Single Aspect Blog

Most of the articles you’ll find on this blog are about housing, council estates and the poor quality of new housing design but now and again you’ll find another type of article under the category of Thoughts and this is one such.  It relates to housing in as much as council estates are often cited as being the source of individuals causing trouble through being unemployed.

With all the talk of NEETs (Not in Employment, Education or Training) whenever the subject of unemployed young people comes up, the ASBO culture, sink estates etc I thought it would be time to revisit an article from some years ago that I came across while at sea in a newspaper onboard one of the ships on which I worked at the time.  I have reproduced the article in full below:-

Sunday Express September 15th 1991

———————————-

From Sunday Money

Why is unemployment so high in Britain and the rest of the EC, when it isn’t in America or Scandinavia?

The mistake in Britain, according to Layard, has been to depart from Lord Beveridge’s prescription that the state should provide work or training for all, and that the payment of unemployment benefit should be “conditional on attendance at a work or training centre.”  He was insistent that “complete idleness, even on an income, demoralizes.”

Instead, benefits have been open-ended and for an unlimited period.  And training and work opportunities have not been made available on a scale sufficient for the authorities to insist decently that, after a period the unemployed should accept either a training place or a job offer – or forgo benefit.

Read the rest of this entry »

A month ago today I wrote an article entitled Blinkered Boris caves in and subsequently copied the article to the Mayor of London and other contacts.  I received encouraging news from somebody associated with the project which I have added below and today received an email from City Hall which I have reproduced below:-

During the 1940s my late Father studied architecture at the South East Essex Technical College in Longbridge Road Barking, later to become the Barking Campus of the University of East London and then sold in 2006 for housing.  “Academy Central” developed by Taylor Wimpey has preserved the main building and put housing on the surrounding land as advertised at their website here

Living space

I had a quick look at the plan for a two bedroom flat and noted immediately that it is corridor access single aspect.  The kitchen, bathroom and ensuite shower are all internal having no natural light.  The provision of two bathrooms and toilets in a space intended at most for two adults and two children, and more likely a couple with a guest room, seems excessive and takes useful space away from the master bedroom.  There is a stub wall only between the kitchen and living space and no dining room.

Kitchen

Cooking smells will accumulate in the living room, unless some form of extraction is present (not immediately obvious from the plan).  Through ventilation is not possible without opening the door to the corridor which will compromise security and provide an opportunity for a young child to run out into semi-public space.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who to vote for on space standards? You might have thought that following the promises made (and broken) by Boris Johnson in raising the profile of Sir Parker Morris that space standards would by now have found their way into the manifesto commitments of all three major parties but you would be wrong.  What each of the three candidates below are essentially saying is that if you are free to move around in the market place you can avoid the smaller housing and move to larger but what they are not saying is that so much of what is being built today is inadequate. That housing standards across the country are failing in terms of space so the housing stock is itself being diminished.

On 19 January 100 property professionals had the opportunity to question housing spokespeople from the three main parties at the RICS, Building and Property Week pre-election hustings.

Rt Hon Nick Raynsford (Labour)

Introducing space standards for new private housing is not appropriate, since there is more choice and mobility for tenants and owners than in the social rented sector.

Grant Shapps (Conservative)

Space standards in the private rented sector and density targets
Temporarily relaxing space standards could allow many empty homes to be brought into use by the social housing sector. Density targets would be removed by a Conservative administration.

Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrats)

Space standards
Agreed with Nick Raynsford regarding the differences in mobility and choice between the social and private housing and therefore did not support blanket space standards for new private homes.

https://www.rics.org/site/scripts/news_article.aspx?newsID=1194

Following my study of the A2Dominion developments around the South East I did a study on Vue2 at Bletchley (near the station) and the results may be seen below:-

• From August 17th 2008 until April 20th 2009 the sun never rose within sight of Vue2 NNW facing flats
• On midsummers day the NNW facing flats would get just 2 hours of sunlight from the East at a time when most people would be asleep, and a maximum of five hours from the west
• On 11-11-2009 the sun sets along the alignment of Vue2 and for two months it is not to be seen from the west, until 11-1-2010
• The longest the sun is visible from the west will be at the summer solstice from 16:23 to sunset at 21:29, just over five hours

for photos and more details click here

Bear in mind that with only marginal differences the results will be the same for any given year. The fact that I had to choose specific dates and times in order to plot the sun does not alter the fact that this situation is repeated annually.

We’re not the only ones worried about sunlight issues, while researching single aspect dwellings on the web I found the following document about Australian regulations relating to sunlight ->Sunlight_Aus.pdf<-

NOTE: Please be aware that in the Southern hemisphere the sun shines from the North not the South, and so in Australia a North facing single aspect flat will be sunny but a South facing one will be dark.  The reverse of the situation here in the UK.

Following a new report by HATC, The One Show (April 9th 2010) did a four minute segment on the problem which is no longer available

but the audio is:-

Audio on YouTube

This used to be a long article about back to backs and tuberculosis. I shortened it because most of the TB in the UK arrives from other countries.

While it’s true that Victorian housing conditions and lack of ventilation exacerbated health problems, in the UK in the C21st the vast majority of tuberculosis is brought in from outside the country by people from developing countries.

“These individuals account for nearly three-quarters of all tuberculosis notifications in the UK with an incidence that is 20 times higher than in UK-born individuals”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108102/

BCG

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/31/tb-vaccine-bcg-effective-for-twice-as-long-as-previously-thought-study

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