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.

Some pp mention living in ex council homes. The right to buy is a major part of the problem. Reducing the pool of genuinely affordable homes. There's only limited land to build on (we need our green spaces - for farming, for wildlife, and to breathe). So the new builds (and flat conversions in older houses) are of reduced size and quality.

Regarding the new builds. Round my way there are several developments.

One is being marketed as affordable Help to Buy. It's not. Not for the average income, let alone low earners.

The other development (in an area with very long - years long - waiting lists for social housing) is for 'luxury' apartments. It's not needed. For anybody with money, there is already plenty of choice round here.

The majority of new builds need to be genuinely affordable for lower earners and people too disabled to work (will be an increase due to Long Covid).

And, like you say, they also need to be of acceptable standard. To live in. Quality of life hugely impacts on health - both physical and mental.

I've pointed out on WFH threads, how WFH is only good for people privileged enough to have a home suitable to work from.

@PermanentTemporary

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 think that’s part of the problem: apart from e.g. central and west London mansion blocks which are desirable for all the obvious reasons, flats in the UK are seen as very much second rate to a house, what you buy when you can’t afford a house - even if that house is actually smaller in terms of square footage with less generously proportioned rooms. So developers aren’t minded to build flats to the sort of standard they could if they were viewed as an equally desirable choice.

@Handsnotwands

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

Yes this is a worry.

@midsomermurderess

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.

I came here to say the same! My friends in London can’t believe how spacious and beautiful the tenement flats are up here.

Agents & Builders should be forced to advertise houses in terms of the sqm of space that you get and should list the price per sqm. That would show of the difference between a spacious old 2 bed and a mini new 2 bed. At the moment, people often only look by the number of bedrooms, so builders have learnt to squeeze in tiny bedrooms and hope people don't notice.

I live sweeping statements

Another question is, why are new houses not automatically built with solar panels and heat pumps?
That is, of course, in addition to effective insulation and triple-glazed windows.

This puts me in mind of the thing that Rosie Jones did about how hard it is to find accessible accommodation, I think it was on Joe Lycett's peculiar consumer advice type programme. Really bloody depressing. The house building industry has a lot to answer for - packing them all in without a thought to whether they're actually appropriate for use, without any regard for the environment they're destroying or the consequences for the local area. Obviously the planning departments share that responsibility, but they just don't seem to give a fuck.

It's not just the houses itself, the planning around it is atrocious as well.

I moved to a new build estate in the Netherlands last year and the estate has it's own supermarkt, shops (bakery, book shop, fish mongers, chemist), doctor's surgery, pharmacy, 2 primary schools, nurseries and many, many playgrounds.

Meanwhile the town I where I lived in the UK had a massive housing estate planned without any thoughts about services.

I agree and I don’t understand why there isn’t government legislation forcing developers to build decent homes.
That would be due to the small matter of extensive donations to Tory funds and lots of paid lobbying

@RobotValkyrie

What baffles me most is the lack of basements/cellars in British houses. You could still build the same number of houses on the same land, and every house would get extra storage space + a utility room. But no, no basements.

Water table

@CuteOrangeElephant

It's not just the houses itself, the planning around it is atrocious as well.

I moved to a new build estate in the Netherlands last year and the estate has it's own supermarkt, shops (bakery, book shop, fish mongers, chemist), doctor's surgery, pharmacy, 2 primary schools, nurseries and many, many playgrounds.

Meanwhile the town I where I lived in the UK had a massive housing estate planned without any thoughts about services.

The planners are strangled - they have no real power. Around her the developers do what the fuck they like - they either ignore conditions or get them set aside.

@daimbarsatemydogsbone

I agree and I don’t understand why there isn’t government legislation forcing developers to build decent homes. That would be due to the small matter of extensive donations to Tory funds and lots of paid lobbying

Not just Tory.

Tony Blair and his family, for example, have made millions out of property.

We live in a four bed new build town house, I hate it. We are lucky in a way as they are army married quarters in a mixed neighbourhood so we pay nominal rent but it’s so poorly thought out. The actual living space is tiny, there is art room for one three seater sofa. The kitchen table has to be pushed up against the wall when it isn’t in use. It is so poorly though out for a family despite being advertised as a family home. I feel sorry for the people who have paid £400+ for them!

