Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Richard Hakluyt]

Terraced housing is(was?) pretty cheap to build and outside the south-east land is not at such a premium. Also most terraced houses up North don't have a garden, just a backyard which is a great place to plonk a shed and keep the whippets 

[Josquius]

I really don't see the problem with terraced houses. I'd rather have one than my semi- far more attic space available.

As to terraced houses vs flats.... I'm sure I recall reading that the various tower blocks that sprung up in the 60s actually tended to be lower density than the houses they replaced given the clear space around them.

We really should be building more terraces IMO. The current trend for semis and detached houses with half a metre or less between them and the neighbouring property is really quite sad. Plays more into peoples need to be recognised as a king than practicality.

[Sheilbh]

Well, duh.    As I'm sure I've already badgered one too many times, the British obsession with living on single family houses with a ridiculous "garden" is one of the main reasons why IMO you have such housing issues in the first place. It's trying to pretend to be on splendid isolation while ignoring that you live side by side with other people in the same situation as you.

I think this is precisely wrong

The stereotypical image of community in the UK is gossiping over the garden fence, plus the shared space of the street - the twee recreation of "street parties" at every big royal jubilee in imitation of the VE Day or silver jubilee street parties. I think there's a bit of chicken and egg about this, but by contrast I don't think Britain has a great sense of communal civic space. I don't think the squares and streets in a city centre play that role, or any sense of street theatre with people on balconies engaging with the wider space.

It isn't about splendid isolation. Rather I think the British image of community is homes and gardens not the British image/perception of atomised, isolated, isolating blocks of apartments where you don't know your neighbours. That may be a result of the British experience of post-war Brutalist blocks. Also because a lot of those flats became run-down, so the communal spaces (the terraces or corridors connecting flats, lifts) became neglected and perceived as crime/anti-social behaviour-y. That might partly be fair because of the general inability for nosy neighbours to watch those communal areas as they'd keep an eye on the street - and this comes up still. There's a bit redevelopment of an old post-war estate near me and one of the big requests from residents for the re-design is more of a street feeling, but also less dark corners/"hidden away" public spaces that aren't overlooked by living room windows.

So I think in the UK the urban flat is seen as the isolated, non-communal way of living v a "village-like" street of houses with gardens. A street of terraced houses where everyone's involved in each other's business is Coronation Street, which is the UK's longest running soap doing episodes since 1960. But I think something like this is the romanticised image of neighbourhood community-ness in England:


Separately, gardening is hugely popular in the UK. I think something like 40% of people regularly garden as one of their main hobbies (I don't understand it - but I'm someone who likes urban anonymity ). I think the demographics are older and skew female but that's also, to an extent, the stereotype. The husband in his shed building a model railway and his wife doing the garden outside - but I suspect the demographics may have shifted with the pandemic when lots of people got into gardening.

I also think having a garden is just tied up with a sense of modest prosperity in post-war Britain.

And on Tamas' point. Traditional terraced housing has higher population density than big blocks of flats - largely because designers feel blocks of flats need open space around them for parking and communal green space, while terraces are often flush to the road plus private gardens. It's making a bit of a comeback now - such as Peter Barber's spectacular council houses in London which are often terraces (sometimes homes, somethimes flats) but deliberate re-interpretations of things like back-to-back housing. But I think for a long time they were seen as too traditional, too old fashioned for architects despite (or perhaps because ) they are popular and they are dense.

I would slightly carve out Scotland from lot of this though because I think Scottish cities do have tenements and the nostalgia about community in Glasgow or Edinburgh is around the tenement block. Although there's a similar negative image of post-war blocks.

Edit: And I don't think it's romanticisation of or nostalgia for country life either - though there's an angle of that in the suburbs. I think lots of things in the UK (our food, not least) are because we urbanised early. We haven't really had peasants since the early 19th century. Not many people even have family memories from grandparents of really living in and on the land. I think it's a romanticisation of those terraces in cities - the Coronation Street model - and the interwar invention by public transport of Metroland.

[garbon]

I really don't see the problem with terraced houses. I'd rather have one than my semi- far more attic space available.

As to terraced houses vs flats.... I'm sure I recall reading that the various tower blocks that sprung up in the 60s actually tended to be lower density than the houses they replaced given the clear space around them.

We really should be building more terraces IMO. The current trend for semis and detached houses with half a metre or less between them and the neighbouring property is really quite sad. Plays more into peoples need to be recognised as a king than practicality.

I don't know why you would want to own a house with shared walls. Feels like built in drama with any communal repairs.

