#30 - Jonathan Glancey

0:01How would you summarise the state of British house building today?

0:06Jonathan Glancey:How would I summarise the state of British house building today, Bruce? It's obviously a complicated mess. At the very top end of British house building, whether it's by traditional house builders or by very skilled architects for very wealthy or intelligent clients, there's good stuff. And there always will be, always has been. But what I was interested in writing about is something that's obsessed me and many of us for years, which is this thing, this thing called housing, right, with the I-N-G on the end, which is by definition, it's the mass market, it's the mass houses, the homes built for everybody that can't afford really to have an architect, to do them a beautiful house, or hasn't got the money to buy a beautiful house on Bologna Square, or a country estate, or a place in France or Florida.

0:59Jonathan Glancey:So housing in Britain is on the whole dreadful. And I wanted to investigate that and really think it through, given that it's something that in this country we have been able to do. Housing, this mass housing, it doesn't really start to the Industrial Revolution. And it got off to a pretty bad start. You know, all those back-to-backs built in Leeds and Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and so on. They weren't nice then. They aren't nice now. And most of them have gone, of course, although Leeds City kept building them to 1932, which is interesting. But aside from that, we've had a few golden moments in mass housing and they're quite a long time ago.

1:45Jonathan Glancey:And partly because basically council housing, local authority housing was abolished in 1980 effectively by Mrs Thatcher's Housing Act, for better or worse, whatever people think. But it did take away the local authority architects departments, which at their best, at their best, Bruce, this is the thing, it's absolutely key. And I'm only interested in trying to argue for the best for people by examining the worst. At their best, we produce brilliant housing. The London County Council in the 1890s, 1900s, shining example of a progressive, intelligent council with high-minded people and brilliant young architects working for it, who could certainly draw and could certainly know how bricks should be put together with their workforce, achieved wonders.

2:37Jonathan Glancey:And that is the standard we had, and we've lost in mass housing. That's city housing. And the other thing before you ask, push me, is the other housing is rural housing, distinct from city housing. And that's the one I think that drives many people bonkers today, because most rural housing or housing built on what's increasingly on the green belts or what the current government likes to call the grey belt, is done by big house building companies for maximum profit, for least input, and is deeply cynical and is just spread out in formless ways across the countryside. And if it's not done in that spirit, it's done by governments and their They're agencies who spout stuff about creating garden villages, green cities, new towns, which are basically forms of outer suburban sprawl in a slightly more contained way, but surrounded by hot air and jargon.

3:43Yes, no, it does make me great slightly when you hear politicians saying the new garden city and so and so, and you know they have no idea what they're talking about.

3:51Jonathan Glancey:Well, you've actually no idea, because the first garden city, the very first, was Letchworth. Now, it's actually an interesting place. It's over the many decades since it opened, it's sort of lost its real purpose, I suppose, and become more of an outer London glorious suburb in a way. But it still has something of its original intent. And what it had, and this is the whole point of the book, really, and what I argue for and build up to this argument, this rant, which I hope an informed rant, Bruce, and a fair one in many ways, I hope. But it says Letchworth, unlike so many of these new towns being built now, supposedly new towns, supposedly garden village, garden towns, had a purpose.

4:40Jonathan Glancey:And you can't just build. That's what the book really tries to say right way through. You can't just build houses, housing, and therefore you've solved the problem of how we live and where we live. places, towns, villages have always emerged for a reason, because they have a purpose to exist. And to its great credit, Letchworth did. It had proper factories and businesses from the beginning, real ones. I mean, absolutely fascinating ones too. The book talks about those for quite a few pages because they're just so wonderful. The high-minded, interesting, intelligent entrepreneurs came there feeling relaxed about it and had an intelligent workforce, high-minded, civic-minded people that wanted to do well.

