General Article Why Britain’s newbuilds are so ugly

Topic Selected: Housing Book Volume: 396

400m is earmarked to help build homes on brownfield sites and to redevelop empty high streets for housing.

 

By Richard Reed

A new housing estate is being built outside your town. What do you hope it looks like? Britain’s housing stock includes everything from stone cottages to the pair of new skyscrapers in Nine Elms, south London, connected to one another by a swimming pool “bridge” suspended 115ft in the air. Elsewhere we have neo-classical Georgian townhouses, arts and crafts-influenced semis, Victorian terraces, brutalist tower blocks, the boxy brick houses of modern suburban developments and much else. So which would you choose to drive past every day? Which would you choose to live in?

The Government has an inkling. “Poll after poll suggests we prefer the homes built before planning really began with the 1947 Planning Act, not those that came after,” Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said in a July speech to the Policy Exchange think tank. Weeks later, Nicholas Boys Smith, a ...

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