Right idea, wrong time?

Historian Vernon Bogdanor was talking about Keith Joseph on the radio at the weekend, on his series on people who have changed the political weather. Joseph introduced many of the ideas that later became known as Thatcherism. Indeed, if he hadn't made an ill-advised speech about feckless single mothers, he might have become leader of the Tory party, and we might refer to Josephism not Thatcherism.
When Joseph came up with these ideas he said he realised that he had never been a true Conservative before, because he had wanted government to do too much and interfere too much - from which he now recanted. One of his early roles had been as housing minister, and they played a clip of him saying that, to provide more housing, we needed more industrialised systems, with bigger and bigger components being made in factories. At that time of course it all went wrong, with large housing schemes that became dumping grounds for the poor, and poorly built projects leading to the tragedy of the collapse of Ronan Point.
It was interesting to hear a politician sounding so confident, and with such faith in technology. Now they are all far more backward looking. Yet the construction industry is looking very seriously this time at offsite construction - this time as a way of guaranteeing quality and safety as well as bringing down cost. So in a way the old-style Keith Joseph was right when he thought he was wrong and when he seemed so wrong. He was just half a century too early. Which is a pretty good metaphor for a lot of politics.

In a pickle over bins?

Earlier this week I visited a small social housing project that was using some innovative techniques. Most of these were hidden, and the housing association had requested a conventional layout and appearance.

Nevertheless, the architect had managed to select solar panels that looked elegant rather than garish with the roof tiles. But when we went to the small back gardens they were dominated by the ugly array of wheelie bins. Recycling may be noble, but these bins are becoming a blight.

Many developers, of private as well as social housing, do not want to spend money on bin stores. properties Well-designed bin stores on older properties are probably too small for modern wheelie bins.

Does this matter? I think it does. Good housing with a rash of bins outside is rather like wearing a great dress with laddered tights or smeared lipstick - the small error masks the greater good. But it is not an easy problem. Eric Pickles decision to ask councils to demand bin stores is a good start. But I was talking to an architect a couple of years ago, who said that the trouble was that the bin lorries are very prescriptive about where the bins are placed. Living Streets is campaigning less on aesthetic grounds and more on the hazard to the blind, the mobility impaired and parents with buggies. If we can get something done about this blight, it will vastly improve our cities. Wheelie bins may look like a silly season story, but the issue is important.

Small is not beautiful - when it comes to homes

In the latest blast in its campaign to see more spacious and lighter homes, the RIBA has issued the results of a poll by IPSOS Mori showing that natural light and space are the most important consideration in our homes. 80% of the public would be more likely to choose a home with minimum space standards and, damningly, wanting more space and light is the main reason why people in new homes would consider moving. This is part of the RIBA's HomeWise campaign for better homes and coincides with its launch of a new and rather snazzy website. The kneejerk response is of course that we can't afford anything better than the minimum. But this is madness. Despite the very real financial crisis, by most measures this country is more affluent than at almost any time in history. Some of Victorians were horribly overcrowded in slum dwellings. We should not go back to that way of living. It is no coincidence that mean residences so quickly can become slums - it only takes a small change in the way we live to make such a dictatorial residence (only one way of using it) uninhabitable.

Good housing should be robust enough to cope with alteration

How many people - how many architects? - live in Georgian or Victorian houses? Plenty. Many of those houses are in conservation ares, and some are even listed. But even the listed ones will have been altered prior to achieving that status. If nothing else, they will have had bathrooms added, and probably the ubiquitous back extension. And the AJ has published tens, probably dozens, of glazed back extensions to create spacious kitchens on old properties. So I found it hard to sympathise with the residents of the Stirling Prize winning Accordia scheme in Cambridge who have, says the AJ,  applied for Conservation Area status to prevent others living there from tinkering with the design. Somebody has put a cat flap in a window. Somebody else has stained a shed. Didn't the fools know it's not meant to be stained? Who could create such vandalism where uniformity previously reigned? The sort of people who did this presumably:

Oh, but of course that is colourful charming Notting Hill isn't it? The point about good housing is that it is robust - and that owners and residents will want to put their own stamp on it. Accordia has been universally acclaimed. It is evidently much loved. But it is a collection of individual houses - not a housing tower, not a set of student residences, not a hospital. People will want to put their imprints on it. If it can't cope with the odd rattan blind or new house number, then it isn't up to much. It's time to get over it and get on with life.

