Why are English flats so shit?

[OneMentalBastard]

For a fairly populous country short on space, you'd think one thing we could get right is apartments. But, there are problems at every turn. The entire ownership model is all to cock, for starters. Freehold, management company charges, restrictive covenants on self employed/small business owners - all completely patrician and feudal.

Then there's the design of the damn things. Quite aside from deathly cladding, half of them don't have balconies and precious little outside space, so you're just shut in a box. The new ones don't even have bloody walls - who the fuck wants open plan living? Apart from those 23 year old wankers at Foxtons whose only possessions are a futon and a smart speaker? Where is a person supposed to put their bookcases, in a flat with no walls? Who wants their washing to smell of cooking? (Which it will, in a flat with no balcony, no walls and no space in the "kitchen" (aka a lino floored corner of the living room with a sink and two cupboards) for a separate tumble dryer.)

And what's with this "low car/no car" development craze? Our public transport outside of London is shit. Anyone with a job or any kind of regular commitment (ie most adults) is going to have a car. If they can't park it outside their flat they're just going to rack up council charges to park it elsewhere.

Apartment living should be, and in other countries is, the smart choice for people who want a hassle free low maintenance urban life, but instead it's an almost sure path to penury, inconvenience and tripping over stew-scented clothes horses in the living room.

Why can't we get it right?

With you 1000%.

Ds is living in a nice flat with friends, for a price. A huge rental only development that someone is making truly extraordinary amounts of money on. But the flat is great, well designed with plenty of space, well thought out utilities and storage, a lift, and a good balcony. You can have decent housing if you pay through the nose for it.

i often wonder if any of the designers and builders of most flats would ever deign to live in them.

They build them as you describe to keep their costs down and maximise their profit

We used to be able to build flats. Look at the mansion blocks in places like Maida Vale- elegant, nice to live in, decent housing density. These were flats built for ordinary people not toffs.

So many parts of our economy are out of whack- wages too low compared to house prices and building costs, so a flat like this now costs over £1m.

Some are nice, there's some spacious ones (with lots of walls) at quite good prices round here. Agree with you about the parking. I used to like the tenements in Glasgow, and quite liked the high rises when I was little, though I understand why a lot of people have problems with them now.

YANBU

I have lived in tenement flats in Glasgow and Edinburgh and would again. Sturdy, spacious and lots of storage! New build flats anywhere in the UK are to be avoided imo.

Poor governance, greed and short-termism.

We seem to build flats around what maximises fast profits for developers and investors, rather than what the people who will be living in them might actually need or want. To add insult to injury, many developments receive support through taxpayer-backed loans or other public funding. The government is pretty shit at insisting on better value for tenants when it is handing over workers’ hard-earned taxes to developers.

Although I’m sure someone will be along shortly to explain how it’s all fault of pensioners.

What do Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland do differently OP?

My guess would be she only had experience with English flats and doesn't know if the rest of the UK is the same or not? I do think people can't win sometimes, if they generalise and say " the UK" but all the examples are English based someone will come on to scold them that England is not the UK and shouldn't be used interchangeably. If they specify "England" someone will ask why they aren't including Scotland/Wales.

I think flats in other countries are also suited for small families to live in. I think it's a bit circular because if people are used to nice flats for families there is more demand for family flats and so they build more. If raising a family in a pokey little flat feels like hell there is less demand and so all flats are built for Foxton 23 year olds or as an "investment" not to be lived in.
More generally I think there is a real dearth of the sort of starter homes that a couple might buy with space for a child if needed. It could be a flat or a small house but they just aren't there in enough number. It's either really expensive fancy apartments for super rich, big expensive houses or shitty flats.

I can answer the "where do bookcases go" puzzle though. You can break up open plan rooms with freestanding bookcases or the IKEA Kallax shelves so long as one end is bolted on to the wall. This solving two problems at once. That only works if the "open plan" area isn't tiny though

I think there's a massive difference between old and new - many of the old mansion blocks and tenement buildings are great spaces, with beautiful features and so much storage. But I also think there's a snobbery - definitely English, but even so I'd say UK-wide that means some people feel flats are inferior to houses. And in fairness, some of the new ones are, but it goes back longer and deeper than that. But having lived in Asia for years, I love apartments, and they are brilliant for families: toddlers are all on the same level, and even when they grow up to be grumpy teenagers, they can slope off to their rooms, but being on the same level somehow makes them less isolated. Even now, my arthritic old dog can mooch around everyone's bedrooms at night, finding a comfortable spot. I'm moving back to the UK next summer, and one of the things I'm having to get my head round is the idea of stairs!

Probably because if you have a space in a city to build a block of flats it is in the financial interest of the developer to build 20 flats instead of 12. If we don't have a basic standard on square footage for each time of room they will be shit. Nobody builds flats for families, but they still have to live in them. They build them for older people who don't want to downsize and move into them or investors.

They were oppressed by the English and so had many many more tenement flats which were, at least, better built and meant for families.

