Compared with our northern and southern European neighbours, Britain’s homebuilders disregard environmental performance
A s Britons swelter in the highest temperatures on record, the UK’s substandard and overheating housing is again under the spotlight. Most British homes are unable to keep residents cool in heatwaves and are cripplingly expensive to heat in the winter. By the numbers, we have some of the worst-performing housing stock in Europe. Our homes are poorly insulated and draughty, have virtually no shading and are badly oriented. How did one of the world’s wealthiest economies end up with houses that are so unprepared for extreme weather?
For decades, the British construction industry got away with building scantily insulated, poorly oriented houses. The country was quick to industrialise, so burning cheap coal could take the edge off the coldest days, while summers were cooler than they are now. Compared with our northern and southern European neighbours, Britain’s homebuilders could effectively disregard environmental performance to prioritise other, less prosaic concerns.
British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.
The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.
As a result, entire British neighbourhoods have been designed with more attention paid to this antiquated rule than to the risk of overheating. Many streets of houses are also designed so homes face each other, with no orientation taking account of the movement of the sun or from which direction the wind normally blows, as is common in other countries.
This style of urbanism derives from pre-modern British social conventions that prioritised the formality of street-facing front doors over considerations of comfort or environmental performance. Marianna Janowicz, an architect and founder of the feminist architecture collective Edit, says, “Many British terrace houses were designed to follow a strict social order – formal rooms were at the front while women and servants were kept from sight at the back. Propriety and social mores took precedence over comfort and efficiency.”
British homes are also on average the smallest in Europe, with tiny rooms, low ceilings and miserly amounts of floor space. The 1960s Parker Morris standard set a modest but decent minimum size for all public housing, but it was abolished in 1980 by Margaret Thatcher’s government. This led to a collapse in dwelling sizes: one 2005 study revealed that typical newly built British dwellings were barely half the size of new Greek or Danish homes.
More recently, further deregulation has seen an estimated 65,000 micro homes made by partitioning old offices and commercial buildings into flats without planning permission, leading to dwellings in some cases as small as 15 or 10 sq metres. As small spaces heat up more quickly than large ones, especially when they are overcrowded, cramped flats soon become stifling in the heat.
Another crucial victim of our falling housing standards was cross-ventilation. This is when flats are designed with windows sited on opposite sides of the property that can be opened to allow a breeze to blow through. This kind of ventilation was once a common feature of new UK domestic architecture, but over the course of four decades of deregulation it has become rare, as profiteering and spiralling land prices mean developers have cut costs by building difficult to cool, single-aspect homes. Research by the National House Building Council foundation in 2012 found there is increasing evidence that new dwellings are “at risk of overheating, especially small dwellings and flats and predominantly single-sided properties where cross ventilation is not possible”.
Deregulation, cheap fossil fuels, Edwardian moralising and the luxury of a previously mild climate have converged to leave Britain with an extremely poor general standard of housing. But that mild climate is now gone for good. The UK now urgently needs to invest in massive improvements to its housing stock in order to protect citizens, reduce energy consumption and make extreme weather bearable in the future. New construction is intensely polluting, so the way forward lies in upgrading existing buildings rather than demolishing them to start from scratch.
Inventive architects such as the Pritzker prize-winning Lacaton & Vassal in France and XVW Architects in the Netherlands have shown it is possible to massively improve the environmental performance of housing without demolition. The challenge of upgrading British housing to withstand extreme weather will take investment and political will, but it is not rocket science. We simply need to borrow some ideas from across the Channel – shading, ventilation, insulation, heat-absorbing trees and the reintroduction of decent space standards for all.
Phineas Harper is chief executive of Open City, a charity dedicated to making architecture and cities more open, accessible and equitable