An end to dark satanic homes

Jonathan Glancey

We have got to start building homes worthy of our architectural history and heritage

10 October 2008

The majority of new British homes are horribly mean in terms of space. The old Parker Morris standards applied to postwar council housing were generous by comparison. Houses are homes, not units of space. To lift the spirit and ensure the minimum of everyday contentment, housing needs to be much more accommodating than it has become in recent years.

Along with building a considered number of homes, we need to refurbish as many properties as we can. Abolishing VAT on refurbishment would bring many generously planned homes back to life, especially those in old suburbs, towns and city centres.

This would also negate the need for “eco-towns” and other unsustainable proposals made by those for whom homes are playthings and patronising social experiments rather than emotional nests.

If I could add a suggestion, it would be quality of construction. Last week, I drove from Suffolk to mid-Lancashire, heading north-west through a string of towns I haven’t visited for years. I was shocked by the low standard of new housing (and town planning, another story) in towns such as Newark, Mansfield, Chesterfield and Stockport, and by the sheer meanness of the homes that, in the early years of the 21st century, should be so very much better.

Driving through the Peaks, though, I was enchanted by the stone houses and villages, and by the sheer quality and rightness of most of what I could see: quality buildings, a man-made landscape true to nature, a real sense of place. Most people living here in the past were hardly well off, yet their homes were modestly beautiful and thoroughly well made.

Too many of the new homes I saw on my trip looked as if they might have been bought off the shelf of some giant flatpack store and plonked down regardless of locale. This is not an argument in favour of turning the clock back. The British once had a genius for translating radical adventures in architecture — gothic, baroque, palladianism — into local landscapes. Look at Holkham Hall — Palladio as a Norfolkman — or Seaton Delaval — baroque goes Geordie.

We need to campaign for more dignified commonplace housing, and this would mean not just more space and more sensible taxes, but a commitment to building gracefully with high-quality materials old and new, whether for a cottage in the Peaks or a new block of low-rent flats in overlooked Midlands towns.