What sort of housing do we want?

Architect Alison Brooks, no slouch at housing design herself, talks in a discussion run by The Architects' Journal, about the appeal of Victorian homes.
'Why are people willing to pay so much for a flat in a Victorian house?' she asks. 'Why are things like high ceilings and big windows and good proportions, and all these very simple, basic things that the Victorians did, deemed to be above the minimum provision right now?'
It is true that the Victorians inhabited their houses far more densely than we do now (even if they are divided into flats) but it does get to the nub of the problem with housing, as with much else today. Despite the recession, this society is still richer than it has been for almost all our history, yet we are constantly told that there are things we can't afford. In terms of housing, it is, as Brooks points out, because we are measuring the wrong things. Valuations are done on the basis of number of bedrooms rather than on a more sophisticated basis. Just as planning seems to be over-concerned with box ticking rather than encouraging imaginative and appropriate solutions.
Housing is a tremendously complex issue. Sweeping away all regulation is not the answer, as MP Nick Raynsford points out in the debate. But it does need to be freed up, and the right kind of development encouraged.
It is a dauntingly complex area, but one that the AJ is to be applauded for tackling in its 'More Homes, Better Homes' campaign. It will be fascinating to see what comes next.

Let's be sensible about housing

 Michele Hanson's latest 'A certain age' column  in today's Guardian is a corker. After telling us about her friend Clayden being attacked by cows on Hackney Marshes, she says she thinks she is trying to make herself think of urban life as rustic to compensate for the fact that planning minister Nick Boles wants to concrete over most of the countryside.
'How I wish I was planning, and housing, minister instead of Bolesy,' she writes. 'My plans are more sensible: use all brown-fill sites [I think you mean brown-field Michelle], fill all couuncil voids, cap rents, sto VAT on renovation of existing dwellings, and decriminalise squatting. That should help.'
It certainly should. And seems like plain common sense. Someone else who is advocating common sense is Piers Taylor in The Architects' Journal last week touched a nerve when he wrote a column 'An architecture of circumstance would help local character evolve'. OK, the title isn't all that catchy but he was arguing for planners to stop 'meddling and micro-managing' the appearance of housing. Britain should be more like Almere in The Netherlands, he argues, where builders have certain restrictions on volumes, space between buildings etc and then can build what they like.
The interesting thing is that the illustration he shows from Almere is of houses that all look like a family - as did streets of Victorian houses built in pairs by speculative builders. There might be an argument for more restrictions if the result, over the last few decades, had been lots of lovely houses. But it hasn't. Most houses have been ugly, shoddy, small and inflexible. Looser planning restrictions wouldn't necessarily put an end to that. But if they allowed us to build more houses, the market might kick in and people would no longer buy the worst. So here's to more freedom - but not to build over all our green land.

Make yourself at home

Smugness is not attractive so like everyone sensible I try to avoid it. But if I were to be smug about anything it would be about where I live. My small, not terribly convenient flat is in an inner London suburb where, if I were buying now, I would not be able to afford to live. There has been a ripple effect in London where successive waves of buyers talk wistfully about areas that their elders found barely acceptable. Now it has reached the point where first-time buyers, even in well-paid jobs, cannot afford to live in the capital at all unless subsidised by serious rich parents.
Housing starts are at an all time low, much of which is built is ugly and cramped because housebuilders can build anything they like, knowing it will sell. This despite the fact that potential buyers still find it hard to get loans, and even those living in social housing in London are being priced out. There was a touching interview on Radio 4 yesterday with a woman who is working part time and having her benefit cut. She is looking at moving to Birmingham or Glasgow but this would mean giving up her job and becoming even more dependent on the state. In The Guardian yesterday, Steve Rose wrote a feature headlined 'Squatters are not home stealers,' saying that the government has misrepresented their position in order to pass its laws on squatting.
In fact everything the government is doing in regard to housing seems to be driven by either rigid ideology or blind panic. Not enough housing? Let's tear up the Building Regulations. Still not enough housing? Let's allow people to build everywhere and disregard the green belt. House builders are not short of sites, and are not prevented from building by Building Regulations. Instead the situation is far more complex, tied up with the market and, it is true, by planning problems in dense areas.
In this dense tangle, what can architects do? According to The Architects' Journal, quite a lot. One of the comments on the launch of its More Homes, Better Homes campaign says that what we need are not more homes but fewer people and a redistribution of employment across the country. Maybe, but that is a big ask. In the meantime what we need are homes built now (or converted from existing buildings) in places where people want to live and, crucially, homes that people want to live in now and in the future. This means decent space standards for activities we can't yet contemplate, higher ceilings to retrofit fans that can cope with climate change, and the creation not just of reasonable individual homes but of proper functional neighbourhoods. It is a big ask, but the special intelligence of architects should help unravel it. The AJ is planning to publish a manifesto. It should be fascinating and, one hopes, influential.

