Council housing, social purpose

The GLA recently announced that London boroughs have reached the target of 20,000 council-built homes by 2024 a year early, with more council-built homes started in the capital in 2022 than any year since the 1970s.
 

This was encouraging news and rather appropriate since it arrived as I started reading John Boughton's book A History of council housing in 100 Estates, a rich collection of public housing projects from Millbank Estate, completed by the LCC in 1902, through to the 2019 Stirling Prize-winning Goldsmith Street in Norwich by Mikhail Riches.
 
The book is packed with humdingers of housing schemes like the Old Oak Estate at Hammersmith, a fine example of arts and crafts architecture, with curving streetscapes, carefully designed intersections, and the splayed butterfly corner housing, designed to open vistas and circulate air. Its controlled palette of red brick and tile, set amid generous landscaping, survives to this day. One can only hope that the current developments at Old Oak will be of equivalent quality. Boughton includes the wonderful Nissen-Petrn Houses in Yeovil, with the familiar barrel roof shape of the Nissen hut. Its designer thought it would solve the country's housing problem. But like a lot of modern methods of construction, it was more expensive than a traditional brick-built house, and in the end, only 24 were built in Yeovil and another 50 across the country.
 
While it is an interesting architectural survey, it also reinforces Boughton's case that in 2020/21, just 6,566 new social rent homes were completed in England; at the same time, 9,319 were lost to Right to Buy. With 1.2 million households on social housing waiting lists, there is a desperate need to build more social homes.
 
Ben Derbyshire, whose book Home Truths is a compendium of knowledge about housing and its delivery, cut his teeth as a young architect regenerating some of the estates that Boughton celebrates and doing so in full collaboration with residents long before ballots became a thing.
 
Ben went on to help build HTA into one of the most successful housing practices in the land as well as becoming President of the RIBA. As President, he set up the institute's Ethics and Sustainable Development Commission, endorsed by the Council, which ‘reasserted the Institute's unequivocal commitment to placing public interest, social purpose, ethics, and sustainable development at the heart of its activities.’ Although Home Truths ranges far and wide with sections on post-war corruption, the diminishing influence of architects, and the impact of Grenfell as well as sections on suburbs, semi-detached houses, long life loose fit, standardized components, and beauty, social purpose is the golden thread that ties the book together.
 
There’s a helpful guide for practice, with sections on the metrics of sustainable design, working with developers, and how to talk to clients. A must-read for anyone with an interest in housing design delivery.
 
Social purpose is not just a thread that runs through Flora Samuel's Housing for Hope and Well-being; it is its very essence. Although critical of our current problems with housing delivery, this is ultimately an optimistic book. Samuel has a go at the politicians: "the creation of a housing system for health and happiness can never be achieved under the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism," Samuel asserts. Which means there's not much hope with the present lot in power. Worse, we're rubbish at social cohesion. A dismal 11 per cent of the UK population will borrow things and exchange favours with neighbours – a number that sadly is steadily decreasing. But Samuel is hopeful that with the "right political breeze behind us, a new generation of ecologically minded young people working their way through the system and some community-based policies, we could just get there". Listen up, Keir!
 
But what is the right sort of housing? What is the future of high-rise housing? Examining the long-term social and financial impacts of residential towers is a long title, but it does what it says on the tin. While accepting that high-rise housing plays a prominent role in meeting housing demand, the authors highlight issues around the cost of managing and maintaining such homes. Post-Grenfell cladding problems have brought the perils of unknown and unprovided future costs into sharp relief. Worryingly there are no obligations on developers to ensure that buildings are specified and constructed to be easy to maintain and repair. The book proposes a raft of eminently sensible recommendations for actions by the government, local authorities, and developers.
 
Our buildings are not only assets but liabilities; the quality of what we build and how we maintain those buildings is paramount to the long-term health and well-being of people and the planet. These books provide an essential guide to that heritage, what we can do to improve it, and that housing for everyone should be social, not just for those on the bottom rung.
 
A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, John Boughton, RIBA Publishing 2023
Home Truths, Ben Derbyshire, Hatch Editions 2023
Housing for hope and wellbeing, Flora Samuel, Routledge 2023
What is the future of high rise? Examining the long-term social and financial impacts of residential towers, June Barnes, Andrew Beharrell, Dickon Robinson, Kath Scanlon, self-published 2023