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.
The historic present
February 17th, 2010
In what way is the English language enhanced by removing the past tense? I ask this question in all seriousness because for some time now the media have taken it upon themselves to refer to historical events in the present tense. The most recent example that comes to mind is John Tusa doing a series of daily reports on the events of 1968 around Europe. This was narrated in the historic present and resulted in my switching off after a very short time despite my respect for the presenter.
On occasion entire documentaries have been presented in this way, perhaps it is thought to add immediacy to a program. I really have no idea, having not asked the producers.
Having looked around the web the conclusion seems to be that it’s ok for a brief period such as retelling a story in a pub, to bring immediacy to the action, but that one should switch back to the past in the longer term, and likewise with documentaries, that the historic present quickly becomes tedious and irritating. That’s my view, what do you think?
Job agencies
February 17th, 2010
‘the agent is not there to find you a job’
The best advice I’ve ever seen written down for those seeking work through agencies is what follows below:-
There do seem to be some misconceptions about agents.
The agent is *not* there to find you a job. In theory the agent is there to find the best staff for the employer – it’s the employer they’re working for, you can tell this by the fact that it’s the employer that pays them, not the candidate.
This theory rarely plays out in practice however. In practice the agent is working for himself. He does *not* try to find the best staff for the employer, he tries instead to make the most profit for himself, which is *not* always the same thing.
Whatever, the concept of “finding you a job” never enters an agent’s brain for a nanosecond, it’s simply not what they do.
If you want to see the whole quote in context then click the article header Job agencies and you will be taken to the relevant page.
In my experience it is far too easy to be taken in by agents on the phone who would appear to have your best interests at heart, some do, most do not.
Right to buy
February 15th, 2010
Stephen Greenhalgh and “decent neighbourhoods”
Anybody got anything intelligent to say about the continuing to stack the poorest and the most recently arrived on top of each other, in defined areas, for the rest of time?
Clearly you are right that this is not a good idea. However you have to look at the history to see why this now appears to be the case.
When RTB was introduced by Margaret Thatcher it was always going to be the most desirable properties in the best locations that went first to those who could afford the discounted prices. This inevitably altered the housing stock balance across the country adversely and tilted towards the estates which even if they had not been in trouble before now began to decline because tenants able to afford RTB on those estates moved out and let the flats to DSS tenants.
Eating on public transport
February 15th, 2010
The answer is no, eating ought to be banned on public transport in the same way that alcohol was. This has only come about because of the growth of the fast food industry and the subsequent demise of cheap places to sit down and eat with cutlery. The fast food industry has been allowed to grow unregulated while passing 50% of their responsibility (litter, unwashed hands, somewhere to sit down in comfort and eat) outside the door. It is true that McDonalds and perhaps others do pay their staff to clean up in the immediate area outside the door but beyond that litter is still dropped, and worse on windy days it can end up some way from its origin.
When more cafés existed it was only possible to take away food such as a sandwich in a brown paper bag, a piece of fruit, or a tea or coffee in a (chunky) polystyrene cup with a lid. https://www.classiccafes.co.uk shows the way things were and could be again. The only way to change this is by using them more and eating inside at the place of purchase, and not on public transport.
Housing typologies
February 14th, 2010
This page is now redundant having been replaced by the static page Typology
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.
The Psychology of Housing – Alice Coleman
January 1st, 2010
First seen in the Salisbury Review
Psychologists blame parents for their children’s problems but overlook an even stronger influence — the design of the home. The mid-19th century crime peak arose from tenement buildings, a steady fall of crime to a record low accompanied the great spread of late Victorian single-family houses. Yet the 20th century reverted to tenements in unprecedented numbers and crime has soared in parallel as well as becoming vastly more vicious.
The leader of the new tenement psychology was Le Corbusier, whose 1923 book, Vers Une Architecture, introduced the Modern Movement. He argued that throwing people together in blocks of flats would create communities — an idea which won global support. Its validity went unchecked and Labour’s 1948 planning control facilitated its enforcement, as the popular semi‑detached house was dismissed as out-dated and up to 90,000 Victorian houses were demolished annually for comprehensive redevelopment with flats.