Where I live in west London, the density is very high, comprising a mix of four-storey-plus basement terraces, eight-storey mansion blocks and two- or three-storey mews houses.
But there's a lot more to the area than housing. Private gardens are limited in number and size, but those of us without gardens either use our roofs or personalise our street frontages with plants; two of London's major parks are within 10 minutes' walk; kids play cricket and football in the street; there is a good parade of local, if expensive, shops and two supermarkets a few minutes away; and nearly all parking is on street.
This seems to me to be a thoroughly civilised model that we should be able to replicate, albeit in a more modern idiom and with a wider range of tenures. But somehow we seem not to be able to recapture the essence of good Victorian inner-city living.
Instead, we look to continental Europe for our models, even though there are enormous cultural differences that make it hard to transpose ideas into the English context. For instance, the shared courtyard surrounded by apartment blocks is a common model in France or Germany, yet in the UK I can think of few examples where this is really successful. We seem to prefer our amenity space on the outside. In the squares of Bloomsbury or Kensington, for instance, houses and gardens are separated by the road, creating visual and aural privacy and giving more space, light and air to the plants. But we no longer seem able to provide those wonderful public and semi-public spaces that offer more than adequate compensation for apartment living.
Perhaps we should be learning from the Chinese. My company has recently been working on a competition for a major new housing development in Jin Tan and we have been struck by the attention given to sunlight, open space, water and landscaping. Although densities are very high and apartments are the universal dwelling type, space standards are generous and every dwelling has a large balcony or roof terrace. Orientation of blocks has to be within a few degrees of south to be acceptable to buyers, which leads to rather repetitive layouts. But the quality of planting and standards of maintenance are much better than we would normally find in affordable housing in England.
In some ways, it reminded me of the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, designed by Powell & Moya in the 1950s and 1960s. This simple layout – repeated blocks with high-quality open spaces in between – has created a well-loved and well-cared-for estate, where apartments change hands at very high prices. Indeed, a couple of years ago, the Civic Trust named that scheme as the best project since its awards scheme began. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
Barry Munday is the chairman of PRP Architects
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