Single aspect flats II
February 17th, 2010
At the end of 2008 a film was rediscovered featuring Sir John Betjeman in Leeds talking about buildings. In it he visited the then semi-derelict Marshall’s Mill which is now the subject of a renovation project by Urbed who talk about the difficulties of converting former mill buildings into flats. I can only quote a short section here but the document is worth reading in full or at least the chapter 3D Masterplan – Blocks.
In city centres it is more common to develop flats as corridor blocks or ‘double loaded’ blocks. These involve single-aspect apartments off a central corridor and tend to be 20-25m deep. This is the way that many conversions of warehouses have been undertaken. However for new-build schemes there can be problems with corridor blocks. Because the apartments are single aspect, there is a need to provide space around the block to achieve privacy, natural light and solar gain. There is also the problem that some apartments end up with a single northern aspect. It is therefore necessary to space blocks 20-25m apart. This is fine on large city streets (The Briggate for example is 20m wide). However it makes it difficult to create residential accommodation onto narrow urban streets.
They go on to say that despite building some flats as single aspect off a corridor they did build some scissor maisonettes as well.
The remainder of the blocks are dual aspect and are accessed by balconies on the internal face of the courtyard. This balcony is linked to the corridor of the double loaded apartments and is accessed by cores that access both the street and the courtyard. The aim is for the courtyard to become the main means of access to the apartments. The block layout suggested by Bauman Lyons (opposite right) is based on similar principles except that the east west blocks are designed as ‘scissor flats’ (shown in blue). The east /west apartments could also be designed as walk-up blocks with individual staircases serving each pair of apartments.
See also:- Marshall’s Mill, Holbeck – Planning Framework.pdf
This determination to go on building single aspect flats I find depressing but they have at least included a variety of typologies from which future tenants can hopefully choose. They more or less admit in the first paragraph quoted above that single aspect blocks require so much space around them that they might as well build dual aspect blocks closer together, and yet…
Fortunately both CABE and the Draft London Housing Design Guide are on the case and both these organisations come out strongly against single aspect in their written publications so there is hope.
Update 26th March 2010
Or there was hope until Boris Johnson failed to implement his ban on single aspect developments . . . read on
Update 26th June 2010
The London Housing Design guide is due to be published soon and will address these issues, watch this space.
Update 29th November 2010
Mapping existing housing standards from CABE
https://www.cabe.org.uk/files/mapping-existing-housing-standards.pdf
Source documents – lastly, in case those two documents from Urbed disappear from the web, and it happens, you can still get them below from my server:-