Why is housing in the U.K. so shit?

I accept , what you’re saying, still, there’re nicely designed ones too. Good planning can make wonders. Let’s not forget The Barbican estate is very much wanted place to live. It has been well designed and built out of good quality materials from the start, though. I understand not every area can be The Barbican. But it doesn’t need to be Crappy Estates either.

Also, many things now are built to last around 25 years, good luck when it comes to selling your property.

Kitchen in the living room. Sofa 1.5m from the cooker. Why?

There has been a tradition of flat-dwelling in Scotland. Family member has just bought a huge beautiful 1830s 4 bedroom flat with ornate plasterwork, marble fireplaces and oak floorboards in central Edinburgh. They chose this over a new-build and it's a lovely family home. No garden to speak of but French windows lead to an enormous private shared drying green which is a safe place for children to play.
It's also the mindset in the UK that prefers a detached house (no matter how small) sitting in a garden (no matter how small) and somewhere to park a couple of cars. I've seen really nice developments in Scandinavia and Holland with variously sized houses from starter homes upwards built round central play and leisure areas. Cars not allowed and had to be parked on the periphery,although there were access points for unloading shopping etc. Wouldn't be acceptable here.

It’s a shame housing is now so poorly built here. No thoughts given at all where people could store suitcases etc or there’s a radiator placed on one wall where you could have placed a wardrobe and so on.

When I lived in Finland, I had a tiny studio flat but every household also had a dedicated storage space in the attic where you were able to store bulkier items. There was also a dedicated room to hang out your sheets and duvet covers to dry.

Recently I also stayed in another Finnish apartment, only for a few nights but it was so well thought out despite being a studio flat. Good space for double bed, sofa, wardrobes, small table & chairs, separate small kitchen corner but it had floor to ceiling cupboards as well as a display cabinet for your fancy wine glasses. It had more kitchen storage than our previous 5 bed house here in the UK!

The flat also had a large balcony and wet room including sauna. It was so nice but it wasn’t a luxury development, just a bog standard apartment building.

Developers min-maxing the build costs and ROI.

A status obsession with detached houses, even if there's barely room to squeeze between them. Snobbery prejudice against terraced houses and flats.

Measuring size/status by bedroom count regardless of the size of the bedrooms.

Something weird about not wanting bums to share toilets.

Gaming the building standards on insulation and environmental performance to produce airless boxes with small windows and no soundproofing.

Developments that are too big and are undertaken by only one developer. When you look at early-C20 Edwardian and Georgian streets you realise that they were developed by lots of small developers each building a handful of properties all with subtle differences in size, layout and style. Yet they can all work together and look cohesive, without being the identikit shoeboxes that a modern estate comprises.

We have looked at a a few new build showhouses lately. The main takeaway is where on earth do they put their clothes??? No wardrobes, no space for a chest of drawers..bizarre!

Flats do have their place -have owned two and it depends on your stage of life. Look at the US where young professionals can live their apartment life before (or instead of) the family forever home. And makes sense for older people too -who needs the hassle of gardens and roof repairs when you are old?

And soundproofing!

Modern British housebuilders are crap. No sense of anything except cram as many as you can into a given space and as for the idea of actually designing a house forget it. All that matters is it is built as cheaply as possible.

I have never lived in a house built after 1939 and, please God, I never will.

Thatcher. Anything shit and to do with housing is down to Thatcher IMHO. I'm not even a Tory hater per se. But she fucked housing.

Other countries have higher population density and they still have bigger houses.

The Netherlands and Belgium for example.

I think its a cultural thing. Absolutely no reason we couldn’t decide to build large family sized flats without stupid leasehold rules, we used to in fact.

In our peasant mentality we have passively accepted crap housing, as long as it means one day you might own a house and make loads of money from it.

Well I mean, new towns are in the Labour manifesto. But the devil's in the detail, and I haven't read it yet. It's entirely possible for newts and new towns to coexist, if you care enough to leave areas for wildlife. Actually, one of the only good things the Tories did was to introduce the Biodiversity Net Gain legislation. A planning ecologist I was talking to the other day says he reckons that they're too incompetent to understand what an effective piece of legislation they've accidentally enacted! 😆

Not enough land, too many people ( we can’t house our own never mind immigrants), people want a multi bathroom house instead of a sensible sized bedroom house.

@YeahWhateverGoAway

I agree with the comment though that if people keep buying them then they will keep building them.

People buy them because they have no choice. "Nicer" homes are beyond their finances and the cheaper homes get snapped up so quickly that they're almost impossible to buy. The whole housing market is screwed.

Flats are rarely well designed in the UK though. Noisy and cramped. Every time the developers have to choose between squeezing in 20 decent flats or 30 crap ones they are always going to go for the highest number because everything sells.
I did read that flats are not keeping their values recently though. Too much nervousness about service charges, cladding, leases. I would never buy a flat.

I suppose the short answer is that developers could not give a shiny shit about the quality of the housing they throw up, and the Tory government has allowed them to continue in this, probably because many of the big developers are major party donors.

It's all crowded around existing infrastructure because neither successive governments nor property developers want to invest in new infrastructure such as power supplies, roads, pipework, etc., for the long distances required to build far outside existing towns and cities. That's why we have ribbon developments alongside existing roads and new build housing estates right on the edge of towns/cities. What we need are "new towns" with all the proper NEW infrastructure, but no modern government is going to commit to the billions that it would cost, not to mention all the opposition from Nimbys and newt lovers!

I wish homes were sold by £/area as they are in the US. I think the average UK house is about 1200 ft square. That could be a well designed 2 bedroom flat with garage in a block or a modern 4 bed, 2.5 bath new build.
It takes an experienced buyer to spot layout problems and storage issues. The 4 bed boxes with en suites appeal more.

Indeed! I've just been on another thread about gardens with lots of people saying how much they dislike having one- so why have one then?!

I lived in a flat in Switzerland. We had a huge walk-in cellar attached to the underground car-park, which gave us adequate storage for all our seasonal things and was also a bomb shelter in case WW3 broke out. I don’t think we need to build bomb shelters, but if all new flats both private and social had underground parking and storage, electric vehicle chargers down there too, it would be great - low land footprint, efficient shared use of space and resources.

What stops the UK from doing things well is extractive capitalism.

I agree.

Ive got a 2 bed 1930s ex council house. The rooms are huge, the walls are solid, when I went house hunting with my friend, 3/4 bed houses had half the living room space that my place has. And you would assume that it would be bigger families in there rather than what's in my place.

I agree with the comment though that if people keep buying them then they will keep building them.

I cannot comprehend the lack of storage in flats. Are people not supposed to have Christmas decorations? Camping gear? Bikes? A hoover?

Profiteering, corruption and Tories.

Same here. My grandmother lives in a three bed flat in continental Europe which they bought in the 60s and had three generations under one roof at one point. My bedroom is the smallest room in the flat, literally referred to as a "small room". It is 7m2. In contrast, the smallest room in our three bed house in England is 2.7m2 and they have the audacity to call it a bedroom! We can barely squeeze a single bed and a night stand there. Wardrobe? Forget about it. Our master bedroom is 6m2...
But people are falling over themselves to buy houses with an extra "bedroom" and a garden when a well-designed flat facing a park is 100% more suitable for a family.