5:33Jonathan Glancey:And they created a little town, a city, garden city, where how and why people worked was part and parcel of the way the town was organised and the way it looked. And that's what we don't have today. So we're just building all over the place, whether in towns, cities, villages, green belts, this strange thing called the grey belts, which doesn't exist of course, it's just the green belts with the politicians name attached because they want developers in there quick to build lots of bad housing. But we need always a purpose to build. Yeah, we should say to people who are listening that the book we're talking about is your new book, this one here.

6:15Jonathan Glancey:Where We Live. The Fractured Art of British House Building and How to Build the homes we need which is excellent reader which i've just finished very good um i'm interested in the difference in financial model of modern developers and how they operate with which i'm fairly familiar because i'm an smg developer myself um versus the way that it was done previously not necessarily by local authorities but more so by the sort of the bigger private developers, whether that's businesses or others, perhaps slightly earlier in the Victorian period in the 18th century. Can you sort of talk about how it is that the model differs and whether or not there are any learnings or anything that's applicable that we could do today?

7:05Jonathan Glancey:Certainly. I think the model today, if such a fancy word could be used, it's really a bit of free for all, that most, the majority of developers and the majority of house builders working with those developers are there to make and sell a product. And it really is a product. And that's these houses. And they want to build them just like any other, many products in the mass market as cheap as they can to whatever standard is required, technically, legally, structurally and so on and to make a maximum profit either for themselves as a private company or for their shareholders and they do indeed by the way make as you all know Britain's house builders do well and the profits margins for the big house builders are high so it's a good business to be in if you just want to be in business but what you're building is not architecture You're not building communities in the sense of real places.

8:08Jonathan Glancey:You're just building a product that can be sold. And then you can involve your marketing people and you can create websites and brochures. Singing the praises of these places and making them sound like paradise, earthly paradises, when, of course, they're anything but. That is one clear-cut and straightforward, simple model. Making money as best you can, as quickly as you can, as profitably as you can. I think the great difference when we look back to some of the very interesting housing schemes of the 19th century, aside from the dreadful back-to-back houses in industrial cities, there were two sets of people or organisations, as it were, that made things happen to their credit.

8:55Jonathan Glancey:it. One were just very, very high-minded entrepreneurs who had good intentions generally in life. We can look at the cabras, the round trees, the fries, those people who had that sort of calm, quiet, religious, moral belief. We can look at certain cities where there were clearly, as clearly an intent to build well and that anybody coming in to make money out of building houses had to do it to a certain standard, or indeed to pattern books. Or if you look at the London squares going out from the City of London across what's now the West End, try and imagine if it was in about 1850, 1840. Absolutely terrific.

9:46Jonathan Glancey:Garden square after city garden square, beautifully planned, And yet all built by, nearly all of them built by house builders or by, you know, grand landowners, of course, that own that land. But then, you know, giving that work out to people that could get buildings built quickly and efficiently. but to a standard because they themselves at that time in a city like london the aristocratic families the grand what be now the upper middle class of today lived there themselves i mean they had their own places in the countryside but they also lived in you know the what say in london the west end all around oxford street regent street mayfair and so they didn't want to live in rough looking places and they had a sense of great culture there but people brought up in the era of the grand tour and all that so they were well aware of you know high standards of architecture and design and culture and literature even if they could be quite yobbish themselves some of them but they knew but they knew this is what you did they understood the sense of decorum and when you built you built according to a set of social and civic rules um and and that's a great thing.

11:01Jonathan Glancey:So it doesn't matter if you yourself personally were a greedy sod and a drunken swine and whatever else, but you knew how to behave when you came to build the city. And that's so important. So you've got these two types of people working through the 19th century. More towards the end of the 19th century, we see these great entrepreneur patrons, as they like the cabras and so on, like Titus Salter. They really, they just wanted to do the best for people. And it's very interesting that when we go and visit those places now, if you go, which, you know, writing this book, I'd travel massively around the country again, just re-looking at places.

