#30 - Jonathan Glancey

Theory of Architecture

Jonathan Glancey discusses the decline of quality in British mass housing, contrasting modern profit-driven developments with historical exa

Key takeaways

• Modern mass housing is often treated as a disposable product for maximum profit rather than architecture or community.
• The 1980 Housing Act effectively removed the influence of local authority architects, contributing to lower standards.

Main topics

• British housebuilding
• Urban planning

Notable quotes

Housing in Britain is on the whole dreadful.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for developers, governments, an

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) How would you summarise the state of British house building today? Speaker 1 (0:06) How would I summarise the state of British house building today, Bruce? It's obviously a complicated mess. At the very top end of British house building, whether it's by traditional house builders or by very skilled architects for very wealthy or intelligent clients, there's good stuff. And there always will be, always has been. What I was interested in writing about is something that's obsessed me and many of us for years, which is this thing, this thing called housing, right, with the ING on the end, which is sort of by definition, it's the mass market, it's the mass houses, the homes built for everybody that can't afford really to have an architecture, to give them a beautiful house. or hasn't got the money to buy a beautiful house on Bothergrave Square or a country estate or a place in France or Florida. So housing in Britain is on the whole dreadful. And I wanted to investigate that and really think it through, given that it's something in this country we have been able to do. Housing. this mass housing. It doesn't really start to the industrial revolution and it got off to a pretty bad start. You know, all those back-to-backs built in Leeds and Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and so on. They're not brilliant. They weren't nice then. They aren't nice now. And most of them have gone, of course, although Leeds City kept building them to 1932, which is interesting. But aside from that, we've had a few golden moments in mass housing and they're quite long. time ago, and partly because basically council housing, local authority housing, was abolished in 1980, effectively, by Mrs Thatcher's Housing Act, for better or worse, whatever people think. But it did take away the local authority architects' departments, which at their best, at their best, Bruce, this is the thing, it's absolutely key, and I'm only interested in trying to argue for the best for people by examining the worst. At their best, would produce brilliant housing. The London County Council. In the 1890s, 1900s, a shining example of a progressive, intelligent council with high-minded people and brilliant young architects working for it, who could certainly draw and certainly knew how bricks should be put together with their workforce, achieved wonders. And that is the standard we had and we've lost in mass housing. That's city housing. And the other thing before you ask... push me is the other housing is rural housing distinct from city housing and that's the one I think that drives many people bonkers today because most rural housing or housing built on what's increasingly on the green belt or what the current government likes to call the grey belt is done by big house building companies for maximum profit for least input and It's deeply cynical and it's just spread out in formless ways across the countryside. And if it's not done in that spirit, it's done by governments and their agencies who spout stuff about creating garden villages, green cities, new towns, which are basically forms of outer suburban sprawl in a slightly more contained way, but surrounded by hot air and jargon. Speaker 2 (3:43) Yes, no, it does make me great slightly when you hear politicians saying the new Garden City and so and so, and you know they have no idea what they're talking about. Speaker 1 (3:51) Well, you've never actually no idea because I mean, the first Garden City, you know, the very first was Letchworth. Now, it's actually an interesting place. It's over the many decades since it opened, it's sort of lost its real purpose, I suppose, and become more of an outer London. a glorious suburb in a way, but it still has something of its original intent. And what it had, and this is the whole point of the book really, and what I argue for and build up to this argument, this rant, which I hope an informed rant, Bruce, and a fair one in many ways, I hope, but it says, Letchworth unlike so many of these new towns being built now, supposedly new towns, supposedly garden village, garden towns, had a purpose. And you can't just build, and that's what the book really tries to say right the way through, you can't just build houses, housing, and therefore you've solved the problem of how we live and where we live. Places, towns, villages have always emerged. for a reason, because they have a purpose to exist. And to its great credit, Letchworth did. It had proper factories and businesses from the beginning, real