In Hackney, east London, a pair of luxury apartment towers are fast rising above Shoreditch Park, soon to boast multimillion pound penthouses designed by Sir David Chipperfield. It’s not an unusual sight in the capital – except for the fact that the project was the council’s idea, as a canny means of paying for the regeneration of the estate next door.
It is what the borough’s head of regeneration, Karen Barke, describes as an “unapologetically commercial approach, but with a social purpose” – part of Hackney’s plan to build about 3,000 homes over the next seven years, half of which will be for private sale, to cross-subsidise the construction of more affordable housing.
In the absence of government funding, and constrained by strict limits on the amount they can borrow to build, enterprising councils are having to find ways to meet their housing targets through unconventional means.
More than a third of UK local authorities are now setting up their own housebuilding companies, which behave more like commercial developers than the conventional council housing departments of the postwar era, building homes for private sale or rent to generate much-needed revenue.
These publicly owned development companies are mainly emerging in London and south-east England, where values are higher, although Sheffield council has also announced plans to build 2,300 homes this way over the next 15 years.
Croydon has set up Brick by Brick, a council-owned company to deliver 1,000 new homes in the next three years, half for affordable rent and half for private sale. Newham has established Red Door Ventures to build 3,000 private rented homes, while Barking and Dagenham has the biggest ambitions of all, with plans to build 42,500 homes over 15 years through a variety of joint ventures.
In Essex, Thurrock council has established Gloriana, a publicly owned company designed to kickstart housing in an area where few commercial developers were interested in building. “The idea is not to undercut the market,” says the council’s former head of housing, Barbara Brownlee, “but the company is able to start development projects without having to consider making the sort of swift and significant profit – typically around 25% – that developers seek.”
Architect Paul Karakusevic has built a practice of 85 people working entirely on housing for local authorities, with 3,000 homes currently on site or in detailed design for 13 London councils. Most of them are learning how to build housing again for the first time in four decades, since Margaret Thatcher took away their ability to do so – a power that was only returned in 2012.
“It’s taken time to build up in-house capacity, but local authorities are now doing a tremendous job,” says Karakusevic, who has written an optimistic book for the Royal Institute of British Architects looking at the new wave of social housing, to be published in spring 2017. “By doing it on their own, rather than partnering with developers, councils can achieve around a third more affordable housing on each project.”
The government’s housing white paper, which was launched this week and called for a sharp increase in the numbers of new houses being built, praised these “innovative models” of council-led housebuilding, but it also declared that the right to buy should be extended to such properties, potentially putting all this new stock of social rented housing in jeopardy.
“Councils have worked so hard over the last decade to get where we are now,” says Karakusevic. “To be forced to sell all these homes off would be madness.”
Six of the best new council-led housing projects
In a borough where it’s more profitable to put a lorry park on your land than to sell it for housing, how does a council meet its target of building 20,000 new homes by 2021? Rising out of the ground in Tilbury, this carefully planned neighbourhood of terraces, mews streets and courtyard houses represents one possible answer. It is the first project by Thurrock’s ambitious house building company, Gloriana, comprising 128 new homes for sale and rent, designed by Bell Phillips architects using a variety of familiar housing types with generous back gardens, broken up with contrasting mottled red and grey brickwork. Unlike your usual soulless volume housebuilder’s estate, it already feels like it has the makings of a real place.
When a plan by local housing associations stalled after the 2008 financial crisis, Norwich City council took the brave step of setting out to develop the site itself. Following an international architectural competition, London-based Mikhail Riches was selected, with a scheme that reinstates a terraced street pattern to an area that had been blighted by clumsy postwar planning. Due for completion next summer, it will be the UK’s largest ever Passivhaus development – a standard of energy efficiency that will see heating bills reduced to about £150 a year – providing 100 new light-flooded homes, 80% social housing and the rest for private sale, the first project in Norwich council’s new eco-homes programme.
As the first phase in the wider regeneration of Ponders End – which will see 1,000 new homes built by 2026 – this little street represents the first new social housing to be built in the London Borough of Enfield for almost four 40 years. With all homes pre-allocated to existing tenants and leaseholders, moving from the nearby Alma Estate, the future residents could be closely involved in the design process. Continuing the surrounding urban grain, the design takes its cue from the traditional London terraced street, providing 38 new homes in a mixture of townhouses, flats and maisonettes, half social-rented and half for shared ownership, with big windows and generous back gardens.
Channeling the majestic arched slab blocks of housing estate into a small backstreet site in Newham, Worland Gardens is the work of Peter Barber, one of the most imaginative and playful architects working on local authority housing. Bringing a bit of character and brick solidity to an area that’s been subjected to cheap post-Olympic speculative housing, the shared-ownership homes are designed with arched social “stoops” at their entrances, while the buildings are cut back to create first-floor terraces, and the big vaulted opening leads to a little square around the back. A clever use of a small end-of-terrace site.
How do you responsibly and respectfully densify the suburbs, when the only land available consists of small infill sites that are too awkward to attract traditional developers? Croydon’s answer was to do it themselves. It set up Brick by Brick, a private independent company, with the council acting as sole shareholder, to bring forward hundreds of little housing schemes, designed by a range of small and upcoming practices. Coldharbour Road, designed by young female architects vPPR is one such project, comprising eight shared-ownership homes on a tight backland garage site. The perceived mass of the development is broken down by pulling the facade in and out to form a playful profile, creating porches and terraces in the process.
Hillington Square, King’s Lynn
A model of how to improve existing postwar housing estates with a range of surgical interventions, rather than razing them to the ground, Mae architects’ work on Hillington Square in Norfolk is as powerful as it is subtle. Recognising that the existing fabric was sound and there was no need for demolition, the architects set about adding new stair and lift cores, introducing bigger windows and new front doors at street level and converting problematic deck-access corridors into balconies where possible. Encompassing 320 homes across 15 different buildings, these tweaks and upgrades have been transformative, pointing a way forward for a more sensitive form of estate regeneration across the UK.
