It was good to be one of 1,000 people who spent their Friday night listening to architects talk about housing at the Barbican Centre last week – even though the UK's chronic lack of good homes is a downer, it’s got to be positive that so many people are interested in how to do something about it.
There was a lot of agreement that we need to find ways to decouple housing from speculation – so seeing homes as places to live rather than investment vehicles, and as part of the country’s infrastructure, which shapes how we live together as citizens, rather than a consumer product.
I particularly enjoyed hearing from Mellis Haward from Archio Ltd (who has built great Community Land Trust housing at Citizens’ House), who gave a nuts and bolts talk about how we need better retrofit programmes.
Astrid Smitham from APPARATA atchitects (who designed A House For Artists, affordable housing for creative people in Barking) talked about how new buildings need better circulation spaces – the corridors need to be less dark and narrow, and more likely to encourage people to stop and talk to each other and feel that they belong in their building.
And Osama Shoush from Southwark Council talked about the challenges Southwark is overcoming to build new council homes - particularly the fact that the combination of future rental income and central government grant doesn’t cover the costs.
But my favourite talk was from Russell Curtis, from RCKa, who showed us that there are 95 golf courses within greater London, which collectively take up as much space as the whole of LB Brent, of which around half are owned by local authorities, and those local authority owned ones take up the same space as LB Hammersmith and Fulham. Just by building on those golf courses, you could create 120,000 new homes, which would be a quarter of all the new homes London needs in the next 10 years. AND you could increase biodiversity at the same time, since golf courses look green but are actually very bad for plants and animals as the grass is so heavily managed. In fact, you could build most of those houses and leave nine holes on each golf course, so people could still play a full game of golf by going out and back. And there are another 75 golf courses within 5km of London, and 300 within 25km of London, so people could still get their golf in (or we could build even more homes on those ones…).