Posts Tagged Housing market
RIBA condemns ‘shameful shoe box homes’ now built in Britain
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2011
Architects' report claims new three-bedroom houses are being constructed 8% smaller than guidelines advise
The Royal Institute of British Architects has criticised the "shoe box" sized homes now being built in Britain. Ahead of its inquiry into housing needs, RIBA claims that many of the new homes being constructed are too small for the number of people expected to live in them.
The institute says the average new three-bedroom house is 8% smaller than the recently adopted standard for homes in London, with floor space of 88 sq metres (947 sq ft). That is 8 sq metres short of the recommended space, the equivalent of a single bedroom.
One-bedroom properties, at an average of 46 sq metres, are 4 sq metres short of the recommended size, it adds in its recent report The Case for Space.
RIBA suggests that potential buyers are being short-changed and fobbed off with "shameful shoe box homes".
The London Housing Design Guide, adopted in the past year or so, lays down, among other features, minimum space standards for new properties, based on factors such as the average quantity of furnishings as well as number of occupants.
The RIBA inquiry, to be conducted by Sir John Banham, a former director-general of the CBI and former chair of the Tarmac group, is expected to report by next summer and will feed into the government's proposals to alter planning rules. The inquiry will seek the views of architects, builders, planners and purchasers.
Banham said: ""There are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed to ensure we have more of the right kind of affordable homes in villages, towns and cities … new thinking and financing approaches will be needed."
Anna Scott-Marshall, RIBA's head of policy, said that the organisation's Future Homes Commission would address issues such as housing costs, building quality, design and layout, including factors such as the amount of light in a property.
"We need to look into affordability and the mechanisms that need to be in place to enable people to buy," she said.
The scariest building in Britain?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain? As Halloween looms, Jonathan Glancey visits the school adored by film-makers that's being turned into luxury flats
When the film-maker Merlin Ward was scouting for a location for his 2003 film Out of Bounds, a psychological thriller set in an eerie boarding school where bells toll ominously and a chill wind rarely stops moaning, he could scarcely believe his luck when he was shown the Royal Masonic School for Boys, a hulking structure built in 1903, in the Hertfordshire town of Bushey.
"It wasn't just that this vast Edwardian school was conveniently close to London and the film studios around Elstree," says Ward. "It was the gloriously spooky entrance tower and the sense of foreboding evoked by the surrounding buildings: cavernous, ominous, Halloween-like. I couldn't have asked for a more unnerving setting."
Nor could other directors. When Ward began filming in 2001, four other production companies were busy there. In fact, before it closed in 1977, the school had been a popular setting for murder mysteries and thrillers, including the cult 1960s TV show The Avengers. Since then, it has featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Harry Potter movies, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and 1985's Lifeforce, in which a shuttle returns to Earth carrying space vampires. Scarier still, it even served as a law court in EastEnders.
When the school, surely a contender for Britain's scariest building, closed, its next incarnation was as an international college, before becoming the property of Comer Homes, a company founded by Brian and Luke Comer, two plasterers from County Galway. They have redeveloped some great abandoned buildings, including Colney Hatch Asylum in London, which they rechristened Princess Park Manor, after turning it into sumptuous flats complete with gyms, swimming pools, spa facilities and pretty much every luxury expected by their clients, who include high-earning footballers. They have now repeated the trick with the Royal Masonic School – or Royal Connaught Park, to give it its new name.
"It's sad in a way that it's been redeveloped," says Ward. "The school was such a brilliant studio. It was highly atmospheric. We camped out there during our shoot. It was cold and forbidding. We never saw a ghost, sadly, not even in the mortuary." The mortuary? "Oh yes – the boys who came here as orphans from the Boer and great war would sometimes die of flu and TB, if not from beatings. It seems odd today, but there was nothing unusual about a school mortuary then."
Comer Homes employed architects ADP, specialists in such work, to exorcise the Halloween spirit from the old school. "I've spent more years involved with Royal Connaught Park than any schoolboy did," says project architect Catherine Yeatman, who, with Comer's Basil Nwalema, is taking me on a tour. "Planning began in 1998, and it has evolved gradually ever since."
There are 157 flats in the old buildings, with 200 to come in new residencies hidden in a dip in the extensive grounds. The cheapest flat, which has just one bedroom but could never be described as cramped, costs £369,000; the most expensive, a three-bedroom penthouse, is £2.5m.
"It's hardly a fast-buck project," says Nwalema, "but this type of complex – big and beautifully built, at a time when British architecture was exceptionally well crafted – makes for special homes today."
As a mournful drizzle sets in, we start off from under the clock tower. Originally built by freemasons for sons of impoverished and bereaved families, the white-stone-and-red-brick complex was designed by the firm Gordon, Lowther and Gunton. Their approach was, to say the least, eclectic. For their schools, chapels and office blocks, the architects employed a pageant of styles drawn from the spectrum of British history: the daunting tower alone reads like an encyclopedia of gothic design.
