Above: Sovereign Harbour Eastbourne (Antony Clayton)
Modern house builders such as Barratt, Wimpey and Persimmon build around 160,000 new homes a year. All too often these are of a soulless, standard design, constructed out of glaring red brick, with little effort to incorporate local vernacular styles or materials. Incongruous features, such as classical doorways, are bolted on with no sense of architectural style or detailing. Wimpey Homes anachronistically describe their flats in Gloucester as “Queen Anne apartments”.
Housing estates – often gated communities - are designed totally around the car, with land-devouring layouts of closes that make navigation difficult. In an audit of one hundred new schemes in the south-east Cabe (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) reported that, “often the public realm effectively becomes a technical area for storing and manoeuvring cars, rather than spaces or places in their own right.”
Designer Wayne Hemingway has commented that, “The house builders have the perfect business model. They have managed to keep their output the same, year in, year out, and yet their profits have gone up on a very steep curve. They have been able to produce something incredibly bland and still make massive profits.”
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