The Progress Estate Eltham
September 15th, 2010
From London Open House 2010
The Progress Estate, now a conservation area, was built during the time of the popularity of garden cities in England. Specifically built to house munition workers at Woolwich Arsenal, Frank Baines was lead architect. Almost every type of cottage architecture is represented with the houses mainly in terraces of four or six houses with gardens.
Photos at https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627528201719/
Stonebridge Estate
September 14th, 2010
In the week before this year’s Open House weekend I toured London at some pace with the 2010 brochure in my bag, and this was one of the visits I made – Stonebridge Estate and Fawood Childrens’ Centre.
Stonebridge Hillside Hub
Photos from September 2010
https://www.flickr.com/photos/singleaspect/sets/72157627521049825/
Story of estate leading up to the regeneration
https://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/15/gang-wars-police-supergrass-help
Go away you’re poor
August 16th, 2010
Following the report from the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research entitled “High Density Housing – The Impact on tenants” I have come to the conclusion, along with other indicators, that the current attitude of developers and some housing associations to their tenants is “go away you’re poor”.
HIGH DENSITY HOUSING – THE IMPACT ON TENANTS:
From Building Design 14/6/13
Cassie O’Keyboard | 12 June 2013 1:54 pm
Another interesting thing about this typology of having maisonettes over flats is that there isn’t any shared circulation space so the residents don’t have to pay a service charge. Particularly for social housing this can make a big difference to how affordable it actually is to live there.
The second article in the series linked below:-
Hope VI – or go away you’re poor II
Maydew House
August 12th, 2010
HCA funding crisis
May 25th, 2010
This wonderful news which in any other circumstance would be bad news about housing, means that ill thought out and badly planned schemes like Wornington Green redevelopment, and many schemes of poor design funded hurredly under Kickstart, despite reservations of CABE, are likely to have their funding stopped or entirely withdrawn. Look at the row earlier this year:-
A row over the quality of publicly-funded homes rescued by the government’s £1bn Kickstart scheme has broken out between the two public bodies involved.
Documents obtained by Building under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a dispute between Richard Simmons, the chief executive of Cabe, and Sir Bob Kerslake, his opposite number at the Homes and the Communities Agency (HCA), over the scheme design assessments carried out by Cabe for the HCA.
The HCA was criticised in December after it emerged that more than half the homes in the Kickstart programme failed the government’s own design test. Of 136 developments, more than half achieved less than 10 out of 20 against the Building for Life design criteria.
HCA fate in doubt as £700m frozen
May 21st, 2010
This is the best news of the year. A lot of very questionable housing schemes have been given Kickstart funding regardless of their merits and the opinion of CABE. Now comes the news that that HCA that is funding so many of them is in financial difficulties.
Funding for Kickstart and Pathfinder in doubt as HCA enters talks with coalition over its future
All spending by the Housing and Communities Agency was put on hold this week as the quango entered “intense negotiations” with ministers and officials over budget cuts.
A source at the HCA said the body, which has about £700m of funding for construction waiting to be signed off, was examining “all uncommitted budgets” to try to identify savings.
It is thought likely the body will be expected to contribute to the £6bn of savings to be set out by chancellor George Osborne on Monday. It has a total budget of £6.1bn for 2010/11.
The future of the agency in its current form is also understood to be in doubt; housing minister Grant Shapps criticised it when he was in opposition.
In addition, the Treasury confirmed this week that the review of all spending decisions made since 1 January extended to quangos, meaning a raft of grant allocations made by the agency could be re-examined.
https://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3163831
Please note the last line quoted above. This means that even housing schemes granted permission and recently funded may be recalled.
Wornington Green it’s time to pray.
Blighted homes
March 29th, 2010
Long before residents of council estates under threat stand any chance of being rehoused into the new part of phased redevelopments there is a significant danger of them becoming “the dispossessed” – those unfortunates scattered about a former estate in the midst of abandonment, vermin infestation, squatters and burned out flats. If it were only a one off that would be worrying enough but there is clear evidence that carelessness and lack of consideration for the tenants by the councils is commonplace.