Their work could be epic, though. It takes an age to walk from the tower to the enormous dining hall at the far end of a cloistered quadrangle. Almost too large for the eye to take in, the hall, which will be used for big social events, boasts dark timber panelling, exposed beams and lofty gothic windows that pour light into an echoing cavern. I'm assuming it wasn't much fun here. A record of school life written by Geoff Kirby, a pupil from 1949 to 1953, is divided into sections entitled: I Enter Hell, The Curse of Games, Censored Letters and Beaten Bare Buttocks, and My Eyes Are Ruined By Incompetent Medical Staff.
Today, a glazed section in the dining hall floor gives a glimpse of the luxurious underground swimming pool. Its blue waters look enticing: for a happy moment, all the daunting school architecture is warmed and tamed. Yet if the old dining hall, with its horribly long echo, feels in any way sinister, the unrestored assembly hall is the stuff of a Hammer House of Horror nightmare. Yeatman tells me that this appallingly large room will eventually be conjured into five four-storey flats, each with a pair of cathedral-sized windows.
We move on to imposing towers and wings, now flats, some big enough to house an entire football team. There is an impressive gym with gothic decor; and that swimming pool, underground yet ingeniously daylit; as well as other rooms due to be turned into club rooms and restaurants. A magnificent kitchen block, with clerestory windows, is to be made into further flats boasting impressive top-lit, oak-beamed roofs.
"One of the good things," says Yeatman, "is that we've been able to demolish poor ancillary buildings that grew up alongside the walls of the Edwardian school like architectural fungus. Now the school has been turned into homes, you see it more as it was [originally]. We've also been able to replace black-pitch yards and playgrounds with gardens."
"And," says Nwalema, "the birds have returned, along with a lot of wildlife." Just as I'm about to suggest bats, rats and giant spiders – if not vampires and zombies – a murder of crows alight on a gothic gable and arrange themselves into a line, cawing menacingly.
There are still a large number of buildings like this in Britain: schools, hospitals, asylums dating from a time when Britain was able to indulge in architecture that was the stuff of architects' dreams and gothic horror nightmares. While it is good to see them returning to favour, their ghosts and demons expelled, it does pose a question: where will directors of the future go to find places as scary and Halloween-like as the Royal Masonic School for Boys?
‘Garden grabbing’ eases the pressure on greenfield sites
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 21, 2010
This attack on brownfield development means more green fields will be built on
Michael White draws attention to the government's attack on "garden grabbing" brownfield development (Prisons, power stations and social housing – just not in my backyard, 10 June).
He is right to point out the links to localism, populism and nimbyism: "the empowerment of sharp-elbowed locals to prevent developments they don't like". But why would a minor bit of middle-class rabble-rousing find a place in the incoming government's first legislative programme?
White appears to assume that the issue is about the physical capacity of "old industrial land [and] gardens from past eras" to accommodate enough new homes. In fact, the key question is the right balance between extending the city and renewing its existing fabric. During the Thatcher and Major years, I was responsible for planning and transport policy in Newcastle and Birmingham. I coined the term "brownfield" (in 1976) to express the tension between urban renewal and greenfield development in the dynamics of urban change. Brownfield development, in this view, is like cell replacement in the body, an essential part of the continuing health of a city.
White rightly draws attention to how Prescott's brownfield strategy "eased the pressure on green belt and greenfield sites". However, by focusing simply on numbers of new houses, he (like Prescott) underplays the importance of the strategy to housing choices more generally. In practice, only 10% of housing transactions each year are new homes – and most of these are built within existing neighbourhoods and on brownfield land. As Prescott recognised, there is not a finite stock of brownfield sites; with good local planning brownfield supply is constantly being replenished.
White implies that the current furore is just the perennial conflict of nimbyism with developers. But there is a bigger issue: rapidly rising house prices from the mid-90s were blamed by the 2004 Barker Report on an inadequate supply of new homes, and this in turn on lack of land. Developers took the opportunity to attack Prescott's emphasis on brownfield because greenfield land is easier and more profitable to develop.
We can now see that house prices were a bubble pumped up with hot money and unreal expectations of capital gains. But the last government did a policy U-turn, persuaded by developers that more greenfield land would mean more new houses and (eventually) lower prices – and that higher profitability would provide infrastructure, services and social housing. As a result, twice or three times as much greenfield land is now in the pipeline.
With nimby constituents, Conservatives and Lib Dems generally opposed these increases. How ironic, then, that the coalition's attack on brownfield development inevitably means more green fields will go under the bulldozer – even as developers are backing out of the planning gains that justified this.
However much (or little) new housing the market will now bear, almost all will henceforth be on greenfield land, with dire consequences for cities, neighbourhoods, social fabric, transport demands, and most people's housing needs.
• This article was amended on 21 June 2010. Owing to an editing change, a line in the original said: "As Prescott recognised, there is a finite stock of brownfield sites". This has been corrected
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