High-density, mixed-tenure brownfield developments will reduce the housing shortage, but only with political consensus to improve affordability and an investment in placemaking. This essay by Robert Bevan, writer and architecture critic for the London Evening Standard, was written following a series of conversations with WestonWilliamson+Partners. It is one in a series marking the 30th anniversary of the practice in 2015.
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1. Cholera outbreak distribution map, London 1854: a high number of deaths occurred near a water pump on Broad Street. 2. Designed by Henry Darbishire in the 1860s, Islington Estate is the first Peabody estate to be arranged in a square with an interior courtyard and was granted Grade II listing in 1996. 3. Council house building took on renewed vigour on blitzed and slum-cleared sites after World War 2.
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ros’s long-departed arrow was originally aimed up Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, according to one persistent urban myth. Accurately known as the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain, the sculpture commemorates Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, which became the first Model Dwellings Company in 1844. Shaftesbury campaigned for better workers’ housing in the countryside (after the Swing Riots of 1830) as well as in the Victorian cities. It’s no accident that the memorial incorporates a drinking fountain (the ungrateful poor wrenched off the elaborate cups chained to it on the very night it opened); from the time of its unveiling, public housing for the needy was a matter of enlightened self-interest. The Industrial Revolution was causing unexpected consequences, not least because of poor sanitation, as Dr John Snow discovered when he mapped the deadly Soho cholera outbreak of 1854. Sanitary housing was the demand of the age, and philanthropists and industrialists, including Octavia Hill, George Peabody and Titus Salt, set out to provide something more than the traditional almshouse or reviled workhouse.
Transforming the housing landscape Although not a genuine public good in the strict economic sense, there is no doubting that decent and affordable housing transformed British society for the better. Following the 1919 Housing Act, that was itself the culmination of the Homes Fit for Heroes campaign for troops returning from war, some one million council houses were built before 1939, also influenced by the Garden Cities movement. Council house building was renewed with vigour on blitzed and slum-cleared sites in the wake of the Second World War and within the context of the emerging Welfare State. The number of homes built annually rose to more than 142,000 by 1966. Today, however, under neoliberalism, the retreat from social housing provision is having catastrophic consequences for both individuals and society at large. Furthermore, political and economic cycles are having a significant impact on the problems faced by the housing industry. It is now critical to not only redress shortage, but also address affordability and deliver design quality.
Housing has always been a cornerstone of Weston Williamson’s practice, together with expertise in transport infrastructure and master planning. In spite of current housing pressures, the homes they are designing today are better informed by understanding how people live in 21st-century cities. The emergence of London as a primary world city, coupled with population growth and influx, is putting significant pressure on housing stock like never before. Meanwhile, sites remain undeveloped as landowners wait for the opportune moment to maximise returns. Sale values and market rents have moved beyond the reach of the average Londoner: the market price of the average London home reached a record £500,000 in September 2014, with the national figure coming out at £272,000.
Historic ambivalence Much of the stigma attached to public housing dates back to Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy policy, launched in 1980. The policy saw the biggest privatisation drive that the country has ever witnessed. Currently, some 17 per cent of UK households continue to live in social housing (2010 figures), down from almost 50 per cent of the nation’s housing stock at its peak. However, it was not simply an ideological position regarding tenure that led to the stigmatisation of social housing; any analysis of social housing reveals historic ambivalences of various kinds. At the more abstract, these have ranged from the use of design as control (even the LCC Boundary Estate, perhaps the country’s first council estate, has something of the panopticon about it) to housing provision as a means of appeasing a restive working class, as encapsulated by Le Corbusier’s determinist claim that architecture could avoid revolution. While some truths can be found in such arguments, they forget that public housing was also a successful grassroots demand alongside free education and healthcare. It is mistakes in their design, implementation and management that contributed to the unpopularity of mass social housing at the end of the last century. Other public housing schemes were hugely successful: the Golden Lane Estate, for example, by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon for the (then) Borough of Finsbury.
