To think U.K. houses and flats are not fit for purpose?

[Notcontent]

So - I know that there is a housing shortage - but I think too much forces is on getting houses and flats built no matter how small/inadequate, which can cause huge problems for the people living there.

The U.K. has some of the smallest houses in Europe. I am not saying people need huge houses - far from it actually. But homes should have:

• adequate heat and sound insulation
• rooms that are big enough for storage, etc
• somewhere for people to dry their clothes
• etc

I am not an architect but I am interested in this as I have lived in a few different countries, in different houses and flats, and have experienced first hand how small things in house design can make a huge difference to people’s quality of life.

@HighlandPony

Let’s be honest. This is only really a problem in new builds. I’m in a 1963 ex council house and I’ve got a 23x11ft living room. master bedroom is 19ft by 9ft. Double room is 14ft by 12.5ft and single room is 9ft by 8.5ft. I’ve got two huge cupboards upstairs, one downstairs and a pantry. Tiny bathroom and small kitchenette mind you but really big rooms compared to new builds. Half the price too

This

New buildings are a missed opportunity. Such a shame I went to visit a few to buy but there is not way I do it. They are tiny.

Completely agree OP. We were in a rush to buy when I was pregnant and made the horrible mistake of going for a new-ish build house (12 years old I think).
It's made me unbelievably depressed over the past few years, to the point where I'm too embarassed to have anybody come to the house, including tradesmen, and can't stand to be here for more than an hour at a time. A "master" bedroom that is so small that we can only open one of our wardrobe doors fully because the other hits the end of the bed - there's literally no other way of having the furniture, and we only own a small double bed, a chest of drawers and a slim double wardrobe. A pointless (and windowless) ensuite crammed into the master bedroom but no built in storage anywhere. The third "bedroom" that can only just fit a toddler bed and a chest of drawers in it - if we had a wardrobe, it would block either the window or the door, and there's no hope of fitting a single bed in there, so we're praying DD2 doesnt grow too much. One small built in cupboard in the entire house that needs to house shoes, wellies, coats, children's toys, hats and scarves, boxes of Playdoh and craft stuff, the hoover, the mop, and the ironing board. A "kitchen/diner" where we have to shift the (small!) kitchen table every time we want to open the washing machine. Walls so thin that our neighbour can hear every conversation we have in our bedroom (which she regularly comments on). I can hand on heart say this house has ruined my life. I loathe everything about it.

It's an issue in all countries. Average sizes can be deceptive because people want to live in certain places and that land then becomes super valuable. Apartments are town houses make sense but it's not what most want

Yanbu someone I know got a 3 bed 3 storey new build ha property but the proportions were way off. Postage stamp sized front and back gardens. No driveway. Tiny pavements (I dont think they are actually classified as pavements)
Huge downstairs bathroom. Bigish lounge.
Tiny kitchen. First floor 1 massive bedroom. 1 massive (stand alone shower and bath in there) 1 bedroom so small a single bed would only fit in one way!
3rd floor an ok sized master with ensuite.
So so odd.
I'm in a 1930s semi and I love it decent sized rooms. Decent sized front and back gardens. Best is I only hear next door shutting a drawer in their kitchen and plugging something in in the bedroom.
I also hear their dog bark if someone knocks their door.

YANBU.

I find it incredible that it is legal to build flats in the UK without decent lift access - a lift big enough for furniture, a person in a wheelchair and a carer, that kind of thing. It is so so rare to find a block with lifts in it. There are hardly any flats i could even consider for my mother.

I live in Scotland which has a lot of 19th century flats in its cities which tend to have high ceilings, often pretty decent size rooms, traditionally a ceiling pulley for clothes drying (in modern times often taken down but I still have one), and a box room. The insulation, sound and heat, isn't that good though. I think a major issue with poor quality housing lies with the volume builders. They often do build mean spaces and seem quite resistant to new eco technologies because they eat into profits. They are major donors to political parties and wield huge power when it comes to housing. And they have very little interest in building communities, which should be central to housing policy. Houses dumped with nothing else there so the people who live in them have to drive everywhere to get their needs met.

The problem is that the plot of land a house stands on can cost considerably more than the materials used to actually build the house.

There's a plot of land for sale near me. It covers around a quarter of an acre and is up for sale for £1.5 million. Planning permission is for nine houses on that. Nine houses on a quarter of an acre. Madness.

The lack of storage space is definitely an issue. One of the things I miss the most from my one bed flat in another European country is the storage it had in the entrance hall - 3 deep cupboards and an alcove of a sort so there was plenty of space for shoes, coats, gym stuff, even the hoover lived in one of those cupboards. My Victorian terrace in London has the narrowest entrance ever with no space for coats at all.

Yy to your post midsomermadness. The housing builders may not give large bungs in brown envelopes to councillors any more, but they donate hugely to all political parties and control the supply of land and building to keep prices as high as possible. They're usually uninterested in brownfield and conversion, and get the definition of 'affordable' altered repeatedly plus the number of 'affordable' units they have to include reduced.

