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This year’s Housing Design Awards coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two, when there was a determination to house the nation decently and quickly. At that time the chronic shortage of homes, materials and skills generated remarkable designer - and industry - led initiatives to increase production and build affordable houses in viable New Town communities and cities. There was no shortage of sites to clear or land to build on.
The present government has signalled its intention to give the production of sustainable housing the highest priority. Since taking office for a fresh term, it has announced welcome initiatives, including the release of government land where change of use to housing communities is feasible, plus a shared equity scheme for first-time buyers. But the shortfall in well-designed social housing for rent remains. Further initiatives and changes in procurement practice will be needed if the scale of the problem is to be addressed with sufficient pace.
With the advent this year of an award recognising the best from the awards scheme’s first six decades, now is timely to reflect on past lessons and successes in procurement and to compare with current practice.
The post-war building boom has been so often written off for its failures, but its procurement routes focused design talent on quality issues, whereas today our best designers are tied up too much in the process rather than the production of new homes.
State Procurement
The years after 1945 were characterised by effective partnerships between politicians and professionals at the highest level in central and local government with very active industry participation to meet clear annual production targets. These were challenging days which I had the privilege to experience both as an architect / civil servant in the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and afterwards as a co-founder of Phippen Randall & Parkes.
Government departments and some local authorities responsible for the major building programme in housing as well as education and health invested heavily in supporting research and development teams in-house. These were led by distinguished architects enthusiastic to use their talents and post-war experiences to raise national standards and spend the available resources wisely. The supporting agencies included the Building Research Station whose architects and other professionals made a unique contribution to building design in this period. It was an era of shortages which generated innovative solutions, uniquely recorded in Andrew Saint’s book, Towards a Social Architecture.
In the Ministry of Housing & Local Government, Cleeve Barr and Oliver Cox set about establishing new policies based on a better understanding of user needs, and put together multidisciplinary teams for R&D. I had to sign the Official Secrets Act while a civil servant, but I can say that initially there was much hard debate about the political wisdom of building demonstration projects to show ideas and possibilities within cost limits: success could not be guaranteed and bad press could not be ruled out for failure. It was a tribute to that generation of administrators that they not only accepted the risk but joined the project teams as well.
It was a formative experience for young architects to work so closely with sociologists, housing managers and other skills to develop methods of enquiry that led to more informed briefs, and to follow on by building projects with local authorities and New Towns. The teams revisited the occupied projects with questionnaires using the sociologists’ interviewing skills and the architects’ ability to use their eyes and observe the tenants responding to the environment. All this experience was published in “Building Bulletins”, including projects for family housing in West Ham, older people in Stevenage and single person accommodation in Leicester. They delivered sensible guidance on residential roads and footpaths. They even braved the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1962 with an early exploration of ideas for an adaptable house that was in sharp contrast with the show houses of the time.
The enthusiasm of these teams to study a community’s needs before making proposals for area improvements is well illustrated by the Deeplish Study for Rochdale which was the first to propose refurbishment rather than wholesale clearance. Published some 40 years ago, this was a joint exercise which included the Urban Planning Group and the local authority responsible for implementation. The surviving architects and one sociologist revisited the area this summer to review their earlier proposals in the light of subsequent changes. A recent survey of the residents gave a 69% satisfaction rating and the group hopes to write up this pioneering initiative for later publication.
1961 was the year Parker Morris published the seminal and long-lived Homes for Today and Tomorrow. After years of post-war housing when area standards fluctuated with the ups and downs of the economy, these proposals included a thorough investigation of how people lived, set out area standards based on occupancy and highlighted the need for storage space. It was followed by Space in the Home which demonstrated layouts and room designs that accommodated the essential furniture without wasting space. As Simon Allford reminded us in his 2002 Housing Design Awards essay, these standards are still used in assessing housing quality indicators, and a contemporary study of equal weight is long overdue.
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Front covers to four Building Bulletins from the 1960s