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4. Robin Hood Gardens: Alison & Peter Smithson’s post-war (late 1960s) slab blocks reduced housing shortages, but too often generated hostile environments.
5. The Marquess Estate by Darbourne & Darke (1966) included family maisonettes and wide, planted ‘roof streets’. 6. Lillington Gardens, Pimlico by Darbourne & Darke (1961–1980): a new approach to individuality, density and landscape.
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By learning from these successes and failures, new solutions have developed with innovative design for both public and market-sale housing, including intermediate tenure, more commonly termed shared ownership. For residents to co-exist happily in dense urban developments, a renewed focus on the value of community and placemaking is long overdue.
Alternative dwelling models One reaction to these shortcomings was the rise of the housing association and housing cooperative movements. This was also driven by a mounting resistance to the dispersal of communities that commonly resulted from tabula rasa slum clearances. Another was the emergence of a more humanist architecture, often with designs that would fall within a definition of critical regionalism. These alternative house models are admirable and spoke to the design drawbacks of mass housing. They were already being pioneered by the likes of Darbourne & Darke at Lillington Gardens in Pimlico. Described by Pevsner as “the most interesting recent housing scheme in London”, Lillington Gardens was constructed in phases from 1961 and was conceived of as the antithesis of the faceless housing block with an emphasis on individuality and private gardens. It allowed for high densities, but no more than eight floors above street level. Darbourne & Darke’s later Marquess Road estate in Islington was less successful. In part, this could be put down to management and allocation policies, as well as maintenance issues exacerbated by the scissor-section block arrangements that placed bedrooms below a neighbour’s living room. As important, however, was that Lillington was much smaller than the Marquess, and therefore less divorced from the surrounding, conventional street pattern. The Space Syntax Laboratory’s later analysis of Darbourne & Darke’s work helped demonstrate the importance of integration rather than segregation in relation to perceptions of safety and to actual crime levels. The attractive Italian hill village aesthetic at Lillington became a crimeridden labyrinth for the tenants of the Marquess. The difference in the fortunes of these two estates illustrates the importance of a subtle architectural response to context—a value that is central to Weston Williamson’s design approach. Imaginative solutions must respond to physical context and meet demands for social cohesion and community integration, while working with hard economic realities.
Modernist council housing continued to be built in ever-decreasing amounts until the early 1980s, but still had some explaining to do. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation might be glorious as a one-off, but its approach was less successful when built on a desolate edge of Marseille with no jobs or transport to hand—even less so when emulated under the damp skies of northern Europe. None of the failings of public housing’s experimental age should be allowed to dent belief in social housing as an idea. It certainly has not for Weston Williamson who continues to champion the sector as integral to developing cohesive places where high-density city living necessitates different tenures to be side by side. This chequered history has instead provoked the practice into investigating fresh, more architecturally successful housing forms, as well as delivery processes that can both engage end users and successfully negotiate the vagaries of today’s byzantine procurement methods and the (often meagre) budgets that accompany them. The practice maintains the three principal typologies of post-war housing—the terrace, the tower and the medium-rise block—are as relevant as ever (each in the right circumstances, of course) in unlocking the current housing bottleneck and delivering high-density solutions. Arguably, the terrace has proved most successful in generating a consistent urban form and being adaptable and flexible enough to meet the demands of an evolving society and complex family structures. The courtyard terrace house is fast emerging as a successful mediator in the city where garden space is short and boundaries constrained. However, the design fundamental that will make the difference to future social housing and cross-tenure integration is effective placemaking. Specifically, the living, urban design framework in which housing sits, and of which it forms a crucial component; placemaking was poorly understood in the post-war period with its health-minded emphasis on segregated zoning for uses and for traffic. Only in the 1980s did placemaking really begin to emerge in architectural circles. It was popularised via Sir Richard Rogers’ 1999 Towards an Urban Renaissance report of the Urban Task Force and the establishment of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). It demands that the streets on which new housing sits on are as important as the residential units themselves. This resident-focused approach recognises that the most sustainable placemaking works with the existing urban fabric. Communities are not designed from scratch; they evolve organically over a long period of time. However, they do need better integration with transport hubs and emerging infrastructure, such as Crossrail and HS2.
