Single aspect flats
February 9th, 2010
UPDATE: 7/4/17 Now these dreadful things at Barnet House
Here’s the Guardian take on it:-
Dog kennel flats Barnet House smaller than Travelodge room
“no better than back to back terraces”
One of my bugbears as a layman taking an interest in housing is the number of modern conversions that take a former office building, usually rectangular, and convert it into flats in the cheapest possible way by putting a corridor along the centre of each floor and apartments off each side like hotel rooms. Access is via lift and stairs at either end and results in what the Americans call double loaded corridors. The flats are then by design single aspect and sometimes North facing. Inevitably the others are South facing and suffer solar gain to the same extent that the former almost never see the sun. I found the following article on the Internet recently whilst looking for Parker Morris links.
The current Part L of the Building Regulations focuses more on heat loss through windows than light levels into a house. Regulations allow us to get away with deep plan single aspect apartments, in my mind no better than back to back terraces, or windowless bathrooms, kitchens and corridors, despite the fact that everyone knows these spaces would be better with natural light and ventilation. House builders generally do the minimum required of them by the regulations, which is not necessarily what makes for good housing. Sustainability is more than just environmental performance.
The idea of rooms lit only from one side with no through ventilation and intended not as an overnight stay as with a hotel room, nor as temporary student accommodation as in halls of residence, but as a family dwelling is to me entirely unsatisfactory. They make a frequent appearance in the projects of the social housing company A2Dominion with Woods House being but one example and I feel unsettled that it should be the most vulnerable in society that have poor standards of design imposed upon them for it is those with least assets who have no other choice. Note the concrete columns at the perimeter of the plan which further compromise the design. It may be nice to live in Pimlico but not at any price.
Not suprisingly there are developers who balk at the idea of providing dual aspect flats. Here’s this from the AJ
Dale Sinclair, director at Dyer, questioned the report’s prejudiced criticism of single-aspect flats: ‘Dual-aspect units require additional stairs, lifts and external walls or an increase in deck access. With developers unable to offset risk, will this also increase costs?’
UPDATE: I was in Glasgow this week (w/e 11th June 2011) and went to see where Dale Sinclair lives. It can’t be his only house. It is a small single aspect house built into the side of the hill on which stands Park Terrace and Park Circus. I am left wondering whether the experience of doing up and living in (or at least occasionally staying in) a former mews house has informed the views expressed above about single aspect flats.
UPDATE: Please see my page on back-to-backs taken from the Housing Act 1909.
I found this today (5/7/2010) an article from Building Magazine by David Birkbeck that gives hope for the elimination of single aspect flats, and mentions Alice Coleman in passing. See also Design Disadvantagement
How you manage movement to and from apartments is tearing the industry apart at the moment. A proposal in the London Housing Design Guide threatens to outlaw single-aspect flats, the default setting for apartment blocks built in the past decade. The guide also recommends a maximum number of homes per floor that can share the same access.
https://www.building.co.uk/comment/unexplainable-homes-access-to-flats/3157211.article
Mapping existing housing standards from CABE
https://www.cabe.org.uk/files/mapping-existing-housing-standards.pdf
From Sean Macintosh:-
Rooms can be either naturally ventilated or mechanically ventilated (by fan or other system). Under current regs toilets are required to have a fan even if they also have a window. A dual aspect flat can benefit from cross ventilation and this means that you can have a much deeper plan. There is nothing preventing single aspect flats ventilating effectively as long as there is sufficient window area (ideally both low and high level) and that this is proportional to the floor area and occupancy. Nowadays we measure this through computer analysis.
Dave Hill of the Guardian has alluded to these in new developments, citing the ones planned for Earls Court:-
Of the 690 total, 287 units would be “single aspect” dwellings, meaning that light can only enter them from one side. Single aspect dwellings are controversial. As the council officers’ report notes (see page 188), they are “generally discouraged by both local planning policy and the [Boris Johnson] London Plan”. The report further records that the council’s own planning rules state that single aspect units which face north are particularly frowned on – they “should be avoided wherever possible”. Yet 103 of Capco’s 287 single aspect units – 15% of the 690 total within H&F – would be north-facing.
Good reason to reject the plans? The officers’ report thinks not. It assures us that north-facing single aspect units have been “avoided where possible”. It says that most of the north-facers are within two of the eight buildings proposed and that, of these, “almost” all the ones that “infringe the council’s standard” would only do so by a few degrees and, anyway, their windows are quite large. Does this conform to the “decent neighbourhoods” requirement for good design?
Estates under threat
February 5th, 2010
“Among
Toryboroughs across London, there seems now to be a disease spreading ever wider that the land on which council tenants live is available for development”[Tory struck out 7/11/12 owing to realisation that they’re all at it. Hello Southwark (Lab)! – Ed.]
On [Thursday] July 9th 2009 Paul Waugh of the London Evening Standard published an article on the planned demolition of all the council estates in Hammersmith and Fulham. I read this while returning home having been to a political meeting at the Methodist Hall in Westminster, and on arriving home got straight on the computer to find out more about it. I quickly discovered that there was already a blog for Queen Caroline and later on found out about the Ferrier Estate in Kidbrooke and Greenwich.
Later on in the year I subscribed to Roof magazine (now sadly no longer with us – April 2012) from Shelter, found myself speaking to Andy Slaughter on the telephone for 15 minutes about H&F and have subsequently continued to take a keen interest in council housing matters and the Tory intention to end it.
I have a personal interest in council housing because from 10/78 to 10/80 I lived at 93 Aragon Tower on the Pepys Estate (via the GLC hard-to-let scheme) which “was sold by Lewisham Council to Berkeley Group, in 2002 for £11.5m” (£80k per flat), to fund a leisure centre in the borough for £7 million and provide some money for regeneration of the remaining estate. This was their best block, the jewel in the crown, and they displaced 144 families to do so. To me this was the start of the rot, although there may have been other examples I simply don’t know. The estate featured in a documentary called The Tower.
Progressive London 2010
February 3rd, 2010
I was at Progressive London 2010 on Saturday. Got there just after the start at 10am it was bustling in the main foyer. Being a Dave Hill follower I was keen to see the man in person and having made it to the back of a crowded and stuffy room on the 2nd floor, standing room only, he was next to speak. He said that Boris was a milder and more gentle version of what might have been expected, less contentious and more redistributive, that he had increased free access to travel for some groups unexpectedly.
He said that Boris was difficult to get hold of to answer difficult questions, that Ken used to let the Mayor’s question time run on until everybody had had their say but Boris just cut it off when time was up. He said that it is possible to get answers out of Boris but that you have to follow him around London to his numerous “openings” and tackle him on the spot. He added that Boris produced a large amount of written answers to questions to such an extent that Dave was encouraging bloggers to go through it all and saying that more bloggers were needed since stories often arose from their writings. By the time Dave had finished speaking the room was even more crowded and stuffy so I left to get some air.
Downstairs in the foyer I met one of the HandsoffQC people and had a coffee and a chat about the goings on in Hammersmith and Fulham.
Back in Invision Suite 4 with the windows open it was time for the Housing session, less crowded than the earlier Boris do but slowly filled up. Megan Dobney kicked off, Dave Hill turned up this time as an audience member, with his familiar long grey coat and notebook in hand. Nicky Gavron had a lot to say about the London Plan which she had worked on with Ken back in the day, but more to say about the dismantling of it going on with the Boris version called the draft London Plan which was abandoning the aims of the Labour version by taking a borough by borough approach and reducing almost to zero those targets for affordable homes in Conservative boroughs while increasing those in Labour ones. It would seem that under Ken the London plan took a city wide approach to affordable housing.