11:45Jonathan Glancey:And you go to something like Bourneville, and it's so utterly charming. And, you know, it's become a place where people will virtually fight to be able to buy one of the houses there. They're really nice. And most of all, they're terribly well built. So those grand philanthropic businessmen, they just believed in doing things well. They didn't really know how to do anything other than do things well. And that's something I think we really need to learn. And by the way, Bruce, there's one other, for me, absolutely key type of development in the 19th century, which is the sort of stuff I'm really fascinated by, which is the pure industrial developments that turned out to be really good in terms of planning and building.

12:36Jonathan Glancey:And there I'm thinking, which you might guess, of the key railway towns. I'm absolutely, Swindon crew, they were so well done. And if you go to So Swindon today, Swindon is, I'm sorry to insult people living in Swindon, but it's sprawled into a mess physically. It's a shame. It lost its heart with its industry, which is basically the railway industry and locomotive building. But what survives of the Great Western Railway workers' housing is where you'd want to live if you're posted to Swindon. And they're much in demand. And quite rightly, they're lovely, but they're the workers' cottages. that's the standard.

13:20Jonathan Glancey:They did it at Crewe, they did it at Swindon. And more than that, Swindon was built up with the whole point of intelligent workforce coming to a pure, genuine greenfield site. So what was Swindon before the Great Western Railway? Just a tiny village, farms all around. The Great Western Railway wanted its locomotive works there and its maintenance depots there. it built them and it built them to the highest standards but it had it had to have intelligent workforce for the new mechanical industries so what did it build it built a mechanics institute what does a mechanics institute look like like a like a gothic church um so you know you're replaced you've replaced the church from historically in terms of teaching and the young boys that went to that institute could have been farmhand sons and in 10 15 20 years they could be a senior engineer working at the highest level in the world.

14:24Jonathan Glancey:And you can imagine that makes a great town. And that, by the way, I think, oh, well, that's such a long time ago. But in 1948, when Nye Bevan in the House of Commons announced the official opening of the National Health Service, which was a Churchill Coalition wartime initiative. But when he announced it officially in the House of Commons, he said we knew how to do it there was a national it was already there the great western railway had introduced it which indeed they had they created the equivalent of a national health service within swindon itself and that was indeed a model one model key model for the national health service in its early days and at its best so you can see that is i suppose what i'm saying is that there are these different ways of building to high standard one you can be high-minded and do it really well like the railways and like those great other industrialists the religiously minded industrialists or you did it because it was a matter of civic decorum you know you couldn't do you're going to build edinburgh new town you're going to build bath you're going to build london or many other towns and cities around england at the time you you just did it well according to a set of rules yeah it's i love that idea and i i would love sort of the world to work like that now i'm just trying to imagine what would incentivize a bunch of barrett housing executives to have that that mindset of uh on housing these days i don't think at the moment i don't think you can i think you've um you'd have to go right back to basics at the end of the book I call for a kind of a doomsday of Britain, a new doomsday book being written, looking at the whole country in terms of what land there is, how it's used, and what land is and could be available to build housing.

16:15But for me, to build a house, to build any building,

16:21Jonathan Glancey:it's a big thing to do. I don't think it should just be a simple, cheap bit of junk chucked up. every building should be thought through carefully. We talk so much, or we're talked at so much these days about sustainability, environmental responsibility, blah, blah, blah. Well, but we don't do it with all this mass housing, quite the opposite. So it's about time we did. But the key to it would be to say, well, if we're going to build new housing, here are all those Barrett's and other people, as you've mentioned there, all the names we can trip off our tongues. They can get a move on. They can bring private enterprise at its most energetic to get things done, build efficiently and quickly.

17:04Jonathan Glancey:But they would be part of something bigger than themselves. So they would create, let's create, we want to build X thousand houses somewhere in Lincolnshire or Suffolk or Hampshire. Well, it needs to be a real place. So you need to work together as a team. you have to have a kind of plan but not just a plan in the sense of we're going to build these streets and these housing and there could be a you know there can be a puppet square here in the satia no it has to be a place where like swindon like crew 150 years ago but in modern terms contemporary terms has a real reason to be there so what could you build well i mean i was at on the edge of cambridge the other day i'm going back to look again after having written the book at Northstow, which is this dreadful new townish extension of Cambridge.

