Can Georgian-style houses fix the housing crisis? Our politicians seem to think so 

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Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Home Front. Christmas has come and I hope you are reading after enjoying a break of some sort from the quagmire that was 2023. Our politicians are gearing up for a general election which, I hear, will likely be in May, but could arrive even sooner.

Housing is, as Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner told me in November, front and centre of Labour’s pitch for government. But they will have quite a task on their hands if they win.

Britain has an epic housing crisis, at the heart of which is a shortage of new, good quality affordable housing.

And yet housebuilding hit a 15-year low in 2023, with the number of new homes granted planning approval collapsing to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Conservatives decided to scrap their own housebuilding target of 300,000 new homes per year at the end of 2022. Just as well, because they would have missed it.

Figures released in November by the National House Building Council show that the number of new homes registered as under construction fell by 53 per cent – 20,680 – in Q3 2023, compared to 44,153 in the same period in 2022. The number of new homes completed fell by 15 per cent.

With both parties already on election footing, both the Conservatives and Labour have pledged to build new homes. And one particular kind has captured their imagination: “Georgian-style housing”.

Georgian architecture was based on the classical styles of Ancient Greece and Rome. Think flat facades with pillars, domes and colonnades. The neoclassical homes of this period were often low rise – between two or five stories high – and built symmetrically out of stone or brick.

Michael Gove is well known to be a fan of the Poundbury development in Dorset, a neoclassical town built by the Duchy of Cornwall. In the central square of the development – Queen Mother Square – is an apartment block with columns resembling an Ancient Greek or Roman hall which has been painted bright yellow and adorned with the British Royal family’s coat of arms.

During his time at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Mr Gove has sought to introduce design codes to ensure that new builds are “aesthetically pleasing” and thrown his support behind the idea of setting up a new school for architecture which teaches “traditional” design.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to build new towns if he becomes prime minister and said in his conference speech that he specifically wants to build “Georgian-style townhouses” in urban areas. To make that happen, he has said that developers would be given special permission to build on brownfield land if they met new design standards which would require them to build “gentle urban developments”.

Skirting the fact that Labour’s housing policies sound remarkably like Mr Gove’s, it’s worth asking why both the left and the right are so keen on solving the current housing crisis in the 2020s by building homes which echo the low-rise, low-density flat-fronted Georgian townhouses of the 1700s and 1800s.

Is it a facile attempt to placate traditionalists who oppose the building of new homes in their area, aka Nimbys (including many MPs?) Or is there genuine architectural merit in mimicking this type of housing?

Nicholas Boys Smith is the founder of Create Streets, a research organisation which advises local communities, local councils and the government on how to create “beautiful” neighbourhoods. He cited multiple polls which show that Georgian terraces consistently rank among Britons’ favourite types of building.

“The case for lower-density, Georgian-style or otherwise is that it’s a way of creating the types of streets and style and home or place which make it easy to know your neighbour, to walk to the shops, to be near the school or park,” he told i.

This is because Georgian terraces can create streets of homes which, if designed properly, include squares with communal green space and amenities such as shops and schools. Think of Bath’s crescents, of Chichester’s townhouses, or the large Huguenot homes in Spitalfields, east London or Bedford Square in central London.

For its part, Poundberry is a good, modern example of this sort of planning.

However, the veneration of “Georgian-style” architecture could also, as architectural designer Benjamin Wells notes, be a reaction against some of the high-rise developments which were built in the post-war years.

Wells is currently an architect at Caruso St John Architects in London. He has also worked at leading firms such as Adam Khan Architects and Carmody Groarke where he was the project architect for Maggie’s Centre in Liverpool – an award-winning structure at Clatterbridge Hospital where cancer patients receive specialist support and care.

“Building new towns that are lower density than, say, a post-war new town like Milton Keynes is definitely the right way to go,” Wells said over the phone.

“There’s certainly value in what is being said about Georgian-style homes, but we need different types of housing which work with what’s already there, not just one typology,” he added.

