“We can’t afford to get our foot on the first rung of the housing ladder,” he says. “No-one in our office can. But most people would like to walk to work if they could.”
This is the perennial complaint that has dogged the housing market in the capital ever since the 19th century. Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, was fascinated by the problem of finding housing for lower income groups (called the “labouring classes”) and paid for prototype “model housing”, designed by architect Henry Roberts, for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace. More directly relevant was the marvelous prototype block of artisans’ housing that Roberts built in Bloomsbury even before the Great Exhibition, which is still there today, and which contains all the essentials of social housing including that old favourite, much used today, of gallery access from a courtyard.
After that, everybody pitched in. The solution always emerged - and still does - as some form of tenement block. Following Roberts’ example, tenements were the preferred solution for the first Victorian charitable housing associations. Strip away the gloss and the hype, and tenements are what low-cost housing providers are building today. The latest prefabricated housing developments by the Peabody Trust, for example - often seen as being very advanced and experimental - are remarkably similar in concept to their Victorian ancestors. Peabody’s much-vaunted Murray Grove prefab development by architects Cartwright Pickard is (apart from its volumentric construction) uncannily like Roberts’ Bloomsbury example of over 150 years ago.
Today’s tiny new student apartments at university are not only tenements, they are essentially microflats - only with shared kitchens. As for Piercy Connor’s self-contained Microflats - they look kind of space-age, but basically they too are tenements. And they are none the worse for that. Tenements are just economical blocks of flats: good design really can pay off there. In Manchester the impending “Krashpad” development of small flats (prices there start at around £70,000 for the 300-square foot studios) is not dissimilar, and there is a world of minute prefab hotel rooms, from France to Japan, that try the same trick.
But the most intractable problem is always land prices. Unless the land is somehow made cheap, there is no way the built apartments - no matter how small and cleverly they are designed, even with every inch of space used as if it were a racing yacht - can be truly affordable. My favourite Victorian housing provider was named “The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company”. It still exists today, as the Industrial Dwellings Society. The “Four Per Cent” referred to the low-cost loans they negotiated from bankers to finance their developments - mainly in the East End of London. This was at a time when most Victorian financiers expected a return of ten per cent. Lending money on such favourable terms was widely seen as a philanthropic act by the banks.