The energy ratings standards need to be lifted! I currently live in a rented flat that is at the lowest living engergy standard and some windows are single glazed and there is no reported instulation in the roof or walls. It gets frezzing, within an hour of the heating beeing off its cold again, my gas bill is so high, i worry for next winter after the prices go up again! We try to get out and visit grandparents most of my days off to make use of there warm houses, if we are in during the day we will tend to sit in LO's bedroom with the door shut and electric heater on as its cheaper than having central heating on or sat cuddled on the sofa under blankets, im allways wearing my dressing gown, may as well call it a house coat😂 we cant afford to move, stuck in a long private rent tenancy agreement and theres not much out there to move into within our budget!

I agree wholeheartedly about the basements. That wonderful huge space for washing machine, tools, stuff and extra play space would make such a difference to living. And solve some of the problems of the tiny footprint new builds tend to have.
I recall with great fondness the basements and cellars we've had in the past, but where I’ve lived for the last twenty five years, the water table is high and they're unusual.
Tanking a cellar would probably cost a bomb and I don’t know how long it would last before leaking.

@OfstedOffred

Yanbu. Our population density isnt much higher than germany yet our average new property is 76sqm, theirs is 109sqm. Its s massive difference.

Not sure if it's because we need to build more apartments vs houses, or if it's because our planning and housing sector is geared around corporates extracting bumper profits, but either way it's terrible.

Interestingly england has nearly double the density as germany

WHAT’S THE OBSESSION WITH BATHROOMS IN NEW BUILDS?!

We went to view a show home and there was always at least two more toilets than there were bedrooms.

We saw a five bed that was four small doubles all with en-suites, a tiny little box room that you couldn’t have fit a chest of drawers in, a family bathroom upstairs, a downstairs shower room plus a hallway cloak room. Why so many bathrooms?!

I live in a 3 bed semi, one of the bedrooms is too small to fit a bed both ways. A friend lives in a similar sized house and when they were built , they took about 20cms from the bigger bedroom , slightly bigger than the width of a double bed out, so all bedrooms were doubles. Such a little thing, won't have cost the builders more and yet makes so much better use of the available space.

I don't know about anywhere else in the UK, but basements are very hard to build where I live in London because there is a whacking great river right next to us and wet clay instead of soil.

A lot of it is the British obsession with living in a house, which puts pressure on land, and results in undersized, boxy homes with often almost completely uselessly sized gardens and no storage space.

We could build solid, spacious, generously proportioned apartment blocks with communal garden areas, laundries, gyms and services, as is more the norm and popular in many other cities around the world. It would be a much more effective use of land and home footprints could be much bigger. Perhaps too big an attitudinal change for too many people, though.

And the Help to Buy scheme only helped the volume builders, it had to be a new build. No help to buy and refurbish an old house, do that, you also get clobbered with VAT,no VAT on new builds. Help to Buy my arse, help Barratt, Persimmon at al, yes.

So much of the country is in a stranglehold to these outfits it's no wonder there is little joined-up strategic planning around housing or looking to achieve carbon neutral homes, something I think Germany has been pursuing hard for years.

Yanbu our house was built in 2015 and all I deal with at the moment is plumbing leaks in the house, roof leaks, ventilation issues, water tank breakdowns, kitchen falling apart etc etc. It’s shoddily and cheaply built and teeny tiny despite in other ways actually being quite nice. To buy it new on the current market would be over 500k which makes my mind boggle, it’s supposed to be a tiny starter house.

Housing in this country has been fucked by two decades of an immoral property boom which will distort our economy for decades to come.

YANBU. I live in a semi-detached council house thats probably 1950s. I have a decent sized front and back garden. Two double bedrooms and a single bedroom but decent sized not a box room. The living room and kitchen are large and there's outhouses. I pay less than £500 a month for it including water.

My friend lives in a council house that's a newbuild and it's absolutely tiny downstairs and she pays £100 more with one less bedroom too. No front garden and her back garden is smaller than mine.

The government got rid of CABE and with it went any hope for accountability and minimum standards in U.K. architecture

@endlesssighing

WHAT’S THE OBSESSION WITH BATHROOMS IN NEW BUILDS?!

We went to view a show home and there was always at least two more toilets than there were bedrooms.

We saw a five bed that was four small doubles all with en-suites, a tiny little box room that you couldn’t have fit a chest of drawers in, a family bathroom upstairs, a downstairs shower room plus a hallway cloak room. Why so many bathrooms?!

Yes this is so true - my friend has four loos. It's a lot of loos!!

know that there is a housing shortage

You're right OP, but also there isn't really a housing shortage.

Like you say, lots of homes are being built. They're just not genuinely affordable ones.

The public health housing and homelessness emergency is because of increased demand for affordable homes and that need is not being met.

basements are great but expensive to build and very expensive to guarantee

Hard to know Comtesse because hardly any flats in the UK do look like that. If my choice is a north facing 2 bed overlooking a car park and without so much as a Juliet balcony, with no lift, versus an actual house with even a small amount of outdoor space, of course I will want the house. Mansion flats in London sell well enough.

I live in a tiny new build shoe box. You're not wrong OP, the build is very poor quality and for a three bedroom house the storage is non existent and the rooms are tiny.

My brother also lives in a new build 'town house' which has four bedrooms spread of three floors. The layout of his house is ridiculous (the living room is on the first floor, it's weird) and his garden is tiny and triangular.

His is supposedly quite posh and cost almost twice what line did but I couldn't live in it. There are THREE horrible en suites without a window between them.

My shoebox isn't much better but at least it was cheap and we do have a big, normal shaped, garden I suppose.