ones. I mean, absolutely fascinating ones too. The book talks about those for quite a few pages because they're just so wonderful. The high-minded, interesting, intelligent entrepreneurs came there feeling relaxed about it and had an intelligent workforce. Speaker 1 (5:29) high-minded, civic-minded people that wanted to do well. And they created a little town, a city, garden city, where how and why people worked was part and parcel of the way the town was organised and the way it looked. And that's what we don't have today. So we're just building all over the place, whether in towns, cities, villages. green belts, this strange thing called the grey belts, which doesn't exist, of course, it's just the green belts with a politician's name attached because they want developers in there quick to build lots of bad housing. But we need always a purpose to build. Speaker 2 (6:09) Yeah, we should say to people who are listening that the book we're talking about is your new book, this one here. Where We Live. Where We Live, The Fractured Art of British House Building and How to Build the Homes We Need. Which is an excellent reader, which I've just finished. Very good. Thank you. Speaker 2 (6:24) I'm interested in the difference in financial model of modern developers and how they operate, with which I'm fairly familiar because I'm an SME developer myself, versus the way that it was done previously, not necessarily by local authorities, but more so by the sort of the bigger... private developers, whether that's businesses or others, perhaps Speaker 1 (6:52) slightly Speaker 2 (6:53) earlier in the Victorian period and the 18th century. Can you sort of talk about how it is that the model differs and whether or not there are any learnings or anything that's applicable that we could do today? Speaker 1 (7:05) Certainly. I think the model today, if such a fancy word could be used, it's really a bit of a free-for-all that most, the majority of developers and the majority of house builders working with those developers are there to make and sell a product. And it really is a product. And that's these houses. And they want to build them just like any other, many products in the mass market, as cheap as they can to whatever standard is required, technically, legally, structurally and so on, and to make us maximum profit. either for themselves as a private company or for their shareholders. And they do indeed, by the way, make, as you all know, Britain's house builders do well. The profits, margins for the big house builders are high. So it's a good business to be in if you just want to be in business. But what you're building is not architecture. You're not building communities in the sense of real places. you're just building a product that can be sold. And then you can involve your marketing people and you can create websites and brochures. Singing the praises of these places and making them sound like paradise, earthly paradises, when of course they're anything but. That is one clear-cut and straightforward, simple model. Making money as Speaker 2 (8:28) best Speaker 1 (8:29) you can, as quickly as you can, as profitably as you can. I think the great difference when we look back to some of the... very interesting housing schemes of the 19th century, aside from the dreadful back-to-back houses in industrial cities, there were two sets of people or organisations, as it were, that made things happen to their credit. One were just very, very high-minded entrepreneurs. who had good intentions generally in life. We can look at the cabras, the round trees, the friars, those people who had that sort of calm, quiet, religious, moral belief. We can look at certain cities where Speaker 1 (9:22) There were clearly, there's clearly an intent to build well and that anybody coming in to make money out of building houses had to do it to a certain standard or indeed to patent books. Or if you look at the London squares going up from the City of London across what's now the West End, try and imagine if it was in about 1850, 1840. Absolutely terrific. Garden Square after City Garden Square, beautifully planned and yet all built by... nearly all of them built by house builders or by, you know, grand or grand landowners, of course, that own that land. But then, you know, giving that work out to people that could get buildings built quickly and efficiently, but to a standard because they themselves at that time in a city like London, the aristocratic families, the grand, what we now the upper middle class of today lived there themselves. I mean, they had their own places in the countryside, but they also lived in, you know, what's in London, the West End, all around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Mayfair. And so they didn't want to live in. rough looking places and they had a sense of great culture. People brought up in the era of the Grand Tour and all that so they were well aware of high standards of architecture and design and culture and literature even if they could be quite yobbish themselves some of them but they knew this is what you did. They understood the sense of decorum and when you built you built according to a set of social and