With the new issue of IHBC’s members’ journal, Context now out, did you work all the way through our last one – Issue No. 181 – and the many facets of urban housing, design, conservation and use, with lessons on ‘innovative ways to create successful, resource-efficient housing in… difficult settings’?
The IHBC writes:
Urban housing has at times been the subject of brilliant invention. In many of the best Georgian terraced streets, for example, the roadway is raised from ground level; a void beneath the pavement stores coal, with direct access through the coal hole; an ‘area’ (originally called an ‘airey’, as it ventilated the basement) provided separate access for the servants; and, for those who needed it, a mews accommodated horses, carriages and grooms. Who invented that extraordinarily clever configuration? And, seeing that most major Georgian streets were built in stages over several years, how did a partly built street work over the months or years when some parts of the raised, vaulted pavement had been built and other parts remained unbuilt, with circulation at original ground level? No one seems to know.
Streets of Victorian and Edwardian urban housing, by contrast, were often simpler, tending to do without the area, the raised road and raised pavement, and enthusiastically embracing bay windows. London cottage flats and Tyneside flats, little noticed but very common, were an innovation: terraced or semi-detached housing was divided when built horizontally, so that, in the case of a two-storey building, the ground floor and first floor are separate flats, each with its own front and back doors. Elsewhere, in certain parts of northern England, back-to-back housing (where only the front elevation has a door and windows) flourished.
The contrast between the tenement tradition of working-class housing in Scotland (where most Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing was built for middle-class families) and the lack of such a tradition in England and Wales is striking, although in view of how common tenements are outside the UK, it is the relative lack of them in England that needs explanation. Later suburban housing in the UK favoured detached and semi-detached forms to create personal space without taking up a great deal of land. Arts and crafts detailing on a vast number of the houses added a semblance of neo-vernacular spirit. Post-war necessity prompted the invention of prefabs (see page 28). Later in the 20th century, car parking dominated the urban housing scene without prompting any innovation that might tame it.
Modernist design produced campus layouts (which worked less well for council housing than for universities) and streets in the sky. Scissor blocks were another innovation of the 1950s and 60s, where in a block of maisonettes each corridor serves the maisonette above and below (or sometimes more), saving on the space allocated to corridors compared to the more normal arrangement of corridors serving apartments on the same level. The interlocking layout of a scissor block was always highly complicated: each maisonette comprised four separate levels, all of them connected to each other in continuous series of half-storey-height staircases. Brilliant but confusing, and hopeless for people with mobility problems.
Then came the private housing estate, tending to condemn residents to car dependence, and often offering design details that ensure that every house looks bafflingly different; and the single-aspect apartment block, achieving relatively high densities and little else positive. So it is wonderful to discover that while we are doing our best to conserve the popular streets that we already have, some architects, such as Peter Barber (see page 14), are finding innovative ways to create successful, resource-efficient housing in the most difficult settings.
This Context’s themed articles include:
- The revival of urban council housing, Peter de Figueiredo
- Saving DH Lawrence’s birthplace, John Perry
- Gentrification in London, Colin Thom
- The maintenance challenge of urban housing in Scotland, Jocelyn Cunliffe
- A pocket of prefab fabulousness, Katriona Byrne
Access the online archive and see the issue online
Reading Context helps IHBC members develop their skills across all of the IHBC’s Areas of Competence, and so is a critical baseline in addressing priorities in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
See more IHBC background and guidance on IHBC CPD and on how you might use past, current and future issues of Context
See the formal guidance paper on IHBC CPD (scheduled for update)
See more on the IHBC Competences and Areas of Competence