The danger of focusing so heavily on “Georgian-style” housing, as Wells sees it, is that we risk looking to old ways of doing things and failing to “create a new aesthetic” which could be “exciting” in the way that Georgian homes once were.

“Politicians should be getting contemporary architects to build modern housing,” Wells said.

One benchmark could be A House for Artists, a social housing project for low-income creatives in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

The building was commissioned by the council from London-based architectural practice Apparata, which was founded by Astrid Smitham and Nicholas Lobo Brennan. It has since won the prestigious Stirling Prize.

A House for Artists is built from concrete and presents a modern take on a block of flats where communal spaces are factored into the design.

The building has no internal corridors, which allows for more living space inside the flats, as well as walls that can be reconfigured if, for instance, a two-person family becomes a three-person family and needs an extra room.

But getting British politicians on board with contemporary design more broadly could prove tricky.

When it comes to housebuilding, design is a curiously contentious and emotive issue. This is not unique to the United Kingdom; in the Netherlands, right-wing politicians such as the Dutch MP Thierry Baudet have become obsessed with “ugly” architecture and argue that it is corrupting society. In Hungary, the country’s right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán has advocated for building in styles which predate the 20th century.

Such narratives are nothing new. In the 80s, 90s and 2000s, hostility towards high-rise estates emerged in Britain. This was epitomised by Tony Blair choosing to give his first speech as prime minister at the Aylesbury Estate in south London, where he spoke of “forgotten people” and alluded that the design of the place they lived had created poverty and bad behaviour.

The truth – as anyone currently living in a period property and struggling to pay their mortgage or rent will tell you – is that poverty is engendered by expensive housing, not simply the fact of living on a high-rise estate.

Indeed, the wealthy residents of new developments such as London’s Embassy Gardens – where a glass swimming pool is suspended in the air – or, indeed, billionaires living in penthouses from New York to Dubai, prove that high-rise living is far from synonymous with deprivation and decay.

But design is an issue. And as the Grenfell disaster tragically demonstrated, Britain urgently needs quality affordable housing where design and safety standards are not areas for compromise.

When I visited A House For Artists in the summer, I found residents sitting together on their communal balcony, drinking coffee and extolling the benefits of living in a building where neighbours can watch out for each other, rather than be siloed off by enclosed corridors.

Traditional Georgian terraces need not be the only way; beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, but new ways of doing things – as Apparata’s design in east London shows – can be innovative and attractive at once.

“I think contemporary housing should be looking forward and responding to current issues such as the crises of affordability and sustainability while being accessible, healthy and aspirational,” Wells said.

“We should of course learn from the successes and failures of past housing typologies, including Georgian housing, but new contexts invariably lead to new typologies – and they’ll be much better if we accept and harness that.”

Key Housing

Christmas and New Year are often thought of as a time of year when we all wind down, rest and spend time with our families. For many, that’s true. But, take a moment to think about the key workers who continue working through the festive season and, in particular, for the homelessness outreach and support workers who find that this is one of their busiest times of year.

In 2023, homelessness continued to rise. Councils warned that they were giving homeless people tents because they had nothing else to offer. People died while sleeping rough. The work of major charities like Crisis and grassroots organisations and shelters all over the country has never, sadly, been needed more and more.

Ask me anything

I am often asked by people how best to support rough sleepers in urgent situations.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to direct you to the incredible services run by Crisis and encourage you to signpost their support to anybody you’re concerned about.

Homeless Link also has a good directory of services.

Vicky’s pick

And, now, for something a little different.

I recently saw a surprising and confronting, but completely brilliant film. Femme is the story of a drag queen who is subjected to a brutal homophobic assault but, when he runs into his attacker, things take a surprising turn. This thriller is the debut feature film from two writers, Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. It’s not an easy watch but it had me on the edge of my seat (in a good way).

There’s a housing element, of course: both lead characters live in house shares and the dynamic of living with friends shapes much of their respective stories.

I don’t want to give too much away but the film begs a question that I know many renters regularly ask themselves: if you can’t be yourself at home, where can you be?

This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.