Rowan Moore:
The home, supposedly at the heart of British culture and the British economy, has become the victim of a dysfunctional market. Consumers in many cases can't buy anything at all, and those that can have little real choice in what they can buy. At the core of the problem is lack of supply: the amount of building land is highly restricted by the planning system, which pushes its price up.
Yet there was a time when the British housing industry was hugely effective at building large numbers of homes, which responded to occupiers' needs and created wholly new neighbourhoods, whose streets and squares became real places, rather than leftover oddments between buildings...
This time was the 19th century, the period that gave us most of the London we have now. Over two decades in the middle of the century, the districts of Kensington, Notting Hill and North Kensington were created out of almost nothing, a feat that the architectural historian Fred Scott compares to the building of the Pyramids.
It was all to do with basic standards and simplicity, he argues. Full of interest. Now read on.
