Single Aspect Blog

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

One more would-be housing regulation bites the dust.  Having implemented Parker Morris + 10% for local authority building but failed to mandate this for private house builders he has now backtracked on the promise to outlaw single aspect flats.

Last summer Johnson issued a consultation on space standards for new homes that included plans to outlaw “single aspect” housing through the planning system, in order to stop the construction of tiny flats he called “hobbit homes”.

“We must not only build quickly, we must build well. In the next year or so we will be judged by the number of houses we have put up. But in ten years we will be judged by the quality of those homes.”

What a pity that logic is not being followed today.

Update 26th April 2010 12:09

UPDATE: 28th Nov 16 – They’ve shot themselves in the foot with the most recent release of the Dublin City Development Plan which downgrades the previously high standards set for city centre apartments.

. . . we might follow. The documents linked below show clearly how Dublin has taken the lead in housing design quality and why England lags behind.  I can cite several examples of single aspect (and|or) cramped new housing developments in the UK, some linked from this website, how refreshing it is to find someone somewhere doing it better.

“Single-aspect dwellings must 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.”

CABE has been saying similar things for some time but nobody appears to be listening . . . read on

and the document they refer to  Sustainable Urban Housing

I’ve been looking at the plans for 282 Goldhawk Road by Peter Barber architects and recently reading the Hansard transcript of the second reading of the 1909 Housing Act.  Despite the passage of just over 100 years, the English is clear and the reasoning beyond question.  Dear Mr Barber where do the children play?

“England is not so destitute of land upon which to house its poor that they should be housed in working class tenements without a backyard in which to chop the wood and put the coal, and in which the children can play whilst the mother is able to keep a friendly eye on them through the washhouse window, and at the same time continue to carry on her domestic duties.

All this is impossible in back-to-back houses, where the children have only got a stuffy room for a playground; and in the days of rapid traction you have no right to relegate children to play in a small front garden, or in the road or street, when the community is rich enough to provide the humblest garden in the majority of cases, and some measure of a backyard in which the youngsters can play whilst the domestic duties in the house are being carried out.

This can be done better in through ventilated houses with a backyard and a garden than is possible in the case of back-to-back houses.”

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1909/apr/05/housing-town-planning-etc-bill

Peter Barber architects have visited my blog:-

A visitor from office.peterbarberarchitects.com (81.149.180.109)
arrived from www.google.co.uk 282 goldhawk road cameron 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/?cat=5
at 15:50:58 on Friday, June 4, 2010.
This visitor used Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB;
rv:1.9.0.19)Gecko/2010031422 Firefox/3.0.19.

That’s something to celebrate. They won’t change the design though, sadly.  They have already got planning permission the project has been stopped.

UPDATE: I went to look at it yesterday 23/6/2010 and things are looking up.  There are indications that the plans may be reviewed, for details please contact the Residents’ association at ashchurchresidents@hotmail.com

UPDATE: The residents’ association plans are moving on, I received this today 11/9/2010:-

Following Harry Phibb’s newsletter mentioning plans to include 292 and 280 Goldhawk Road in our favourite development, we have now met Nick Johnson, the council executive who Cllr Greenhalgh asked to review the 282 plans back in May.

He assured us the 282 development will not go ahead as planned, and that our many concerns have been taken on board. The development may include the 292 site (on the corner of Ashchurch Park Villas), which Mr Johnson thinks will enable them to deliver a better development which respects the local area. He said 280, the old surgery on the corner of Ashchurch Grove is not included in this development.

We expect another update before the meeting , so come and hear more and have your say.

Other business will include

• – election of officers – we are looking for someone to take on Neighbourhood Watch
• – agreeing a constitution and subscrpition for ARA
• – update on our FOI on the trees on the 282 site – we have a victory to report!
• – antisocial behaviour on 282 site
• – drugs, dangerous dogs etc
• -issues relating to Ravenscourt Park
• – developments in Askew Road

and the Starch Green event in July –  for more on that see below.

REMEMBER THE LOVE YOUR STREET EXHIBITION : AN INVITATION

If you were one of the 300 or so people who attended the very successful all day event at Starch Green on 26th June. The architects promised they would put together a summary of the many exciting ideas contributed by those that attended for improving the Starch Green area.

They now invite you to come  review the Exhibition and enjoy a glass of wine.
When : Tuesday 21st September 2010 from 6  8pm

Where : The Mayor’s Foyer at Hammersmith Town Hall (Courtesy of the Mayor)

Please email Melanie Whitlock (whitlockmelanie@hotmail.com)  if you’d like to come, they need numbers in advance.

Many thanks

Fiona Anderson

Chair, Ashchurch Residents Assocation

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Now 1 Ellesmere Street Manchester multi-storey b2b

But Cabe’s chairman Paul Finch revealed the design watchdog’s misgivings in an article published in the Architects’ Journal last week.

He wrote: “I was truly shocked to see designs for back-to-back housing (two storeys, three party walls, single aspect) being given permission and Kickstart funding.

“The Planning Act of 1909 was introduced to make this sort of thing illegal.”

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3159609

If you ever had any doubt that left to their own devices and without regulation, architects would revert to the hell-holes of the past then let this be a lesson to you.

There’s more . . .

Always happy to follow policy, architects with an interest in sustainability are today proposing eco-back-to-backs as “affordable” housing. The housing form that John Burns opposed is re-imagined as the future for subsidised housing, crammed into expensive brownfield sites. (15) These homes will get planning permission. Architects will happily delude themselves that they are designing a double-density world devoted to an age of “eco-equality”.