[Tamas]

I really don't see the problem with terraced houses. I'd rather have one than my semi- far more attic space available.

As to terraced houses vs flats.... I'm sure I recall reading that the various tower blocks that sprung up in the 60s actually tended to be lower density than the houses they replaced given the clear space around them.

We really should be building more terraces IMO. The current trend for semis and detached houses with half a metre or less between them and the neighbouring property is really quite sad. Plays more into peoples need to be recognised as a king than practicality.

Apart from -funnily enough- space (and a bit of a garden) compared to flats, what am I gaining with a terraced house (even a semi) if I still have at least one common (and I bet thin as paper) wall with some strangers?

Also seeing how terraced housing is pretty much unique to Britain, I'd be willing to wager its not such a great thing as you make it out to be. It's the double faucet of housing.

[Josquius]

The stereotypical image of community in the UK is gossiping over the garden fence, plus the shared space of the street - the twee recreation of "street parties" at every big royal jubilee in imitation of the VE Day or silver jubilee street parties. I think there's a bit of chicken and egg about this, but by contrast I don't think Britain has a great sense of communal civic space. I don't think the squares and streets in a city centre play that role, or any sense of street theatre with people on balconies engaging with the wider space.

We do need more terraced streets making car free. The rise in every household having 2 cars speeding around has been a key factor in eliminating their communal nature.
There's some lovely streets around here where rather than shitty roads the middle of the street is instead a patch of grass with trees and bushes.

I don't know why you would want to own a house with shared walls. Feels like built in drama with any communal repairs

Never really an issue, the laws are strong enough about who is responsible for what I suppose.
Boundary lines in gardens now...that's an issue. So often they aren't properly demarked. Then there's the whole who gets the ugly side of the fence thing.

Apart from -funnily enough- space (and a bit of a garden) compared to flats, what am I gaining with a terraced house (even a semi) if I still have at least one common (and I bet thin as paper) wall with some strangers?

Also seeing how terraced housing is pretty much unique to Britain, I'd be willing to wager its not such a great thing as you make it out to be. It's the double faucet of housing.

Direct access to the outside is nice.  Smaller blocks of flats have this too of course but larger ones don't.
Horizontal neighbours are far less bothersome than vertical neighbours I find too. Far more common people have their noisy stuff on the floor than a bass speaker on your wall.
And vs. having nothing bills are a big one. Having something other than outside air touching on your walls is great insulation.

[The Larch]

As to terraced houses vs flats.... I'm sure I recall reading that the various tower blocks that sprung up in the 60s actually tended to be lower density than the houses they replaced given the clear space around them.

Numbers or I really can't believe such a counter-intuitive affirmation.

When available land for residential development is so rare as in the UK, you need to make the most out of it. I'm not arguing for dystopian tower blocks, but something reasonable. I was recently in London and the place Iw as staying at was an appartment block of... 3 stories. It felt as such a waste, it could have easily been twice as tall.

Granted, I'm biased since Spain is apparently the European country with more people living in appartments rather than houses, and the UK is on the opposite end.



I really wonder what's the deal with the Netherlands, though.    Didn't we discuss this in the past, actually?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Honestly, while we meme a lot about how small (geographically) many European countries are, the United Kingdom has a lot of land that could be used for residential development and simply is not for political reasons. Even more is unused for economic reasons (i.e. it is located in parts of the country people don't wish to build houses and live in.)

I think the arguments against people having small residential plots as some sort of evil, and ultra-density being the only right answer (especially on a continent that will have less people living on it in 2050 than it does today), is specious to me. It's campaigning by urbanists who simply don't want people to live any other way, and it smacks of nasty things like Soviet housing blocks to me.

[Richard Hakluyt]

IIRC the slab-shaped blocks are best for population density. The tower blocks are not so good unless you make them really high and cluster them too close together...too close as in the dystopian way we can see in some places in China.

[Josquius]

Numbers or I really can't believe such a counter-intuitive affirmation.

No numbers but at a quick google I find loads of reputable looking sites mentioning it, e.g.

In the 1950s a lot of terraced housing was knocked down and replaced by tower blocks, slab blocks and other forms of more complex high density housing. Research shows that this new housing was actually the same density as the Victorian terraced houses it replaced! In other words, there are ways of having high density areas without resorting to very tall buildings or complete redevelopment.

When available land for residential development is so rare as in the UK, you need to make the most out of it. I'm not arguing for dystopian tower blocks, but something reasonable. I was recently in London and the place Iw as staying at was an appartment block of... 3 stories. It felt as such a waste, it could have easily been twice as tall.

