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!

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.

@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.

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.

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! 😆

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.

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.

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.

And soundproofing!

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

No room for my freezer in the kitchen, I’ve had to put it in the box room. My living room is tiny with two doors and the damned gas boiler in a cupboard. The only place my sofa has is right up against the radiator under the window. It’s utter shite.

We used to build good flats. I live in a 1930s purpose built flat and we have huge built in cupboards in both bedrooms and the hall way, a garage, communal gardens and huge balconies with enough room for washing, plants and chairs.

My friends rented a flat in a ex LA thirties flat for a while and every flat had a big lockable cupboard on each floor allocated to them where things like bikes, prams and other stuff could be stored.

People don't like the leasehold system and the length of leases/ lease renewals and lack of controls on increases in service charges.

Look for an ex HA/council house, even something that may have been purchased as share to buy, see if you can staircase to 100% very quickly after buying.

I've worked in housebuilding. The HA houses we built always underwent additional, more vigorous checks than those which were built for the private market.

Private market checks were often NHBC and not much else. One particular development I took over partway through, all was OK with NHBC but the council had their own independent inspection company that gave a fair few snags that you'd have never had brought up otherwise.
They were particularly interested in the amount of storage there was.

Failing that, look for a 5 star developer...you'll have slightly better luck, unless you can self build, or deal with a very small bespoke developer....these are all very expensive options.

I'm personally more concerned how a 3bedroom semi detached new build in my area is being advertised at just under £500k. I'm only 33, but growing up I always thought half a million was a really special, lovely, big house.

I saw some great flats when we lived in Copenhagen- big 3 and 4 bed really solid mansion style ones -and the newer ones built there all seemed better than what is built here- better planned- better storeage, nearly all had a balcony or patio.

There are some good flats in the UK but mainly at the very high end or some good conversions in places like London -but an awful lot of what they build now are poor in terms of storeage, room sizes, layout ( nearly all have lounge/kitchen combo in one room which some like but some really do not ) , outside space etc -

Labour had 13 years in which to repeal, or at least adjust, Right to Buy, but they didn’t. Could that possibly be because they thought it’d lose them votes?

Cynic, moi?
I can’t be the only person with a staunchly Labour-voting friend, who was only too happy to buy her nice 3 bed council house shortly after RTB was introduced - for £7k.

And Gordon Brown positively encouraged buy to let by a) his raid on pension funds, and b) scrapping mortgage interest relief for owner occupiers, while retaining it for landlords. Did Labour imagine that so many more rental properties would absolve them from having to bother about providing social housing?

Please NB, I am not excusing the Tories from doing fuck all about the dire lack of affordable housing ever since. I hold them firmly culpable.

Which just goes to show the alleged alternate parties are just wings on the same bird. It’s designed to make people think they actually have power in their choice when they have no power at all.

As the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government will always get in.

Isn’t it time people started realising what ‘government’ actually means?

We have hunners of space. Loads of room for housing. But it isn't all in the location housebuilders want to build in.

In terms of space and layout of houses, a lot is dictated by profit. How many houses you can build on a site, then in the houses, the dimensions of rooms are influenced by the size of materials. Builders want to use 1 or 2 lengths of wood for a room, not 1.5 or 2.5, they lose money on offcuts then. Same for plasterboard and insulation. Cutting materials =losing money.

But there isn't a shortage of land in the UK. Just a shortage of places people will overspend vasts amount of money to live in. Or near.

Successive governments have had 3 decades to change things - we can't keep on blaming someone who made a few wrong decisions 40 years ago that could have been reversed/changed subsequently!