We live in Europe but are British. Detached houses here have to be a minimum of 6 meters apart. It used to be 10 when our home was built in the 80s. We have a basement under the house which gives us a laundry room, pantry, bonus room and large garage. The storage is awesome. All new homes have to meet strict building rules here. Our homes are also built with much thicker external walls which means they don’t get cold in winter and stay cool in summer despite us having much colder winters and hotter summers than the UK.

The internal walls are also think concrete which gives amazing soundproofing within the home.

Minimum standards for UK new builds could help stop developers building such tiny bedrooms at least.

We always planned to return to the UK at some point but the lack of affordable well constructed and spacious homes puts me off to be honest.

Yanbu. This is a long standing issue in the UK though. There has really only been a few post war decades when we built decent quality housing on a big scale. The old Victorian houses I've lived in that were for the workers ie the two up two downs or back to backs all had big issues with damp, underfloor water, bad roofs etc. They were still supposedly "worth" a quarter of a bloody million though. But houses aren't about housing people, not now we've been printing money for a decade and a half. They're about asset ownership.

yep , im in an end of bed terraced council house which i am of course extemely grateful for , i know it could be much worse , but its a 1950s build pretty small , but the garden is the size of a tennis court out back , its huge and i dont know what they were thinking when they built it , if only they had built the house out to the end of where the garden patio is id have just that wee bit more space a bigger kitchen ,as it is if two people are in in you cant move , my bedroom at the back would be better as it is i have 2 foot of space between the window and my bed , all the houses on my street are the same these huge gardens and not very big inside

Totally agree with you OP. I heard that developers stage their show homes by having special short beds made for bedrooms so viewers don’t notice how tiny the bedrooms are. And friends of mine lived in a new build where the kitchen cupboards were too shallow to fit normal size dinner plates in. In many houses there is nowhere the dry clothes and no storage space. I simply do not know how people manage in these crap houses and flats.

The first house I bought with ex partner was a former council house built in the 1950s. What a contrast with modern new builds! Big rooms, high ceilings, tons of light and a nice big garden where we grew veg and had apple trees, which were planted by the people who built the estate. The house was very cheap too compared with the tiny new builds going up in the area.

I think in respect to houses, as with so many other areas of life, Brits accept being shat on and fleeced in return for for substandard products.

YANBU. New builds - unless you pay £££ for them - are laid out poorly, have not nearly enough storage, and are quite poorly made.

One of the things I do like about American houses is that bedrooms have to have a closet to be marketed as a bedroom. I'd love to see that here. They can keep most of the rest of their building code though

It's the reason we're in the process of buying a house which needs quite a lot of modernising - 80's build, but got a kitchen diner, a living room and 3 bedrooms (one box) plus an office. A bit apprehensive about the updating work needed, but the space is lovely.

Other places we've seen have barely 2x3m kitchens (or less) and then one room which isn't quite big enough for living and dining.

@parietal

Agents & Builders should be forced to advertise houses in terms of the sqm of space that you get and should list the price per sqm. That would show of the difference between a spacious old 2 bed and a mini new 2 bed. At the moment, people often only look by the number of bedrooms, so builders have learnt to squeeze in tiny bedrooms and hope people don't notice.

Yes, my continental friends find it baffling that in the UK homes are advertised with a focus on number of bedrooms, rather than square footage/metrage.

@ComtesseDeSpair

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.

People in other countries tend to be better behaved than we do though. We're too fond of pettiness and fighting, littering and other anti-social behaviour to live communally. Ask anyone who's had to put up with communal gardens, communal entries, communal stairs and worst of all, communal parking. Nine times out of ten, the loud, brash, bullying types ruin it for everyone else.

@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

Don’t be ridiculous, there are swathes upon swathes of tiny terraced old houses across the nation with tiny backyards, no hallways, one bathroom off the kitchen and the street full of cars because they don’t have off street parking let alone garages. A lot of old houses are tiny.

Correct.

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

I thought when tower blocks were all the rage in the 1960s and 70s they had communal gardens and laundries etc but you can’t blame people for not wanting to live in them.