Oh sure. We need to build more blocks of flats for sure. Mid-rise is absolutely the way. We especially need to do this in a more transit oriented way- there's a metro station near me where so much of the land surrounding it is a lumber yard, wasteland, and light industry. Such a shitty use of land, they should make it into a little mid-rise residential area.

But some housing is good too, families need somewhere to live and we can't entirely rely on reclaimed HMOs, and this should go back towards terraces rather than current detached trends.
I'd also say it should be 3 story at the least by default, with attics already liveable, more ideally 3 story+ a liveable attic.

Granted, I'm biased since Spain is apparently the European country with more people living in appartments rather than houses, and the UK is on the opposite end.

Spain has the highest lived in population density in Europe outside of the micro nations IIRC.

This does fascinate me. You see the same in Sweden too. Such vast expanses of land, yet they manage to keep their towns compact.

I really wonder what's the deal with the Netherlands, though.    Didn't we discuss this in the past, actually?

Yes. I think so.

[The Larch]

For the record, the highest population density in Europe is to be found in the Barcelona metropolian area (around 16k people/sq Km), hardly a dystopian landscape of post- Soviet tower blocks.

London is at 5.596 people/sq Km.

[Tamas]

I mean, would I want to live in one if I could help it? Of course not. But it's not some Hong Kong hellhole either and I bet there's two towns worth of terraced "houses" population is shown (it's Budapest btw):

[Sheilbh]

Numbers or I really can't believe such a counter-intuitive affirmation.

Can't find the exact stats but from a quick search it's cited by London mayoral documents and by real estate consultancies. The contrast is between Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing which looks like this (in Liverpool). These are the "back-to-backs" which are being revived:


Against post-war blocks which looks like this (near me ):


It's counter-intuitive until you look at them. If you tipped those over and spilled each flat into a house, they take up a lot more space. The thing that we don't have much of in England that is higher denisty is the mid-rise urban blocks. There's very posh expensive ones in Chelsea and Knightsbridge (Poirot's mansion block) and there's a brief gasp of them in interwar "homes for heroes" and slum clearance blocks (I live in one now).

They're another building style that's becoming more popular now on new developments but they're quite new. While I think in Europe, you think of Barcelona which I think is still the densest city in Europe, and it's all mid-rise blocks, similar with Haussmann's Paris - or tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh. I'm not sure why they didn't develop here - the areas where they did in the UK, in Scotland, are geographically constrained which I think is part of it, also I suspect early public transport. Metroland in the 30s but even before then the development of railways out of London and other English cities is a huge part of them sprawling out in the 19th/early 20th century rather than sprawling up.

Edit: I wonder if another factor is local government? English cities just gobble up villages and towns - London famously is described as a city of villages - with local government following. While in parts of Europe - particularly thinking of France and Paris - you have a very small, historic area of "Paris" and then broader, often post-war peripheries. I wonder if that acted as a legal constraint on sprawling out and devouring nearby villages?

When available land for residential development is so rare as in the UK, you need to make the most out of it. I'm not arguing for dystopian tower blocks, but something reasonable. I was recently in London and the place Iw as staying at was an appartment block of... 3 stories. It felt as such a waste, it could have easily been twice as tall.

Availability of land is not the issue:


Including gardens, less than 10% of the country is built on. It's not land availability but land use that's incredibly restricted.

Granted, I'm biased since Spain is apparently the European country with more people living in appartments rather than houses, and the UK is on the opposite end.
[...]
I really wonder what's the deal with the Netherlands, though.    Didn't we discuss this in the past, actually?

Yeah I think there's something interesting about North-West Europe. UK, Ireland as well as Belgium and the Netherlands at one of that chart is striking.

Oh sure. We need to build more blocks of flats for sure. Mid-rise is absolutely the way. We especially need to do this in a more transit oriented way- there's a metro station near me where so much of the land surrounding it is a lumber yard, wasteland, and light industry. Such a shitty use of land, they should make it into a little mid-rise residential area.

Nothing makes me angrier than people trying to block planning approval for housing around newly built tube stations

There are tube stations that look onto fields. I think we should go back to the 1930s/Metroland style - any new railway or tube station automatically comes with planning permission fo x thousand homes around it.

[Tamas]

Sheilbh your two photos illustrate the problem very well: those Liverpool streets very much look like you took some residental blocks and instead of building them upward where there is space, you laid them down flat.

[Josquius]

Sheilbh your two photos illustrate the problem very well: those Liverpool streets very much look like you took some residental blocks and instead of building them upward where there is space, you laid them down flat.

In doing so it takes the same amount of space however.