Read on

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

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

In memory of William Barnes

Councils used to buy up private houses to let

https://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/after-grenfell-what-can-we-learn-from-the-housing-policies-of-the-1970s

Frank Dobson obituary from the Guardian

Obituary click here

“Not for 70 years, since the Luftwaffe, has there been such a direct threat to the well being of council tenants and their homes”

Right to buy enabled all those council tenants who could afford to, to buy their homes. The most desirable properties went first, the three bedroom houses in the suburbs.  The flats on concrete estates last, if at all.  Some of those who bought their flats on the concrete estates moved out and let their flats, often to DSS unemployed tenants with the rent paid (at that time) directly to the landlord.  This had the effect of reducing the percentage of working people on the estate.  Those working people with what these days are known as aspirations and in those days was called  ambition moved away, either via right to buy as above or simply to better things.

Just to be clear, there were estates with a bad reputation before right to buy. I worked as a council employed carpenter in London for a while in the 1970s and visited estates that were less than glamorous then, so it’s not all Maggie’s fault.

This compounding effect was bad enough then, but has been exacerbated since by the allocations policy that preceded it in the Housing Act of 1977. [Link to Guardian letters – Ed.] This is an area of some concern because the 1977 Act was itself prompted by campaigners following on from the documentary Cathy Come Home first broadcast in 1967.

The results of this may be imagined and on some estates, can be seen. This situation is fast becoming a political football with complete disregard (on the right) for the people left behind.  Having said that, not all estates are the same and there are those that work.  Estates where there are a healthy mixture of people in different situations reflecting wider society and by no means in need of regeneration, the modern word for expelling council tenants and  selling flats to overseas investors.

You might think that the answer to this problem would be obvious.  Build more council houses for (subsidised) rent thus slowly but surely allowing the allocation rules to be relaxed from people in desperate need back to the situation that existed before right to buy when anybody could apply for a council house or flat, including single men, and stand a good chance of getting one.

But no.  What the political right seek instead is the end of council housing as we know it.  They want to rid their immediate neighbourhoods of the “stigma” of council estates and their troubled tenants, and in their place invite owner occupiers.

Not for 70 years, since the Luftwaffe, has there been such a direct threat to the well being of council tenants and their homes.

Let’s give the last word to the woman who has it all at her fingertips, the woman whose grip on the subject in London is unparalleled and who was interviewed by Dave Hill for the Guardian.

Right click link and choose Save Target/Link As

Guardian Karen Buck interview mp3

A worthy champion for the council tenants of the London boroughs.

Postscript from the Guardian

msenthrop

06 Jul 09, 12:04pm (about 10 hours ago)

Here goes Polly: Which party will push for councils to build housing again and put an end to the pernicious evil that was wrought by the “right to buy” policy of the Margaret Thatcher era, branding those who lived in rented housing(in particular council housing) as second class citizens, thereafter known as “social housing”; whereby it becomes necessary to either have a social problem or to cultivate one in order to be allowed to register for it?
Regards

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/06/politics-political-parties

UPDATE: https://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/sep/21/right-to-buy-coalition-loggerheads

UPDATE: 9/5/11 Michael Collins has a different point of view.  He thinks that Labour caused the problem with the 1977 Housing Act which changed the criteria on which council housing was let, for the worse.  See his recent documentary The Rise and Fall of the Council House

===========================================================

Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977

2.  Priority need  for accommodation.

(1)  For  the  purposes  of  this  Act  a  homeless  person  or  a person  threatened  with  homelessness  has  a  priority  need  for accommodation  when  the  housing  authority  are  satisfied  that he  is within  one of  the  following  categories: —
(a)  he  has  dependent  children  who  are  residing  with  him or-who  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  reside  with him;
(b)  he  is  homeless  or  threatened  with  homelessness  as  a result  of  any  emergency  such  as  flood,  fire  or  any other disaster;
(c)  he  or  any  person  who  resides  or  might  reasonably  be expected  to  reside  with  him  is  vulnerable  as  a  result of  old  age,  mental  illness  or  handicap  or  physical disability  or  other  special  reason.

(2)  For the  purposes of  this Act a homeless person or a person threatened with homelessness who  is  a pregnant woman or resides or  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  reside  with  a  pregnant woman has  a  priority need  for accommodation.

(3)  The  Secretary  of  State  may  by  order,  made  after appropriate  consultations,—
(a)  specify  further  categories  of  persons, as  having a  priority need for  accommodation, and
(b)  amend  or  repeal  any  part of subsection  (1)  or  (2)  above.

(4)  No  order  under  subsection  (3)  above  shall  be made  unless a  draft  of  the  order  has  been  approved  by  resolution  of  each House of  Parliament.

(5)  Any  reference  in  this  Act  to  a  person  having  a  priority need  is  a  reference  to his  having  a  priority need  for accommodation within the meaning of  this  section  or any order  for  the  time being  in  force  under  subsection  (3)  above.

===========================================================

UPDATE: 16/6/11 Dave Hill has an interesting article today in the Guardian on the same theme, that needs based allocations are a disaster for council housing allocation:-

Newham-mayor-plans-olympic-regeneration

Charities condemn plans to let councils house locals before immigrants

US inspired plan to break up sink estates gets green light

UPDATE: Deborah Orr writing in today’s Guardian, a wonderful piece, beautifully written

The most astounding thing about this mess is that there is still a widespread failure to understand that a flagship ideological experiment in self-regulation by the market is in tatters. The deregulation of banks and building societies, combined with draconian restrictions on the provision of new council housing, which could have replaced stock diminished by the right to buy, was supposed to transform “sink estates” into privately owned and lovingly cared-for communities. Instead, the social demographic of people living in council flats has narrowed massively. The people with the greatest problems are herded together, sometimes seeking a dark kind of identity in their blighted postcode, to the point at which the threat of eviction from council housing is seriously touted as a way of encouraging people to think twice before they take part in riots. God help us.

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/tory-housing-idea-in-tatters