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Rowan Moore: UK architects should look elsewhere for council housing inspiration

2024-11-25T17:59:00-05:00

In Britain, as our government has promised, we’re going to have a “council housing revolution”, the building of as yet unknown numbers of homes at genuinely affordable rents, a return to policies of 50 and more years ago in order to address the well-known housing crisis. Which is welcome. Luckily there are, close at hand, outstanding examples of how this might be done, in cities and countries on the continent of Europe.

Moore points to Vienna, the city known for its ambitious development model for social housing, and Barcelona as two examples of what he says is a healthy "willingness to experiment" to be applied back home in the UK. The new Labour Party government has promised to usher in a "revolution" in council housing to deliver the up to 100,000 new homes needed per year to match current needs that have been made worse for years by bad policies and a lack of funding.

The same set of issues are plaguing efforts back across the pond in New York City, where Moore's American counterpart Michael Kimmelman recently considered some "radical" alternatives being pursued as part of NYCHA's complicated new plans.

Trellick Tower residents are bracing for a fight against encroaching development schemes

2022-08-11T11:45:00-04:00

“Given the dire shortage of affordable housing in London and the valuable real estate occupied by the Trellick, it is almost certain that someone will build on the site in the future. But residents would like their say. [...] Many fear the build would only attract more developers to the surrounding neighborhood, spoiling the character of the site.”

This fall, residents were able to halt a Haworth Tompkins scheme for a new 16-story tower block in the place of its demolished nursing home that would have obstructed sightlines, a graffiti wall, and exterior views of the Grade II* listed structure. Some units have already been converted into luxury accommodations. Many fear the same privatized fate that befell leaseholders in Ernö Goldfinger’s earlier Balfron Tower is all but inevitable, given London developers’ penchant for leveraging the city’s social rent needs in order to obtain taxpayer-funded contracts.

"All we’ve ever done is stop them for a couple of years," original tenant Keith Benton told the Times. "There’s no guarantee they won’t try again."

The Modern Urbanism of Cook's Camden

2018-01-23T14:08:00-05:00

The council housing designed 50 years ago for a progressive London borough remains a potent symbol of the achievements of postwar social democracy.

Prompted by Mark Swenarton's recent book, Cook's Camden, Douglas Murphy looks at the radically experimental public housing estates built by the London borough from 1966 to 1975, and the reevaluation of these extraordinary projects currently underway in our own era of unaffordable cities and triumphant privatization.

Redeveloped with the promise of new social housing, the Heygate Estate's units have been entirely sold off to foreign investors

2017-04-13T17:41:00-04:00

The Heygate Estate in London was torn down in 2014, forcing tenants out of their homes with compensation that was less than 40% of market value. Supposedly, the replacement building would have affordable housing as well. But, according to Vice, 100% of the properties sold in the building so far have gone to offshore foreign investors. While the original redevelopment plan called for 500 social housing units, just 82 were actually built out of a total of 2,530 new units.

The root of London's housing crisis lies beyond its borders

2016-04-20T20:05:00-04:00

In 2008 the financial crisis was caused by the sub-prime property crash in the US. Today London is facing a super-prime crisis. [...] the market in London and parts of the south-east does not respond to local demand, because it is fuelled by the demands of global capital flooding into London, much of it from highly dubious sources, as the Panama Papers reveal. If London has been shown to be a hub of global money laundering, the property market is its driving force.

Stock bricks to Brutalism: housing design in Poplar

2016-04-08T05:07:00-04:00

The East End of London has been associated with many things: the “cockney” sense of humour; colourful criminals; waves of immigration; and poverty. Not many people associate it with architecture. But it was in Poplar in the south eastern corner of the East End that I chose to do my architectural guided walk, called Stock Bricks to Brutalism: Housing Design History in Poplar. The reasons can be found in the great regeneration of the area’s housing that took place in the twentieth century to address the problems of overcrowding, dilapidation, poor sanitation and bomb damage.

In this one locality, Poplar, you can trace the progression of social housing design from the end of the First World War through to the early 1980s – the days of high volume council housebuilding in the UK – from blocks of flats of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s built using “stock brick” (London’s traditional building material made from the clay on which the city stands) to 1960s and 1970s tower and slab blocks built i...

"Pay to stay" may boot 60,000 UK families from their homes

2016-02-09T21:03:00-05:00

Tens of thousands of hard-working families will be forced to leave their council homes and find themselves unable to afford a local alternative as a result of government plans to restrict social housing to the poorest, according to research obtained by the Observer. The devastating figures...show that almost 60,000 households in England will be unable to afford to remain in their council properties from April next year, as a result of George Osborne’s reform, called “pay to stay”.

The economy, coupled with concerted political efforts to dismantle what's left of the welfare state, has birthed a veritable housing crisis in London and the rest of the UK. According to new figures, "pay to stay", a plan crafted by George Osborne, the Conservative MP for Tatton, will leave an estimated 60,000 English households unable to continue to afford their current council housing, worsening an already dire climate.

For more Archinect coverage of housing in the UK, check out these articles:

And, if you're not already familiar with this visage, here's a portrait of Osborne (without his monocle, top hat, or handlebar moustache):

The (state-facilitated) death of the council house

2016-01-08T02:13:00-05:00

Whereas residents were once all long-term tenants, in the 35 years since Margaret Thatcher encouraged people to buy – and therefore sell – their council flats and houses, the population of places like this has become ever more transient. In particular, homes that were once council properties are now often owned by buy-to-let landlords who rent them out on a short-term basis.