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7. WW+P Springfield Lane (2006) for Urban Splash: Placemaking is central to the regeneration of brownfield land. Here, on the banks of the River Irwell in Salford, Greater Manchester homes, retail and commercial uses are connected by waterfrontlandscaped spaces.
8. WW+P, Former Plaistow Hospital (2012): Placemaking is central to the masterplan to regenerate the former Plaistow Hospital in East London as part of Peabody’s 150th anniversary initiatives. The coming together of the old and new buildings defines the proposal. A progressive and sustainable approach to living is engineered through home and community learning programmes and initiatives. Communal spaces generate a strong sense of belonging for all age groups, underpinned by delightful well-considered design.
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Dense development planning can be held back by lack of transport connectivity, but transport infrastructure schemes are stalled, as Public Transport Accessibility Levels (PTAL) remain too low to generate a robust business case. The Mayor’s 2050 infrastructure plan for London is a big step in the right direction for housing, and should be embraced by the regions too. Successful placemaking as a pre-cursor to decent housing—public or private—demands educated clients who are willing to think beyond their developments and realise the wider benefits: clients with which long-standing, trusted relationships can be built.
Improving quality and increasing supply The unlocking of constrained brownfield sites needs to accelerate tremendously to even scrape the surface of the Mayor’s target for the construction of 42,000 homes per year in London over the next decade. Building on the greenbelt is not the answer. When operating in highly competitive fee markets, and where site constraints and funding will always challenge the product, architects must remain robust and maintain focus by continually challenging ideas to develop better homes and spaces; Talgarth Road is a case in point. The housing industry has recognised that this mixed-tenure scheme in West London (for the Stadium Housing Group) demonstrates the benefits of a correctly pitched approach to develop a difficult urban site. Innovative and sustainable design is balanced to mitigate overlooking and noise constraints, and provide homes fronting a heavily trafficked road where previous attempts had failed.
9. WW+P, Talgarth Road (2008–2012) for Stadium Housing Group: an exemplar of innovative and sustainable design on a particularly constrained urban site. The building provides 14 homes on a long narrow site adjacent to a bullying highway. Daylight to adjacent residents is maintained with a sharply angled roof to the rear elevation topped with chimney-like vents that house heatrecovery systems for the mechanical ventilation. Open-plan double-height first-floor spaces with two-storey windows are a reference to local 1890 landmark artist studios.
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10+11. WW+P Spa Road, Bermondsey for Hyde Housing (2008–2014): As part of the Southwark Council Bermondsey Spa master plan, 48 mixed-tenure homes above groundfloor commercial space have regenerated this part of the Neckinger Estate. High-quality brickwork and elegant repetitive details animate the design and successfully integrate the new buildings with the existing context.
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12+13. WW+P, Jamaica Road, London (2012): high-density housing successfully integrates different tenures within a simple building volume that wraps the triangular site. Existing estate-building lines are maintained and continue to positively define the street edges. Elevations reference the adjacent brick mansion blocks and reflect the horizontal banding evident in the window detailing.
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14. WW+P Jamaica Road
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15+16. WW+P Talgarth Road
17. WW+P, Medlar Street, Camberwell (2013) for Peabody: the courtyard terrace house typology is a successful mediator in the city where garden space is limited and boundaries constrained. In this terrace of six family houses, courtyards are faced with light-reflective brick to pull daylight deep into the plan and openings are arranged to avoid overlooking of neighbours.
