ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Building Beautiful Council Houses is the name of a cross-party report published earlier this week. It recommends that we should be aiming to build 100,000 new council houses a year, and that they should be built to high architectural standards.

We desperately need more houses – the government hopes to deliver over a million new homes and is overhauling the current planning system. Given the scale of the crisis the temptation for any government would be to put quantity before quality. This has happened before, with disastrous results, particularly after the second world war. I remember visiting Berlin before the fall of the iron curtain and looking into the east of the city and being horrified by its grim, soulless architecture. Across the world Pete Seeger sang of American urban sprawl in terms of ‘little boxes on a hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same’.

Drive through any city in Britain and you’ll see urban blocks, cheaply built, and sometimes now oozing damp and mould as well as depressing the spirit. It was not a good omen when, earlier this year, the word ‘beautiful’ was deleted from the National Planning policy framework in an attempt to speed up construction.

The mistake in ANY crisis is to think short term. Desperate as we are for more housing we need to think what houses are for. They are not just boxes made of ticky-tacky to store people in as though they were Lego pieces.

Houses are homes, and for most of us ‘home’ means both privacy and neighbourliness. Secure in our own space we connect to the flat next door or to neighbours over the fence. One of my favourite quotations from the Bible is from the Book of Micah which describes the ideal community as one in which ‘they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid’. It’s a lovely image of people who are relaxed and at peace, in sight of their neighbours, yet still separate, and with nature’s harvest on the trees. It is no accident that the Bible is full of imagery of gardens and cities which speak both of our origins and our heavenly destiny. Perhaps that’s why people these days aspire to having what they call a ‘forever home’, as though it is a foothold in heaven. I would like to think that our architects are striving to design houses that they would like to live in themselves, and not just because they are pleasing, but because they help us to be human.

Show less