Is it too good to be true?

Can it be possible? The RIBA's Future Homes Commission has proposed a means for local authorities to invest in new housing using money that, effectively, is just sitting around.
Its idea is that they can set up a housing fund from part of the money that they are holding in their pension funds. Of course this money is not 'doing nothing'. It is invested elsewhere. What the RIBA is suggesting is that they invest in their own future. It would take an accountancy expert to work out what exactly would happen to the value of those assets - presumably at some stage the local authority would have to sell them on to a housing association in order to realise the money for its pension pot? But it is a really exciting idea. It gives a central role back to local authorities, it gives them a vested interest in making sure that the housing they produce is well designed, appropriate and well-maintained. It is the localism that the government claims to want, although not in the form that it foresaw.
Will it happen though? That, I fear, is the hardest question of all.

Singapore provides a different angle on liveable design

The World Architecture Festival has been taking place in Singapore this week and it has been eye-opener in terms how a country with limited space deals with housing and the desire for greenery. At half the size of London and two-thirds of the population, Singapore sounds as if it should be denser - but not that dense. The difference though is that there is no hinterland - no wider country to which to escape.
So Singapore has to provide all its greenery and open space within its boundaries. And it has done this remarkably successfully.Between 1986 and 2007 the population grew by 70 per cent yet across the same period the proportion of green space actually increased from 35.7 per cent to 46.6 per cent.

A small amount of this growth was the result of land reclamation - the fabulous Gardens by the Bay are in one such recent area. But mostly it has come from a deliberate densification of construction. The brief for the recent Pinnacle@Duxton for example asked for the amount of accommodation to be trebled. In the UK we would be horrified to see families living in a 50-storey building. But the residents love it. Great attention has been given to the ground plane and there are also 'flying gardens' - communal spaces at upper levels. Other projects are even more radical, and there is an increasing trend to green the exteriors of buildings.
Designing for a tropical climate, where you usually want shade and designing to increase wind flow is crucial, is evidently very different to more temperate environments. But Singapore evidently feels that it has no choice but to build upwards. The approach it takes to it is surprising, stimulating and admirable.

Homes for grannies

I hope you all had a good long weekend. While the country was celebrating the jubilee of its favourite granny, the government made an announcement about a type of accommodation that the Queen is never going to need - the granny flat. It said it would introduce a council tax break for anybody converting a garage or other unused accommodation into a granny flat. This caused some confusion, as apparently they are already tax exempt. So the government back-pedalled and said it didn't just mean grannies (or grandpas) but any member of the family - including presumably adult children who have become part of the 'boomerang' generation, leaving home for university and then coming back again.
It seems that the government is changing its mind all the time about taxes and fiscal incentives, pace the pasty tax and tax exemptions for charitable donations, but this time it does seem to be doing something rather clever. It is breaking up our terribly rigid ideas of where we should live, that anybody with any aspiration to success should be a homeowner and, failing that, can make do with renting a self-contained flat. Some small places, almost but not quite independent of their owners, could suit all sorts of people at all sorts of stages in their lives, and perhaps ease our chronic housing situation and even, whisper it, pull inflated house prices down a bit. Just don't expect the queen to move in.