Fulham Court
“Between 1982 and 1986 the Tory/Liberal coalition council emptied most of the 400+ flats in Fulham Court with a view to selling it to a private developer for refurbishment as private flats. Tenants were re-housed by going to the top of the waiting list which meant the rest of the borough’s tenants had a lower priority. A spirited campaign by tenants including marches and legal actions and the decision by a group of tenants to stick it out meant that by the time the Tories lost power in 1986 there were still residents in some blocks. By that time some of the estate had been sold to the developer and the rest was dilapidated – empty flats were boarded up, only essential maintenance had been done and lack of care by the council meant there was squatting, fly tipping and infestation. Labour cut a deal with the developer to buy back what was sold and refurbished the whole estate as council homes, as it has remained since.”
Andy Slaughter MP
That was then but now the estate is under threat again from the Leader of Hammersmith & Fulham Stephen Greenhalgh and his plans to rid the borough of council tenants.
Single aspect III
March 11th, 2010
UPDATE: October 2016 Similar crap to the original Barber plans now going up in Kidbrooke, see Crap Flats for details on Urban Houses – spit.
UPDATE: 10/3/14 Work on site at Ashchurch Villas
UPDATE: 3/12/12
The two plots 282/292 were subsequently sold to First Base who short listed four practices of which two are known to be PTEa and MAE, the project was given to PTEa after each practice gave a presentation of their intended plans.
“25% of the apartment is stairs….”
Click the image for full site plan
Sometimes it feels like 1937 again. Allow me to explain. Within the last few years, following a conversation with my Father (an architect) about Quarry Hill in Leeds, which he had studied whilst training, I bought a second hand copy of Model Estates by Alison Ravetz and devoured it in order to continue the exchange.
More about Quarry Hill may be read here https://tinyurl.com/22wmmwg or here
Quarry Hill from Leodis
and should this ever change or be removed then you may read the same material here
Discovering Leeds – Poverty and Riches
Early on in the book the author points out that despite the 1909 Act outlawing the building of back to backs, they continued to be built in Leeds until 1937 because the authorisation for those had already been agreed prior to the act. Now more than 100 years after the act of 1909 we have plans such as the following being passed now “pending decision” (21/6/2010) with little or no comment, until just the other day.
Ravenscourt Park 282 – 288 Goldhawk Road London W12 9PF
Ref: 2009/02757/FUL
Going to:-
and typing the application numbers will enable you to look at the planning application in detail. The above was just an introduction to what I want to say.
If you view the “Associated Documents” for 2009/02757/FUL and select PROPOSED GA 1ST FLOOR PLAN you will see that the layout is that of “back to back” houses last built in Leeds in 1937 [citation Alison Ravetz Model Estate]. The flats are four stories high in some cases and have three party walls, and are single aspect.
Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back
March 4th, 2010
UPDATE: 3/2/13 On reflection I disagree with Karen Buck, I don’t think that demolishing perfectly good houses was a good idea, and it has left a swathe of dereliction across parts of the North while failing to help the housing situation. https://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/2013/02/fencing-contest/7356
During the housing debate Karen Buck MP stepped in to deal with an objection from Justine Greening MP that the Pathfinder scheme had demolished 16,000 houses and only built 4,000 in their place. As usual Karen Buck’s eloquent reply and acute grasp of the situation came to the fore:-
Is not one of the key points we’re discussing housing in London where we have had an excess of demand over supply for as long as I can remember now reaching critical proportions and actually 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 so although circumstances changed very quickly in fact that was a perfectly rational response to a totally different problem to the one we face in the capital.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_8544000/8544005.stm
Camden housing – Frank Dobson
March 4th, 2010
During the Westminster Hall housing debate kindly linked to by Chris Underwood Frank Dobson had a few words to say about the situation in Camden which includes the Maiden Lane estate under threat:-
In Camden which I jointly represent with my good friend the member for Hampstead and Highgate the council is actually selling off flats and houses which become vacant and I have to say with the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats with whom they are in coalition in Camden and this is against a situation where there are 18,000 people on the housing waiting list and it’s a bizarre response to a waiting list of 18,000 to actually reduce the stock that’s available. I take this personally because when I was leader of the council we actually bought up 6,000 properties from the private sector to give security of tenure to people and also to be able to let people off the waiting list into the vacant flats and all I can say is if some people think that being in social housing is unpopular I did not receive during that time one single communication by any means from anyone saying they did not want to become a council tenant.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/
This related article from RedBrick
Councils used to buy up private houses to let
Frank Dobson obituary from the Guardian