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As well as dealing with the difficult realities of social housing design today, Weston Williamson is engaged in wider debates about improving housing delivery and supply. It is not a problem of land scarcity, but more about the political will to act to release it. The NHS, Network Rail, TfL and other bodies are each sitting on a lot of developable land that urgently needs bringing forward, but lack of transparency is often the hurdle. Other mooted measures in London are supported, such as limiting planning permissions to two years to discourage landowners from sitting on sites solely to keep their rising value on company balance sheets. More radical solutions to housing land shortages could encompass the establishment of a government land bank that could capture planning gain for the taxpayer (as in South Korea and Singapore). More immediate, practical measures that would improve social housing include extending London’s new housing space standards nationwide and ensuring that, for example, measures of sustainability or Lifetime Homes indices become meaningful instead of ‘tick-box’ exercises. Central government proposals to streamline a plethora of guidelines and focus on the fundamentals of space, water, energy and security is welcomed, as is a renewed push for off-site manufacture championed by the 2025 Construction Strategy. These proposals will be strengthened when evidenced with more post-occupancy evaluation using robust methodologies similar to those developed for the commercial and education sectors. Nonetheless, these proposals must not preclude innovative solutions being developed by architects and developers for particular target markets. Affordable compact flats below prescribed space standards, for example, are practical in the right location if supported by the right financial model and designed for specific end-user groups.
Renewed focus With a growing backlash in the Tory shires over permissions for housing on the greenbelt, and the affordability crisis in London and the South East, the government has been forced to focus attention on social housing once more. Schemes to make homes affordable for first-time buyers have also been hastily rolled out, but have been met with some scepticism and achieved limited success. Other Coalition announcements include allowing councils to increase their borrowing to build affordable homes, as well as Eric Pickles’ suggestion that existing modernist estates should be redeveloped as mid-rise streets.
18. WW+P’s Arcology Towers offer vertical city living in Hong Kong. Vertical gardens give residents a relaxing environment away from the bustle of life below.
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This could, of course, bring dangers, as well as provide opportunities, for architects committed to social housing. Most worryingly, it could very easily result in far fewer genuinely affordable homes in these mostly market-led regeneration schemes. Interestingly, the driving of Shaftesbury Avenue through Soho was itself part of a Victorian slum clearance project that was delayed by regulations that required at least some of the area’s former tenants to be housed in medium-rise blocks fronting streets. In truth, Eros’s arrow never did point up Shaftesbury Avenue, even before the statue was moved to make way for traffic improvements. His downward-pointing bow is regarded by scholars as being a play—a rebus—on the Shaftesbury name, to bury the shaft of the arrow in the ground. The arrow could also be pointing to the long-buried hopes for more equitable housing provision. Weston Williamson, however, understands the design errors of the past and believe that, with housing integral to the goal of a cohesive society, there is no reason why high-quality public housing and bolder delivery targets cannot be both valued and achieved once more. All that is needed is the political will to make it happen.
19. WW+P Splash Courtyard housing (2006): research project evaluating the benefits of the terrace house typology, combining spatial flexibility with an internal courtyard area.
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20. WW+P, Hong Kong Island (2013): The Arcology Skyscraper demonstrates a visionary super-dense vertical self-sufficient neighbourhood in three ‘kissing towers’. The building has three main functional zones with a maximum height of 440m; lower levels contain offices and commercial space, intermediate levels house an agricultural zone, and upper levels comprise residential apartments. Public nodes provide a range of retail, recreational and social spaces offering all the amenities required to generate a dynamic and thriving community.
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Picture Credits: 1. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 2. © Barson, S. 2001 The Peabody Estates Conservation Guidelines, English Heritage 3. © Public Domain: WWII: (HD-SN-99-02668 DOD/NARA) National Archives 4. © Image by Sandra Lousada, 1972 © The Smithson Family Collection 5. © Collection held at the London Metropolitan Archives, shelfmark 28.75 BOU 6. © Courtauld Institute of Art 7. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 8. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 9. © Nick Guttridge 10. © Tim Crocker 11. © Tim Crocker 12. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 13. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 14. © Nick Guttridge 15. © Nick Guttridge 16. © Nick Guttridge 17. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 18. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 19. © WestonWilliamson+Partners 20. © WestonWilliamson+Partners