The Future of Housing - by Mark Swenarton
Throughout August 2024, in light of the new UK government's ambitious house-building and planning pledges, we are highlighting Lund Humphries’ planning and housing books and offering a 50% discount on a curated collection: The Future of Housing. Use code HOUSING50 at checkout until 31 August 2024.
As part of this special promotion, Mark Swenarton – author of the Lund Humphries bestseller Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing and co-author of the volume Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century – has written a special blogpost, looking at the prospects for a fresh start in housing under the new Labour government...
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What we need, declared the Prime Minister, is to ‘get government back into the business of building houses. A new generation of council houses to help fix our broken housing market’. But it was not the current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, saying this but the last-PM-but-three, Theresa May, in her speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2017.
Since then the world, and especially the UK’s fiscal position, has changed dramatically. Back in 2017, before the Treasury spent billions on Covid and subsidising household energy bills, the national debt stood at a ‘mere’ 83.5 per cent of GDP. Today the figure is 99.5 per cent – the highest since 1961. Moreover, thanks to Liz Truss and her disastrous mini-budget, we all know the consequences if a nation reliant on the kindness of strangers loses the confidence of the markets that finance its debt….
Little wonder then that the incoming Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has taken fiscal rectitude as her lodestar – reducing the ratio of national debt to GDP by the end of this parliament. Building houses is a capital-intensive business and councils building houses means adding to the national debt. Hence the conspicuous absence from the Labour Party’s election manifesto of any firm pledges on council housebuilding.
Fig 1 – Westminster council’s Churchill Gardens housing by Powell & Moya, 1946-62: pages from Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century
Notwithstanding this, the government has committed to getting 1.5 million houses built by the end of the parliament – an average of 300,000 per year. This is way in excess of anything achieved in recent decades. Since 2010 in most years the figure has been below 200,000 and the last time it hit 300,000 was nearly half a century ago, in 1977.
During the 1950s and 1960s, completions regularly exceeded 300,000. But this was only because, alongside private enterprise, council housing was being built on a massive scale. In 1977 local authorities accounted for nearly half (46 per cent) of the 314,000 houses completed. For the 1960s as a whole, when in every year completions exceeded 300,000, the figure was 44 per cent.
Without a massive increase in council housebuilding, 300,000 annual completions is an impossibility. While the new Labour government can doubtless engineer an increase in output compared to recent years, the notion that it can achieve 300,000 without a substantial contribution from local authorities is a fantasy.
In quantitative terms then the outlook does not look promising. What about the qualitative?
Fig 2 – Newcastle city council’s Byker housing by Ralph Erskine and Vernon Gracie, 1968-82: pages from Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century
Here, fortunately, things look much more encouraging. The ‘golden age’ of the welfare state, which lasted from the end of the second world war to the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, saw – alongside a lot of very un-marvellous and indeed sub-standard outputs – a sequence of council housing projects of remarkable quality. Think of Powell & Moya’s Churchill Gardens in Westminster in the 1940s (Fig 1), the London County Council’s Roehampton in the 1950s, Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre and Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall in the 1960s (Fig 2): these were projects that attracted worldwide acclaim at the time and that continued to command the attention of architects over the decades that followed. (A number of these, as well as many from outside the UK, are documented in the recently published Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century).
Above all there was the housing designed by Neave Brown for Camden council, most notably Alexandra Road (which I explored in Cook’s Camden). Alexandra Road was a paradigmatic project, a mixed-use ‘piece of city’ combining ‘modern’ ideas of flexible interiors and generous external space with the ‘streets and squares’ tradition of London’s urban morphology inherited from the Georgian and Regency periods (Figs 3, 4, 5).
Figs 3, 4 and 5 – Camden council’s Alexandra Road housing by Neave Brown, 1967-79: exterior and interior photos © Tim Crocker; cross-section drawing © Mark Swenarton.
Alexandra Road was completed just as Margaret Thatcher was taking an axe to the welfare state in general and to council housing in particular. Very little of consequence was started in the decades that followed. But after twenty years or so architects started to re-visit these classic schemes of the golden age and derive from them principles that they could follow. In 2001 Peter Barber designed the Donnybrook scheme in east London; Feilden Clegg Bradley and others designed Accordia in Cambridge, which won the Stirling Prize in 2008. These were not council schemes (Donnybrook was built by a housing association, Circle 33; Accordia by a housebuilder, Countryside Properties) but they drew on the principles of street-based housing from Alexandra Road and showed how they could be applied in the twenty-first century.
Figs 6 and 7 – Recent street-based housing: Edgewood Mews in Barnet by Peter Barber; Brent council’s Unity Place by Feilden Clegg Bradley, Alison Brookes and Gort Scott (photos © Mark Swenarton)
Since then both Peter Barber and Feilden Clegg Bradley have built a number of further projects (Figs 6 and 7), clearly drawing on the ideas of Neave Brown (whose importance was recognised in 2019 by the RIBA when they established the annual Neave Brown Award for Housing). But they are not by any means the only architects to do so. Proctor & Matthews, Jestico & Whiles, Pollard Thomas Edwards, Metropolitan Workshop, Henley Halebrown, Ash Sakula, Maccreanor Lavington, Mary Duggan, Mikhail Riches (whose Goldsmith Street, comprising 93 Passivhaus homes for Norwich City Council, won the Stirling Prize in 2019): these are just some of the architects currently producing outstanding street-based housing. Rarely if ever has Britain enjoyed such a wealth and depth of talent in the field of housing architecture: an entire cadre of housing architects delivering work of the highest quality.
Some of the work that these architects are producing is for councils but a lot is for other developers. Proctor & Matthews’ award-winning Great Kneighton at Cambridge was built by Countryside Properties and Jestico & Whiles’ Pavilions in north London was built by Telford Homes. So the fact that council housebuilding is not going to loom large in the housing drive of the new Labour government is no reason to ignore the riches available.
Given the constraints on public spending and the commitment to fiscal rectitude, the Starmer government may not achieve its target of 1.5 million homes: but there is no reason why the housing that is produced should not be of outstanding quality – something of which we, and future generations, can be proud.
– Mark Swenarton, July 2024
Both Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton and Housing Atlas: Europe – 20th Century by Orsina Simona Pierini, Carmen Espegel, Dick van Gameren and Mark Swenarton are included in the specially curated collection: The Future of Housing which is 50% off with code HOUSING50 until 31 August 2024.