17:57Jonathan Glancey:Nominally, it has sort of houses designed by architects, but they look like they're terrible. It looks paper thin and grim, grim. And there's no real planning. And on paper, you can see someone's drawn a plan. But the experience of being there is a nothing because there's nothing there. There's actually only the housing. but there's nothing there there's no centre and there's no reason for it to be other than to tick a box for we've built 10 15 000 houses for people but those people um those that have to work and want to work they have to commute and that to me seems absolutely bloody stupid when there's there's Cambridge there what's Cambridge about Cambridge is about no there's academic side of there's research, there's intelligence, there's scientific stuff going on all the time.

18:50So why at

18:51Jonathan Glancey:the centre of that place isn't there part of that? Why isn't there, I mean the whole place is built on what used to be RAF Oakington, an RAF air base, so why not some sort of aviation research bureau company located there? And by the way, it's where government can actually help instead of taxing businesses to death you know you'd actually help businesses if you're a serious government whether you call yourself conservative labor whatever you want to call yourself in the future reform or whatever it is make these things happen you know get people to create businesses intelligent intelligent businesses you know not just more warehouses delivering junk that comes from China and ships to Felixstown and gets driven down the A14 road and taken to our houses by wage slaves driving vans all day.

19:46Jonathan Glancey:And they're things that we just get in and throw in the bin for landfill because we're sort of junk anyway. But what about if we really build places to encourage business? Government working with entrepreneurs, government entrepreneurs working with those house builders, itching to make money out of housing. well do it all well do it all together i believe i've always thought like you like to do that would require effectively a series of corporate partnerships wouldn't it that you'd need the house builders to do effect the same thing almost as waterstones and costa have done in having a deal of having costa coffee shops inside warstones or i don't know greggs and esso petrol stations have done where you have greggs inside of an esso petrol station because Because it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

20:36But I think the problem with that is that the ability of the housing developers, of the developers to sell the houses, is in no way related to the quality of the places, or very little way related to the quality of the places that they're building. Because they know they'll sell all the houses, no matter what. So why would they add extra costs?

20:56Jonathan Glancey:They won't. So this is where we do need, as you said, it's working. It is working together. And the things you've mentioned there are very good examples. And you can extend that to railway stations, which are always itching wherever they are to become social centres at some point or the other retail centres. And those of us that use out-of-town railway stations, you think, how wonderful if they had the equivalent of things you actually need and want. Or if you had to buy nice food on the way home rather than junk. and they could have why don't they have things perhaps people don't want these anymore by the way it might be any old-fashioned they might not want dry cleaners or post offices or news agents I suppose nobody wants any of those things anymore but the equivalent anyway um you know built into the railway station rather than these poor sad places with just an expensive car park with cameras watching it and a lonely unstarked station there's nothing going on not even a lavatory you know and it's pathetic um those could be real places um so we keep so we keep building and whilst we're talking i guess you know maybe in the evening some of these building works will have stopped but as as it's a metaphorically as as we're speaking more and more and more of this mass housing uh crude housing is being built um you can go out of the big cities down any A road or catch a train and just catch one mainline train and look week by week, month by month, you'll see more of this housing springing up.

22:40I like, by the way, the name you give to it. I like that you call it Anywhere Housing. It's very sort of David Goodhart, but for architecture almost. Anywhere. Yeah, it's completely sort of generic, horrific toy town, I've heard, or noddy houses are other terms, aren't they? Just really, really bland vomit.

22:58Jonathan Glancey:But I want to say anywhere because, you know, obviously it's the opposite of somewhere. And, you know, what I'm trying to argue for in my book is you build somewhere. And I think people actually enjoy living somewhere. I do understand this. I've had enough experience over years understanding people get very defensive about the houses they buy. If you're borrowing loads of money you haven't got to buy a house that you so want, you know, and you end up in some of that, it's not really very interesting and you have to commute everywhere and there's no shops and there's no doctor's surgery and there's no school and you've got to put a brave face on it and people do and then they'll get a bit angry and chippy with you if you say this is not very good but I think the answer to that is to say and which I do say now is what if you were offered something else?

