Let’s do for others what the Victorians did for us

A couple of walls have been removed, the ground floor is more or less out of commission. It is not, by any reasonable standards, a major piece of work. It should have taken about eight weeks; it will take about 16. Yet I have been struck by the psychological impact even such a minor disruption has on the whole family. It’s not just the noise and the all-pervasive dust, it has more to do with feeling that the house is part of your life and seeing it pulled apart provokes an emotional reaction.

In Britain we are sometimes accused of being too obsessed by property – Britons certainly buy their homes in greater number than many of their European counterparts, but we all want and need our own space, whatever the title deeds may say. In the 20th century we paid too little attention to the psychological impact of the built environment. We de-personalised much of our living space, creating structures with little or no regard for what enhances that sense of belonging and self worth.

In this new century we need to rediscover the link between individual and home, as well as that between individual and community. This is about more than making sure there are schools, community centres and health and leisure facilities, or counting the bedrooms and bathrooms. It is about reconnecting with how we feel.

The Victorians actually understood this link between home and self worth better than we often seem to. You can see this in the care and attention devoted to developments such as the cleverly designed working men’s houses known as the Colonies in Edinburgh, now inevitably gentrified. These were a distinctive form of terraced housing created by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Society. The homes have their own front doors and are set in cul-de-sacs where children can play safely.

It would be ludicrous romanticism to praise the Glasgow tenement in the same manner. Like the back-to-back homes in England they were damp, overcrowded squalid places which played a major role in killing off many of their residents at a young age. Nevertheless there was, alongside the drunkenness and violence, a sense of community and comradeship in many such working class areas.

Some houses built 300 years ago work better than those built 30 years ago. Builders and housing providers must create better housing in this century than we did in the last

Proof of this is beautifully illustrated by a sanitary inspector’s evidence to a Royal Commission in 1917 – to control overcrowding, the city authorities employed teams of men to make random checks on the numbers living in each tenement flat. But according to the inspector their efforts were often to no avail. “In some streets in Glasgow,” he wrote, “they are so friendly with one and other, that, whenever the night men appear at one end of the street the word passes round right through the street, and by the time they get to the closes [doorways] further on, the inmates have all got up and are dressed. Sometimes the people have got into presses, into barrels and into enclosed places above the bed – sometimes on the roof, hiding behind the chimney head.”

This united front owed a lot to shared adversity, but it also owed something to the scale of the buildings and the shared street on which children played and neighbours conversed. When, later in the 20th century, they moved such inner-city communities to large concrete jungles, something was lost.

So as we dash once again for housing growth are we pausing long enough to think through the implications of what we are creating? What will the inheritance be of what we are building now? Futurology is an uncertain science and we can only guess at how people will want to live in 2055, and yet we know that some homes built 300 years ago work better than those built 30 years ago. Builders and housing providers now have a responsibility to create better housing this century than we did in the last.

Today we understand more. There are fewer excuses for us getting it wrong.