I really don't understand the open plan kitchen. In council homes if you took your kitchen door of you were told to put it back on due to risk of fire. But now its all open. Theres no buying time if theres a fire because theres no walls. Its difficult for parents with small children.

Eh? I'm not sure what "English oppression" had to do with tenements and housing policy.

@20thCenturyFecks are you not? Perhaps read some history?

Plus, if the Glasgow tenements are so brilliant, why did I have to spend part of my Geography lessons learning about all of the problems these blocks did (and do) suffer from? They were a standard case study in the old Scottish curriculum of the problems of these types of blocks, building them from porous sandstone and subsequent deterioration, the damp issues etc.

I once lived in a wonderful Italian apartment. Parking and storage units in the basement, 4 flats a floor, wraparound balconies and a shared garden. My friend in Germany had something similar. There are so many good examples of great apartment living from round the world that tiny box modern apartments seem like the nasty tower block slums in waiting.

My friend's daughter a while ago rented a two bed flat with an en suite to the main bedroom. It was a small flat and she said if she'd had a choice, she would rather have had a slightly bigger lounge or kitchen than an en suite as there was no extra storage anywhere.

I had a converted Victorian three storey house flat, ground floor. It was lovely, really large private garden, solid walls throughout and decent sized rooms. I think if you are going after a flat and want better build quality and room sizes, a conversion is probably the answer.

I live in a flat built in the mid 90s. It’s not too bad in terms of size and I do have walls, but the kitchen and living room are open plan so cooking smells are problematic, the plumbing for the washing machine mean it’s close to the sofa so I can’t hear a thing when it’s on, and I have one tiny hallway storage cupboard in the entire flat. The access to my front door is so narrow I can barely walk along it carrying a shopping bag which made furniture buying a nightmare.

We do have a communal garden but there’s no seating and we aren’t allowed to put our own chairs out there so it’s pretty but useless. And we get charged a fortune for grounds maintenance.

Plentiful car parking but there’s no barrier so we get the local drug dealers using it to ply their trade, it’s also used to dump the odd stolen car until the number plates can be changed and it gets shipped off. Police aren’t interested as it’s considered private property.

When I go abroad on holiday and have a spacious flat with a balcony, gated parking, good storage and a separate utility room - all of which seem to be fairly standard - I wonder why we can’t have the same over here.

And don’t get me started on the management fees which appear to be unregulated and you just have to pay up or lose your home.

Our public transport outside of London is shit. Anyone with a job or any kind of regular commitment (ie most adults) is going to have a car.

👋 This adult lives hundreds of miles from London, doesn't own a car and manages just fine.

23 year old wankers at Foxtons whose only possessions are a futon and a smart speaker

I couldn't agree with you more OP. We just do housing very badly in the UK full stop tbh, especially flats and/or renting. Other countries people are happy to rent and live in flats, because they have rights and stability and the flat is suitable for a family. Here the main beneficiaries are developers making a profit instead of provision of suitable housing for the population, because everyone needs somewhere to live. It can all be traced back to Bloody Thatcher I believe.

On balconies, if flats do have them, there's often rules that basically mean you're not allowed to use it for anything useful, which people blindly follow instead of getting angry and exercising their right to quiet enjoyment of their homes.

Many people's lives in terms of work, access to services, leisure and socialisation would be much much smaller without a car.

Modern flats are appalling. I was looking to rent one about 15 years ago and they were all badly designed postage stamps. In the end I managed to find a 1960s flat that had an actual hallway, a box room as well as bedroom for storage and a small but useable kitchen.

Modern flats are designed for people with no belongings other than clothes, who don't cook.

But even they have crazy covenants. A friend of mine bought one, and moved the kitchen to the back of the apartment so she could use the sunny room it had occupied as her art studio. She was told she had no right to remodel the home she owned and was forced, at her own expense, to put the kitchen back where it had been. Might have been hidden in the small print somewhere, but she had no idea when she bought the place.

She moved to Spain!

I think part of the issue is that there's a prevalent cultural pressure in the UK and Ireland to think that flats are a temporary stage you move through on the way to a house, which is not always the case in other countries. One of my American friends is married to a Frenchman and they've raised their children in Paris, and when they were thinking about moving house in a Paris suburb, he was absolutely baffled that she wanted to consider houses -- from his POV a house where you're solely responsible for roof repairs and maintenance of your garden is just unnecessary hassle, when you could have a big, beautiful apartment in a building where expenses are shared. His brother bought a house, and he thinks it's a weird decision.

But he thinks that in part because, despite being from a wealthy background, he's always lived in flats. Large, beautiful, purpose-built ones, with roof gardens or enormous wraparound balconies, in landscaped grounds.

I would say similar of friends living in Switzerland and Berlin.

(Whereas when I lived in flats in London, they were generally Victorian houses divided into flats, often not very well. This isn't an inevitability, obviously -- lots of lovely mansion blocks exist.)