civic rules and And that's a great thing. So it doesn't matter if you yourself personally were a greedy sod and a drunken swine and whatever else. But you knew how to behave when you came to build the city. And that's so important. So you've got these two types of people working through the 19th century. More towards the end of the 19th century, we see these great entrepreneur patrons. as I like the cabras and so on, like Titus Salter. They really, they just wanted to do the best for people. And it's very interesting that when we go and visit those places now, if you go, you know, writing this book, I'd travel massively around the country again, just re-looking at places. And you go to something like Bourneville and it's so utterly charming. And, you know, it's become a place where people will virtually fight to be able to... buy one of the houses there. They're really nice. And most of all, they're terribly well built. So those grand... Speaker 1 (12:05) this grand philanthropic businessman. They just believed in doing things well. They didn't really know how to do anything other than do things well. And that's something I think we really need to learn. And by the way, Bruce, there's one other, for me, absolutely key type of development in the 19th century, which is the sort of stuff I'm really fascinated by, which is the pure industrial developments that turned out to be really... good in terms of planning and building and there I'm thinking which you might guess of the key railway towns and I'm absolutely at Swindon crew they were so well done and if you go to Swindon today Swindon is I'm sorry to insult people living in Swindon but it's sprawled into a it's a mess physically it's a shame It lost its heart with its industry, which is basically the railway industry and locomotive building. But what survives of the Great Western Railway workers' housing is where you'd want to live if you were posted to Swindon, and they're much in demand, and quite rightly. They're lovely, but they're the workers' cottages. That's the standard. They did it at Crewe, they did it at Swindon. And more than that, Swindon was built up with... The whole point of intelligent workforce coming to a pure, genuine greenfield site. So what was Swindon before the Great Western Railway? It's a tiny village, farms all around. The Great Western Railway wanted its locomotive works there and its maintenance depots there. It built them and it built them to the highest standards, but it had to have intelligent workforce for the new. mechanical industries. So what did it build? It built a mechanics institute. What does a mechanics institute look like? Like a gothic church. So you've replaced the church historically in terms of teaching. And the young boys that went to that institute could have been farmhands' sons. And in 10, 15, 20 years, they could be a senior engineer working at the highest level. in the world. And you can imagine that makes a great town. And that, by the way, you think, oh, well, that's such a long time ago. But in 1948, when Nye Bevan in the House of Commons announced the official opening of the National Health Service, which was a Churchill Coalition wartime initiative, but when he announced it officially in the House of Commons, he said, we knew how to do it. There was a national, it was already there. The Great Western Railway had introduced it, which indeed they had. They created the equivalent of a National Health Service within Swindon itself. And that was indeed a model, one model, key model for the National Health Service in its early days and at its best. So you can see there is, I suppose what I'm saying is that there were... There's different ways of building to a high standard. One, you can be high-minded and do it really well, like the railways and like those great other industrialists, the religiously-minded industrialists. Or you did it because it was a matter of civic decorum. You know, you couldn't do, you're going to build Edinburgh, a new town, you're going to build Bath, you're going to build London, or many other towns and cities around England at the time. You just did it well according to a set of rules. Speaker 2 (15:34) Yeah, it's... I love that idea and I would love the world to work like that now. I'm just trying to imagine what would incentivise a bunch of Barrett housing executives to have that mindset on housing these days. Speaker 1 (15:52) I don't think, at the moment, I don't think you can. I think you'd have to go right back to basics. At the end of the book, I call for a kind of a doomsday of Britain, a new doomsday book. being written looking at the whole country in terms of what land there is, how it's used, and what land is and could be available to build housing. But for me, To build a house, to build any building, you know, it's a big thing to do. I don't think it should just be a simple cheap bit of junk chucked up. Every building should be thought through carefully. We talk so much or we're talked at so much these days about, you know, sustainability, environmental responsibility, blah, blah, blah. Well, but we don't do it with all this mass housing, quite the opposite. So it's about time we did. But the key