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Inscribed on the tomb of Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral is the following injunction: “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.” Were you to seek Boris Johnson’s monument, your gaze might stray in the direction of Nincompoopolis by Douglas Murphy. Published in 2017, it’s a forensic evisceration of Johnson’s architectural and design follies during his eight years as London mayor. The book’s cover depicts the comedically grotesque tableau of a peroxide Struwwelpeter toupee plonked on the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the hellish helter-skelter that squats like a gutted toad on the edge of London’s Olympic Park. “An ugly man’s ugly legacy of chaos concentrated into a single ugly object”, as the critic Jonathan Meades wrote in his review of Nincompoopolis for the Morning Star.
Murphy’s grimly entertaining book should be required rereading for anyone who cares about the built environment and is now casting the runes to see what Johnson’s elevation to prime minister might portend. The auguries are not good. Running riot in London, the nation’s largest playpen, he was insatiably and gullibly drawn to big-ticket vanity projects of stunning vacuity. Like stations of the cross, the Boris bridge, the Boris bus, the Boris cable car and the Boris Orbit (the Borbit?) came to define the modern Via Dolorosa of London’s anguished “iconic” calvary.
During his tenure, big-picture bluster and laissez-faire tendencies contrived to orchestrate a distracting cacophony of “can-do”. Its strident, maniacal tone was reprised from the Downing Street lectern in Johnson’s ascension address. But whether you “should do” is another matter. Notorious for waving through a barrage of contentious planning applications – refusing only seven of the 130 that came before him – Johnson’s penchant for market appeasement merely served to exacerbate the corrosive effects of social inequality and inflame London’s chronic housing crisis.
Appreciably less photogenic than a cable car or fantasy bridge, affordable housing is the problem child perpetually tugging at the sleeve of any London mayor and, indeed, any nascent prime minister. In keeping with his well-known disdain for detail, Johnson’s inclination has always been to forcefully bat it away into an outfield of deputies, minders and supporters, enabling him to bask in the obsequious glow of more easily attainable spotlights. One clear theme that emerged was a concern for overall numbers, rather than the percentage of affordable homes – in other words, quantity rather than quality.
Any old housing would do, as long as the top-line stats looked good and could be cited as evidence of dial-moving. It didn’t matter if most of it was flogged off to overseas investors, facilitating the hollowing out and banlieuisation of London. Previously characterful locales, such as Vauxhall, became gated ghost-burbs, while a miasma of insidious social cleansing seeped into the fabric of London, shaking up and skewing the city’s historically mixed demographic.
This may be a broad-brush picture, but it does gives some sense as to what might be in store for the nation. Given Johnson’s predilection for delegation, his choice of cadres to steer the housing and built environment briefs connotes an intention, of sorts, even as Brexit continues to derail politics as usual. Following the Night of the Blond Knives, Robert Jenrick was installed as secretary of state for housing, local government and communities. The first cabinet minister to be born in the 1980s, it has been mirthlessly suggested that he is the ideal man for the job since he owns three homes. Like his predecessors, he is not short of platitudes. “I’m going to strain every sinew and try to pull every lever that’s available to me to help communities build the homes they need,” he told Inside Housing.
Esther McVey was also appointed to be the ninth housing minister since 2010. Her glibly insensitive assertions about food banks and the impact of universal credit delays, coupled with a dimwitted Tory leadership campaign, suggests she is another career mediocrity who will tug ineffectually at the Gordian knot of housing and then sink without trace.
From the sidelines, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) extended a tentative welcome to the latest ministerial team, while calling for action on the government’s changes to permitted development rights, which enable redundant office blocks to be cannibalised for housing. Seen as an in extremis response to the housing crisis, the outcome is, more often than not, cramped and substandard dwellings that compromise the mental and physical health of occupants. Britain already has some of the smallest domestic space standards in Europe.
The day after the changing of the Tory guard, the RIBA released the shortlist for the inaugural Neave Brown award for housing, a long overdue recognition of the importance of decent, dignified dwelling design. A project for mass housing has not won the Stirling prize since 2008, as its “best in show” mentality tends to favour more architecturally adventurous submissions. Now housing has its own dedicated award, named after the late American-born British architect Neave Brown (1929-2018), whose work for Camden council represented the apogee of modernist design, delivered by well-resourced borough architects’ departments before the public sector was ruthlessly dismantled through Thatcherite right-to-buy policies.
Despite the new award’s admirable ambitions, it has thrown up a rather lacklustre shortlist. With their carefully calibrated mixture of tenures, cross-subsidy arrangements and muted palettes of brick, the four schemes – two in London, one in Cambridge and one in Norwich – seem virtually indistinguishable from one another, reflecting the distance travelled since Brown’s swashbuckling days. From helping to drive and implement a progressive social agenda for housing, architects now find themselves increasingly marginalised and this is reflected in a more cautious, middle-brow design approach.
Of the quartet, the most exemplary is Goldsmith Street, a development of 100 houses in Norwich, built by the city council, offering secure tenures at fixed rents. Designed by Mikhail Riches and Cathy Hawley, it is that rare thing – actual social housing – in a modern reincarnation of Victorian terraces. Unlike their 19th-century predecessors, however, the houses are ultra-parsimonious in their use of energy. Annual heating bills should be around £150.
With the lifting of the borrowing cap on local authorities, announced last year, there are fitful signs of movement in the moribund public housing sector that has hitherto had to rely on Faustian pacts with private developers to deliver a proportion of “affordable” dwellings. This has led to the obscene spectacle of “poor doors” for different occupant constituencies. Housing charity Shelter estimates that lifting the borrowing cap could increase new social housing provision to 27,500 dwellings annually, from just 5,000 built in 2017. Yet more is still desperately needed. In 2018, there were 1.11m households on local authority waiting lists.
This year marks the centenary of the Addison Act, which made housing a national responsibility. Subsidised by government grants, local authorities were given the task of developing new housing and rented accommodation where it was needed by working people. It represents the birth of the public sector housing movement and the expression of social ideas through architecture in a rich concerto of nation building. During the interwar period, local councils built 1.1m homes in total, an unthinkable prospect today.
After 40 years of catastrophic inaction, there is an urgent need for a reframing of priorities across the board, in funding, procurement, design and delivery. This constitutes a challenge that any prime minister should be eager to address, but it seems clear that Boris Johnson’s attention will, as usual, be elsewhere. Reader, if you seek his monument…
The winner of the Neave Brown award for housing will be announced at the RIBA Stirling prize ceremony on 8 October at the Roundhouse, London
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