23:50Jonathan Glancey:What if instead of that cul-de-sac on the edge of beijing stoke um you were offered a really i would say lovely house you know um with with there's a garden square here there's real shops here there's a real pub there um and there's work there as well and you're near you know and we thought of the stations um you will find by the way just occasionally as you travel around europe you'll find um still developments where what's um boringly called infrastructure that's a terrible ugly word but we all know what it means with infrastructure put in first um i know finland well and um they surprisingly for a small country they build lots of new housing they have quite a lot of immigrants coming in now and and also people wanting to spread out a bit more um but when they've built these new settlements um mostly not that far from helsinki because it's finland's fairly centralized on helsinki um you get to them easily by train or if they're not too far away by really good trams high-speed trams but certainly by mainline trains and they build that first you know it's all there there's railway stations there the you know that the school is being built before the people move in before they buy houses and move in.

25:10Jonathan Glancey:So when you're looking at the equipment of a website or a brochure, perhaps we'd like to go and live out of the city somewhere, but quite like a new place because, you know, we don't want all the fuss of doing up in the old place or whatever the reason is, whatever it is you want. But, oh, my gosh, look, it's all there, you know. There is a doctor's surgery. It's the opposite of Northstone I mentioned a minute ago, you know. Yeah. I do always think that the MPPF should be much more prescriptive about this kind of stuff and say that, look, for every, I don't know, thousand houses that you build, you must build a pub.

25:43Or every 3 ,000 houses, you must build a doctor's surgery, or whatever it is, and just be like black and white. You want to build X many, you've got to build these things to go with it.

25:53Jonathan Glancey:But you should be bit by... But you can't just build. That's what I keep saying. Where did this numbers game come from? It's a very interesting thing. This craze for government setting targets. You know, they've done this madly well before the Second World War. But since the Second World War, kind of crazed, weird game or competition where one government will say, we're going to build 250 ,000 houses a year. And the next one says, we're going to build 300 ,000, 400 ,000. And I think one of the Harold Wilson governments actually managed that one year. But, you know, but this is huge numbers. And it's a kind of madness.

26:35and again you need to think

26:37Jonathan Glancey:hang on, who are you building for what are you building, where are you building are all the key things and that big question for me which runs through the book the title is The Fractured Art of British House Building because the actual art of in that modest way of art, not as in fine art as in a painting you see in the Tate Britain or National Gallery but art as in the well making of things that mean making and do things really well and that at art so when you look at the brickwork of a house it's properly laid um and you and the workers that do that are trained to be intelligent workers and responsible workers and get paid properly to do it it's all it's all part of a continuum isn't it so you go to a building site for these houses really interesting this mass housing i'm sure you might have been on one or seen one yourself or certainly films of them they're kind of pretty tragic you'll see some of the um it's just awful there's no sense a real sense of camaraderie or spirit or you know that they're not like an amish community raising a beautiful communal barn you know in the states or whatever whatever but there's no sense of joy in it and no sense of doing things well but if you you know we all know that if you're when you're when you have a skill whether as an architect as a writer as a musician myself you're doing you automatically try and do things as well as you can it's just what you do and you want to get better you don't want to get worse you want to get better and better and better until you can't work anymore which for most of us is when we just drop off our perches because we want to keep going because we're excited but you'll find that and i'm sure you know this i'm sure most people know this the majority of people do like fine enough do like working and working well people laugh at that today and say oh no we're all we all want early retirement blah blah blah that's because they have horrible jobs or they're satisfied or unhappy and um that idea of retirement's been drilled into people when actually a lot of people think oh i quite like to do something you know yeah i have to say with the contractors I've worked with are all pretty bog standard small contractors I've been delighted how willing and interested they are to do something a bit different and a bit more interesting and a bit more difficult and I do a bit more I don't know say brickwork detailing that's got a bit more sort of artistic flair to it rather than just sort of stretch a bond everywhere and all these sort of things and every single one of them you can see a little bit of extra pride in their work when you sort of say okay you're doing it that way but let's do a little bit more let's do something a bit more special and they they sort of they pause sometimes and they think okay oh i haven't done that before i haven't but i never got taught to do that but i'll give it a go kind of thing and they sort of test themselves and they end up really being very proud of what they've done or even at its best you know those those people in those workforces saying turning around the saying to the people in charge, whoever that is, the professional people saying, how about doing it like this?

