstrate their own ways of achieving good design. There is a cost to having standards — higher-ceilinged rooms cost more than lower ones — although there is also a longer-term hidden cost in having homes so badly designed as to be virtually unworkable and which make their occupants miserable.
But there is also a cost in the uncertainty and delay of a planning system where little is clear and which rewards wheeler-dealing and persistence in developers, as much as the merit of their proposals.
The toughest part of returning to the Victorian way of lower cost and more plentiful numbers is improving the supply of land: few would now want Kensington to be returned to green fields but few want green fields now to be made into prospective future Kensingtons. Yet, somehow, the abundant space in, for example, the Thames Gateway has to be made available — as does some fraction of the Green Belt.
A more immediate step is to push for the release of underdeveloped land in the control of London's boroughs, which they tend to cling on to. If all this seems too radical, here's a suggestion. Why not designate some free zones where developers can do what they like, within simple rules designed to uphold quality, and then see if they work?
If they don't, we can return to our current tortuous ways as being the least-bad available. If they do, we might have discovered a way of building homes better. The new Homes and Communities Agency, which in the near future will be the most powerful force in British housing, would have the means to achieve this.
I also realise that it might seem abstract to talk about quality in housing when very little is being built at all. The most pressing task is clearly to get banks lending again. But it is precisely in slack times that standards for the future can be set, as in boom times no one wants to think about them. This is also a moment, with the private sector sprawling on its back, that the public sector can and should lead the way. It should seize it.
Reader views (4)
Here's a sample of the latest views published.
Has anything changed for the better since this article...?
- Helen, norwich
It's sad to think of how nowadays the properties and "London areas" which appeal to all of us are the ones that the Victorians managed to develop 130 years ago, and yet after more than a century of planning expertise the modern age is nowhere near throwing up new suburbs equivalent in scale and appeal to places like Kensington, Chiswick, Putney etc (i.e. all the popular postcodes). It's mad that with a great architectural heritage right under everyone's noses, the 20th and 21st centuries have only generated developments with bland designs, colours and materials and with a distinctly unimpressive scale, in our equivalents to the Victorian suburbs: Thamesmead, Crawley, Chafford Hundred, to name some!
- James, Merton, UK
Agree with much of your article. Perhaps some of the current problems are that homes are only designed after the needs of roads are met (classic tail wagging dog...) and that planning committees and departments are often stocked with low calibre ideologically motivated folk (way to hell PAVED with good intentions...). The so called 'developers' have much to answer for as well. Encouraged to do so by the planners, they whittle down standards all the way through, form materials used, sound proofing, layout, performance design and aesthetic design, workmanship ...
- Helen, norwich
Oh, how I agree with you about so much in this article! Yes, now is the time to debate and establish the building standards for the next three decades. A start should be made at the Olympic Village, at St Pancras, Euston and Middlesex Hospital re-development sites. A return to Victorian and Georgian styles, proportions and quality standards is long overdue. The UK has the worst post-war housing of anywhere in Europe, outside the old Soviet bloc.
- Paul Lettan, Old St Pancras, London
