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

[MaryMaryVeryContrary]

I don’t even mean your ‘built for another time’ Victorian houses, I mean ones built in the last 20 years (and continue to be built).

Counterintuitive layouts, more toilets than bedrooms, strange angles, no storage whatsoever. We’re house hunting and it’s driving me mental!

One of the few things I like about our house on Germany was the two smaller bedrooms (of three) were the same size, rather than two big bedrooms and a tiny one.

Money.

Margins are on the greedy side so something has to give.

As long as people keep buying them, the house builders will keep making them.

German houses also have proper attics and basements.

Unfortunately German new builds can be as poky and lacking in storage as British ones. But the layout was better.

We also had a German flat a few years ago. It was very well designed. (And had a cellar!)

We don't have tonnes of land for the population so land is expensive, also not enough quality control. I agree new housing is rubbish.

One thing that always strikes me is when you see those glass towers of flats that have piles of boxes, toys, various furniture pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling windows because there's obviously nothing like enough storage, especially for families.

I noticed that too. We actually were living in one for a while and there was a little closet with the boiler and the master bedroom had a built in wardrobe. We did have to have a fairly minimalist lifestyle and use a lot of clever storage solutions.

We have a truckload of land but it’s kept deliberately scarce. Same with houses. The problem is capitalism.

The Dutch have less land than the UK but have far better design and construction standards!

Maximum profit - that's all you need to know. They don't care about anything else.

Too many people squeezed onto this little island. That means

a) the demand for housing is really high
b) there’s hardly enough room to build them all
c) developers take advantage of the high demand and lack of space to build ghastly rabbit hutches and jam them on top of one another.

Parker Morris standards ditched in the 80s. Lack of supply/housebuilding means there is a shortage so a huge number of people are in a place that's slightly too small for them because that's what they could afford.

As foreign born European I honestly don’t understand why flats are so unpopular here? Building up resolves so many issues. Piece of land, big enough to build two, possibly three houses, could provide the accommodation for twenty families. Nicely designed flats estates are good place to live.

I find that layouts in the UK are very odd. There is very minimal living space and too much square-footage in bedrooms/bathrooms (with the exception of closets box rooms). Next to no storage space. Gardens built on rubble so even grass can't survive.

I'm not from the UK and have really struggled adapting to houses here.

There’s LOADS of room. But it’s kept deliberately scarce.

I agree. I would happily live in a well designed 3 bedroom flat if it had ample storage space, parking, communal gardens and a laundry room etc

Years ago I used to babysit for wealthy families who had proper mansion flats in London. Properly designed, maintained, spacious and with well tended outdoor space.

Also stayed with friends in Barcelona and Paris and their flats are similar.

Unfortunately many of the flats in the UK are none of those things and so people just don't want to live in them.

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.

Profiteering, corruption and Tories.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.