29:54Jonathan Glancey:You know, because they're the people actually doing it. And they can say to you, you know, an architect or an engineer will do things a certain way to get it to work. They think, okay, that's fine in my head, that's all going to work. And then on site, maybe, you know, things turn up, don't they? You'll find that what you're building, the land you're building on is not quite what you thought it was. I don't know, there may be many reasons why you need to do things. Or maybe there lots of interesting animals there you know not just great crested newts there could be all sorts of wildlife that you need to take into account which you don't on a drawing board a computer screen um and it's great when you've got a real workforce engaged they can say just point all sorts of things out to you oh i don't know i think we've got the mix of water and lime here wrong i don't know whatever it is you know but people people fully engaged it's fascinating and if you around this country, one of the things that's really interesting is that you'll find it, this is a very, very, is it British English?

30:51Jonathan Glancey:I think it's a British thing right through, you'll find hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer organisations, societies, where people do things for nothing, for love, they just like doing them and they can range from, you know, knitting and making, making model, toy houses, model houses, making model airplanes, running preserved railways. And look at them. They all, they're competent and they have to do things. And it's a kind of, it's glorious and it's a kind of something sadness to it as well. Why isn't that being done in the normal day-to-day work for most people? And of course, they have superb companies in Britain making brilliant things very, very well.

31:34Jonathan Glancey:I know that. You go to Rolls-Royce Aero Engines and you're going to find very, very highly skilled people at every level. and quite, thank God, we depend on them and they will be good and they are fully involved. It's that kind of standard you want. Not everything can be a Rolls-Royce standard, of course, but you want that spirit when you come to making things, making buildings, make them well. And one of the things that, you know, in the book, I think, and you know this, one of the great periods of English building, of building houses, both private houses, luxurious houses, and modest houses, and little new towns, and public housing for the first time was in that arts and crafts era in the late 19th century, because the whole spirit of it was geared up to do things well.

32:30Jonathan Glancey:And it was infectious. And the evidence is in your eyes, you say, oh, well, you sure you might just be reading history books, Jonathan no just go and see the buildings and go to the boundary estate in Shoreditch in London and look at one of the first great slum true slum replacement schemes and look at the quality and look at the brickwork it's all done like Roman brickwork and just glorious and this is for some of the some of the poorest people in London living there and it's still social housing today and that's terrific that's standard um and that was a period where you could say why did that happen a very complex story but um earlier on i was talking about that sort of rather high-minded view of the world and it's nothing to be sneered at you know the sort of people having a moral sense um that sounds old-fashioned doesn't it but um a moral sense doesn't mean you have to you know kneel down in a church and make ostentatious signs of the crosses or whatever your equivalent religion is it means just doing things well and that means you know treating people well but in the specific case we're talking about building well you know just do it well yeah i do think you know the you know the sort of hilarious trend of developments being named after the road names in particular being named after the things they destroy like strawberry fields or like meadow view and this kind of thing i always say if you named the roads after the executives of the of the housing development companies so they know their name is going to be enshrined in in a road name for centuries they might care a bit more about the quality of what it was they were naming uh naming after themselves uh it's utterly tragic i was uh finally enough was and i mentioned i was in north stow because it's fresh in my mind outside Cambridge.