The Flat Trap: A polemic

In Patrick Keiller's film, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), his narrator Tilda Swinton posits the idea that English housing is the result of a society that never had a bourgeois revolution, unlike its European counterparts. Instead, rather than creating an urban housing ideal based on the 19th-century apartment blocks favoured by continental cities, the model English bourgeois home emerged from the Arts and Crafts movement and was anti-industrial, looking to a rural idyll in place of the city.

As far back as the 17th century Sir Edward Coke, the English jurist, was quoted as saying 'a man's house is his castle', a phrase which been used to justify the cultural stereotype that the English prefer living in houses ever since, in contrast to life on the continent, which favours elegant apartment living alongside a café lifestyle and the tradition of the passagiatta.

Even within the city, the Georgian home can be seen as representing a version of the country house ideal, with Georgian squares built around a garden in contrast to country estates set within large grounds. Combined with a class system which long looked down on trade and favoured the country and the landed gentry, all the historical ingredients for a type of housing which brings to mind the country – anything but an apartment in other words – are in place. The Garden City movement, which similarly grew out of a desire to escape the horrors of industrialisation and the slums of the city, paved the way for the suburban house and garden.

Mies Van Der Rohe, 1927: Block of flats, The Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, Germany

 With the post-war construction boom and the arrival of centralised planning, inner-city slums were cleared once again, this time to make way for Modernist tower blocks – new light, bright 'flats in the sky' with hot running water and fitted kitchens. Unfortunately, the reality in too many cases turned out to be poor-quality accommodation provided by industrial building systems, which led to the 1968 collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in East London and necessitated widespread demolition.

But by the time Labour came to power in 1997, trumpeting the arrival of an 'urban renaissance' led by Richard Rogers, the aim appeared to be to emulate continental city living, building new apartments and converting warehouses into lofts, bringing people back into city centres while also finding new uses for the swathes of former industrial land around dockside and waterfront areas.

Wells Coates, 1934: The Isokon Building, Lawn Road, Hampstead, London

The surge of apartment building, which resulted from changes in planning policy prioritising brownfield sites, has seen a 300 per cent rise in the number of flats built between 1997 and 2007 – according to the National House Building Council – a figure exceeded only by the fall in the number of houses built, which decreased by more than 300 per cent. In 2007, semi-detached houses accounted for 14 per cent of new housing starts, compared with apartments, which accounted for 48 per cent of all stock.

In every British city centre, new and half-built apartment blocks dominate the skyline, alongside cleared sites and cranes surrounded by hoardings promising 'More Luxury Apartments Soon'. It's the same in London and all across the North, in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham, with the sheer amount of construction comparable only to the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Le Corbusier, 1947-52: Unité d'Habitation

But if vacant properties are anything to go by, then something has gone wrong with this 'renaissance', with large numbers of the flats lying empty. In Liverpool, 35 per cent of the new city centre apartments are empty (as reported in the Liverpool Echo), in Manchester the figure is 24 per cent and in Nottingham it's 15 per cent (from a survey undertaken by magazine Inside Housing).

The question is: could this be a cultural issue – are flats simply not that popular – or is it down to policy and market failures?

Kisho Kurokawa, 1972: Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Japan

It is easy to provide a cultural explanation for why the English like houses with gardens, but it's the type of apartments being built by developers – overwhelmingly one- and two-bedroom flats – which are the problem, highlighting the fact that the 'urban renaissance' did not aim to attract everybody back into the city – the young and old and families. Instead it has been targeted squarely at transient, mostly single, professionals working in the new financial and media industries also sprouting around the docks and waterfronts. The real continental experience, on the other hand, shows that it is possible to build apartments that provide family housing
and cater to all generations.

'In every British city centre, cranes and new and half-built apartment blocks dominate the skyline'

Emphasising the level of demand for family housing, a 2005 report from the London Housing Federation, Thinking Big: the Need for Larger Affordable Homes, revealed that the result of the focus on one- and two-bedroom apartments is leading to severe levels of overcrowding in the capital. At the same time recent research from Sam Street of Communities and Local Government's Housing Market and Planning Analysis department found that predictions about the growth of single person households conflicts with statistics showing that people prefer to live in bigger properties, with the average number of rooms per person increasing among those who can afford to buy.

The report suggested that talking about numbers of units is unhelpful, giving the misleading impression that all is well because government targets on housing numbers are being met even if people are not living in the new homes. Instead the best approach would be to look at floor area and habitable rooms. The authors added that high density can work but there is a need to look at lettings policy.

Ralph Erskine, 1969-1982: Byker Wall, Newcastle upon Tyne

It is policy towards lettings that is at the crux of the matter, because of the fact that anecdotal evidence suggests a huge number of new apartments are bought by investors for 'buy-to-let' or the newer phenomenon of buy-to-leave', which is behind the large numbers of empty flats littering city centres. This process occurs as investors buy properties purely for speculation, without any intention of letting them, waiting instead for land prices to rise to sell them on.
If 'buy-to-leave' is undermining new communities by leaving large numbers of homes empty, 'buy-to-let' is also having bizarre and unexpected consequences as investors let homes to local authorities who use them to provide housing for homeless families. This cycle is starting to occur with increasing regularity as investors find there is insufficient demand from the target market of single professionals, in contrast to councils who are desperate to provide accommodation as a result of the severe shortage of social housing.

Now, more and more 'luxury apartments', particularly in London, are being used to house homeless families in temporary accommodation. In many parts of Docklands, such as Virginia Quay, Canary Central and New Providence Wharf, the result is that many new schemes are home to an uncomfortable mixture of transient professionals with no stake in the area, and homeless families who are also new to the area and there on a temporary basis, and who are squeezed into flats too small for them.

When I spoke to the Home Builders Federation about this, suggesting that housebuilders are failing to build the types of homes people need and helping to create unstable places rather than the sustainable communities promised, I was told that high land values mean that only schemes with a large amount of development – one- and two-bedroom flats in other words – are viable.

By building so many small apartments the market is not providing what consumers of housing want or need, but with developers claiming they have no option and the market for investors buoyed by drivers such as homelessness it is hard to see how the process will be reversed. Consequently the fear is that today's building boom will be no less problematic than the post-war wave of construction which swept British cities in the 1950s and '60s.