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.
Hammond Court in Waltham Forest – MAE llp
November 15th, 2010
Mae celebrates ‘overwhelming support’ for council housing scheme
15 November 2010 | By Ruth Bloomfield
Mæ has received planning consent for a new housing scheme on a troubled east London estate.
The scheme is for 43 new homes on Hammond Court in Waltham Forest, a 1970s estate rife with gang and drug problems.
The practice was awarded the scheme by housing group East Thames Group in 2007, but the project went on hold during the recession. It was revived earlier this year, and includes a terrace of three storey townhouses plus two blocks with a communal garden. The site is around half a hectare and the design of the new buildings mirrors the surrounding Warner Homes, built in the late 19th century as model family housing.
Alex Ely, partner at Mæ, said ‘We’re overwhelmed by the support the scheme received. It addresses many complex and pertinent issues of the moment: How to achieve good quality family housing at high density, how working with residents can help drive regeneration locally, and how we can respond to a historically sensitive context with contemporary architecture.’
Construction is due to start in summer 2011.
https://www.bdonline.co.uk/5009021.article
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The scheme is an estate regeneration replacing a series of unpopular 1970’s buildings. The units have been designed to the generous space standards of the East Thames Housing Design Guide, Lifetime Homes (July 2010 revision) and aim to achieve Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4. Ten percent of units are designed for wheelchair users.
New Royal London Hospital – Yuk!
November 14th, 2010
What a mess. I don’t often take an instinctive dislike to a building but this thing is on such a gargantuan scale that you can’t ignore it, unfortunately, you have to have a view on it. It is out of scale with its surroundings to an alarming degree, ugly, with few windows and a most unattractive finish on the parts that aren’t blue panels.
Out of keeping, out of place, out of scale, I wish it was out of sight.
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain – 22nd Nov
November 14th, 2010
Monday 22nd November
Owen Hatherly
In his provocative new book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherly analyses the architecture of the neoliberal credit boom and discusses its merits with speakers including Lynsey Hanley, author of Estates.
Level 5 Function Room at Royal Festival Hall 7.45pm £7.50
Housing Benefit cuts – in a nutshell
November 1st, 2010
Allied against Osborne’s housing benefit cuts
Boris Johnson, Simon Hughes and Karen Buck – allies against housing benefit cuts. Photo of Hughes by Keith Edkins
The public have a way of bringing common sense and experience to complex issues and I have great faith in the ability of Joe Public to explain things in straightforward terms that anyone can understand. So it is with the housing benefit cuts and the hyperbole that has gone with it in recent days. I was out last night and happened to glance through the Independent letters page, the first of which sums up for me the whole history of the problem in a few paragraphs.
Housing benefit – the row goes on
October 31st, 2010
Sometimes a single comment shines out so clearly that it cuts through all the wordy articles that have been written on the subject since last week. This is one such, not that saying it makes the situation any better but it does make it easier to understand the implications of the ConDem policy.
31 October 2010 7:14AM
So when there is a well known shortage of social housing throughout the land they decide on a policy of pushing people out of currently available housing into areas where there is a shortage of social housing already. Thus making the problem many times worse resulting in increased financial, health and social costs whilst people are housed in temporary accomodation and bed and breakfasts which is the worse thing you can do to a family which is trying to get back on its feet again which will cause the state more in all sorts of ways.Some help this lot are neither to themselves or anyone else.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/31/london-housing-crisis-benefit-cuts
‘Pevsner for the PFI generation’ – from the AJ
October 28th, 2010
Reading today’s email from the AJ, Owen Hatherly struck a chord when he commented on the difference in quality between todays lousy flats (of which I have much to say elsewhere) and the golden age of post war building, in an interview with James Pallister. The article begins as a review of Hatherly’s book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.
JP Was there a golden age?
OH No. It’s a terrible cliché but in any given period most architecture is not very good. There are periods when we hit upon a decent standard and I think one was in the late 19th century, as well as the 1950s and 60s.
To a large degree, in terms of hygiene, services, the amount of light and air coming into the flat, the amount of green spaces, the length of tenure, the best public housing built in this country occurred between 1945 and 1970 [despite the fact that] there were some very well-publicised disasters and some very poor planning. A lot of it was mediocre, though it was good mediocrity. But compared to contemporary standards, which is below Parker Morris standards, it was vastly superior. I sincerely believe that.
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/critics/-pevsner-for-the-pfi-generation/8607518.article
Of all people it’s Boris Johnson who’s doing his level best in conjunction with Alex Ely of MAE llp to bring back some standards into housing, after 30 years of much poorer quality housing in cities.
BBC Open Book 21/8/11 included a section about Pevsner, available here:- Open Book – Pevsner
Pevsner section starts at 1m 15s in, don’t be put off by the unedited section that precedes it.
More on the life of Pevsner here:-
Tackle the housing crisis . . .
October 28th, 2010
. . . by building shared flats for the young
No issue illustrates our “two-nation” problem better than this one, in that so many people are on incomes that cannot possibly gain them a private home in a lifetime, even though that is the holy grail to which all are expected to aspire.
Deborah Orr in todays Guardian tackles the housing problem from a different perspective, that of the young and advocates state owned and subsidised flats.
Two-nation Labourism must bear some responsibility for the divisive climb in housing costs that has been seen in this country since the housing market picked up at the time when Labour achieved power. Unfettered encouragement of the buy-to-let market, which allowed private landlords to step into the gap left by the lack of investment in social housing, contributed greatly to a situation in which people find themselves renting accommodation that is priced beyond their slender means, even in the suburbs they are supposed to be relocating to.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/deborah-orr-build-shared-flats
One of the commentators below the article writes from France with an excellent suggestion:-
Our local town in France has a wonderful building that is specifically for young workers. I suppose we’d call it a hostel in the UK (just to make it sound worse) but they are nice individual flats complete with caretaker on bottom floor. What a great idea. If we’re asking youngsters to work where jobs are, let’s make it just a bit easier, eh?
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/deborah-orr-build-shared-flats
Fortunately this has happened in London quite by chance. As a former Merchant seaman I have some direct experience of facilities provided for seamen by charities over the decades, for those leaving and joining ships. The following were once the home ashore of those who made their working life afloat.
Beacon House 7 Dock Street, London, E1 8JN
Single persons housing.
Prince of Wales Mission – Salmon Lane
Now private housing.
Queen Victoria Seamans’ Rest – East India Dock Road
Until the mid 1990s the QVSR retained rooms for the use of seaman on leave, but had by then long been used for overspill by the local borough council of Tower Hamlets for Somalian refugees and homeless people.
Anchor House – Canning Town
Historically a hostel for seafarers visiting the ports of East London, Anchor House today is a charity based in Canning Town that provides support to over 200 homeless and workless people each year to help them move on to employment and independent living. See the film.
Flying Angel – Silvertown
This is now being redeveloped into flats while keeping the facade onto Victoria Dock Road. The plans may be downloaded from the following link Flying Angel.
Stella Maris- Tilbury docks
This former seamans’ hostel is now 40 one bedroomed flats. Alternate document link here
There were others but as I say this is not a comprehensive list. The link to the issue of hostels above is simply that some of these former seaman’s homes have become homes for single working people. Beacon House is one such and the former Flying Angel hostel at Silvertown, another.
GLC architect Roger Walters dies aged 93
October 21st, 2010
Roger Walters, chief architect at the Greater London Council during most of the 1970s, has died aged 93.
Friends described him as a “remarkable man with an exceptionally acute mind” who was committed to a human-scale architecture at a time when modernist towers were the fashion.