The Scissor Maisonette
March 21st, 2011
I’ve combined the contents of this former article with the page linked from the main menu entitled Scissor since there was a lot of unnecessary duplication of content and therefore if you click the title of this article it will now take you directly to the Scissor page, having lost nothing in the process but complexity and duplication.
Where We Live Now – City of Towers
March 10th, 2011
For over thirty years I have lived with the memory of this excellent documentary City of Towers and just occasionally I have a glimmer of hope that it will be shown again. Today the page was visited by somebody at the BBC.
A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/CityofTowers.htm
at 11:12:06 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/wwln.php
at 11:11:49 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.
If you have a copy of this film and are willing to show it, even as a private showing please get in touch. This film was a landmark of its time in revealing the inadequacies and destruction wrought by an over enthusiastic application of Modernism to housing and city centres and the history that was destroyed in the process. Christopher Booker was one of the first to recognise the damage being done.
UPDATE: I now have a copy of this film, read more about it at the following page:-
The most shocking graph on housing I have ever seen
January 26th, 2011
This article started off as a comment on the need for prefab homes as a solution to the housing crisis brought about by the reluctance of Governments since 1979 to build council housing. In the process of reading the article I came across the graph below which shows the true state of housing for those who cannot afford to buy their own, and it is truly shocking.
Of course the idea of prefabs has been superceded now by Levitt Bernstein and their Beds in Sheds. https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=11852 let’s hope somebody starts building proper housing before too long.
Utopia London – Tom Cordell
December 15th, 2010
Destroy these vertical slums – Phibbs
December 13th, 2010
The Guardian article linked below and published last year, by Harry Phibbs, is in my opinion, ill informed and inflammatory rubbish. However I have chosen to select quotes from it and comment on them along with selected comments that followed the publication of the article, owing to the light they shed on the present public housing situation and the extent to which the Conservative policies have been responsible for it, and not in a good way.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/11/tower-block-vertical-slums
Summit House, St Katherine’s Way, E1
December 12th, 2010
This is a building I like, featured in an article for Building Design magazine.
Click photo for location from Google Earth
A company has taken over the building in question and are going to convert it from flats into a single riverside house. I don’t have a take on this, I like the building. My complaints on this blog are about poorly designed and managed housing. This is a private house by the river, what’s not to like? I like the Art Deco reference of the semicircular staircase (think Bexhill). There is a similar one in Rotherhithe diagonally opposite about half a mile away.
Details here in the D&A downloaded from the Tower Hamlets planning department:-
Dublin and St Paul’s Cathedral
December 10th, 2010
From the beginning of my search for information on who was building what and to what standard in these islands I came across the Dublin approach time and again. From Metwork who have several projects in Eiré and where I found this article:-
Today, as well as minimum room and apartment sizes, the Irish Department of the Environment (DoE) and Dublin City Council (DCC) require new developments to observe minimum room dimensions and rules on orientation. Single-aspect dwellings just be avoided where possible and no northern or eastern single-aspect dwellings are allowed, thereby requiring new apartments to be dual aspect and eliminating corridor developments at a stroke.Metwork_How-to-make-room-for-housing_AJ_080313.pdf
Another view on post war housing
December 4th, 2010
There’s always someone who sees things from a different point of view and while I may not agree with them I am prepared to take them on head to head so here’s the view from the “other side”.
newsed1
2 December 2010 6:10PM
Well, that’s what happens when the Left fiddles with everything.
As Family and Kinship in The East showed, the Left didn’t like working class housing being private and didn’t like it being handed – via the rent man – down through well-behaved working class families.
Many of the ‘slum’ clearances were nothing of the kind- ask Timothy Spall who used to live in a perfectly decent working class street in Battersea (from where I’m now writing) which was taken over by the local council and demolished never to be re-built.
Build more crap – Grant Shapps MP
November 26th, 2010
Cringleford Norwich – look at the size of the windows
As if “toy-town estates” on the edge of almost every UK town were not enough the coalition housing minister Grant Shapps wants the developers to continue in the same vein, unregulated. What else would you expect from the party that dropped the Parker Morris standards? Only Boris has housing standards at heart now and I’ll be interested to hear his London response to this latest unwanted intervention by a cabinet minister someone in charge of a portfolio not considered sufficiently important to warrant a seat in the cabinet.
In an article published in today’s online Architects’ Journal . . .
RIBA attacks government over housing standards u-turn
RIBA president Ruth Reed has voiced ‘serious concerns’ over the government’s decision to abandon the Homes and Communities Agency’s (HCA) core housing standards for all new publicly-backed homes
. . .
She added: ‘UK house builders have delivered the smallest homes in Europe, and have built homes which have been consistently judged to be of a poor quality by the Government’s own design watchdog. The Government should be putting the interests of communities first.’
Pathfinder – Owen Hatherley – Guardian
November 22nd, 2010
“Knocking stuff down does not increase supply, […] everything we knock down shrinks supply”
Prof Anne Power speaking to LB Camden
Pathfinder seems to have been in the news since the days of John Prescott and New Labour. Back in March this year, Karen Buck MP, a lady I respect, pointed out in a housing debate that. . .
. . . when the Pathfinder projects were starting they were dealing with the problem of excess supply and indeed many areas being blighted with huge numbers of homes that they could not rent or sell . . .
Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back March 4th, 2010 https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=86
I confess that I never did understand the true reason for it especially since it quickly resulted in groups of home owners banding together and taking their local council to court, and often winning, in order to avoid demolition.
At the height of the Pathfinder demolitions I can remember BBC news reports showing people saying that they were going to lose their homes with a compensation figure that would come nowhere near the cost of a new flat built to replace it.