Create Streets – Written Evidence (BEN0195)

Policy on the built environment should focus more on what is popular and what is correlated with good wellbeing outcomes rather than on ‘good design’ where evidence shows a material disconnect between the preferences of planners and architects and the rest of the population

1. Focus of our evidence

This submission only answers questions where we believe we have something to contribute. Some of our research could have ‘slotted in’ at various points so please excuse us if we have not perfectly chosen. We have focused on our areas of expertise, research and work which are primarily to do with increasing popular support for housing at sufficient density to meet housing needs and in a way correlated with wellbeing and happiness. Our primary focus is London so our evidence is London-centric. We hope that this is not too distracting. Although the land-vale points are less acute elsewhere most of our points will still hold true for most (not quite all) of England.

2. About Create Streets

Creates Streets is a social enterprise that encourages the creation of more urban homes in conventional, terraced streets rather than complex multi-storey buildings. We do this through research, arguing for policy change, working with communities and consulting to councils and landowners. Our work has created considerable controversy and discussion as well as support from both sides of the political spectrum. According to Sir Simon Jenkins, former Chair of the National Trust, ‘Create Streets speaks London’s language’.

3. Response to your specific questions

Policymaking, integration and coordination

1. Are the decisions that shape England’s built environment taken at the right administrative level? What role should national policymakers play in shaping our built environment, and how does this relate to the work and role of local authorities and their partners?

Two thirds of British adults say they would never even consider buying a newly-built home and only 21% say a new home is their preferred option.[1] This is an astonishing fact that would probably not be replicated in any other ‘market’ in the UK outside the world of antiques. When you consider that new homes should be better, more sustainable, lighter, cheaper to run, this failure of most modern ‘place-making’ is profound and systemic.

Changing this so that new homes, streets and places are not just acceptable to the general population but actively desired, sought and lobbied for (seen, as they should be, as better) seems to us the most critical role of national planning policymaking. National (and local) policymakers should be far far more interested in asking questions such as:

• What types of place do the public like?
• What types of new building do the public like and want to see built near them?
• What types of place and home are correlated with good wellbeing outcomes (probably largely composed of evidence on happiness, physical health, mental health, community engagement and sociability levels)?
• What types of building and place prove popular over time and thus hold their value?
• What types of building maintain reasonable maintenance costs over time and thus last longer and are more ‘sustainable’?

The evidence on matters such as this currently being used to support policy is, in our view woefully, recklessly inadequate. In all the talks we have given to local housing or planning teams we have never once met an official who can confidentially set out with numerical precision and data what residents or potential residents want to see built.

Our research has shown that most of us crave a ‘sense of place’ that most contemporary housing just fails to provide.[2] Figure i sets out a summary of our wider research on what seems to work for most people most of the time or to be correlated with good wellbeing outcomes. In a nutshell it could be summarised as well-connected walkable streets nearly always at human scale, with green space interleaved throughout, with variety within a pattern and normally with at least a good proportion of the architecture feeling like it ‘belongs’ locally. People like a ‘sense of place’. High rise should normally only be for the rich or for commercial uses and almost never for children.

Figure i – what should streets and buildings look and be like

These preferences matter in the fight to build the homes we need. Most of us prefer not just more human scale homes but also more conventionally-designed ones. An Ipsos-MORI poll that Create Streets recently commissioned asked respondents what buildings they would support being built on brownfield land near where they live.

Figure ii – Findings of Ipsos-MORI poll into support for brownfield building

This survey found that 64% of adults supported the building of new homes locally on brownfield land. 14% opposed it. Respondents were then shown five photos illustrating different types of housing and, for each, asked if they would support or oppose the building of 10 similar style homes in their local area. The most conventional in form, style and building materials won 75% and 73% support. Less conventional, more innovative homes won 34% and 23% support. Popular design can clearly change minds. Among the 14% who opposed building ‘in principle’, half changed their mind for the most popular option.[3]

These preferences matter in the fight to build the homes we need. Most of us prefer not just more human scale homes but also more conventionally-designed ones. An Ipsos-MORI poll that Create Streets recently commissioned asked respondents what buildings they would support being built on brownfield land near where they live. This survey found that 64% of adults supported the building of new homes locally on brownfield land. 14% opposed it. Respondents were then shown five photos illustrating different types of housing and, for each, asked if they would support or oppose the building of 10 similar style homes in their local area. The most conventional in form, style and building materials won 75% and 73% support. Less conventional, more innovative homes won 34% and 23% support. Popular design can clearly change minds. Among the 14% who opposed building ‘in principle’, half changed their mind for the most popular option.[4]

Figure iii – Vicious circle of land supply, land prices, credit inflows, housing codes, design culture and political support for new development

Our failure to build sufficient homes is arguably the most profound failure of public policy over the last generation. We are in a vicious circle created by a plan-led, supply-constraining planning system which pushes up land prices and creates barriers to entry. Together with misconceived housing and building rules (see below) and, in London, large capital inflows this imperfectly aligns new housing in type and style with the type of housing for which there is most support. This makes it harder to reform the planning system and increase, systemically,  the supply of new housing (see fig iii.) Planning policy should be about breaking this vicious circle. One way to do is by better aligning what we build with what people actually like.

2. How well is policy coordinated across those Government departments that have a role to play in matters such as housing, design, transport, infrastructure, sustainability and heritage? How could integration and coordination be improved? We have no view on this.

National policy for planning and the built environment

3. Does the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) provide sufficient policy guidance for those involved in planning, developing and protecting the built and natural environment? Are some factors within the NPPF more important than others? If so, what should be prioritised and why?

In the NPPF as implemented throughout England insufficient focus is placed on what people like. What planners and architects like (which is too often not the same) trumps a rational approach to creating popular places. It is worth setting out at length why this matters.

In 1987 a young psychologist was conducting an experiment into how repeated exposure to an image changed perceptions of it. A group of volunteer students were shown photographs of unfamiliar people and buildings. They were asked to rate them in terms of attractiveness. Some of the volunteers were architects and some were not. And as the experiment was ongoing a fascinating finding became clear. Whilst everyone had similar views on which people were attractive, the architecture and non architecture students had diametrically opposed views on what was or was not an attractive building. Correlations ‘were low or non-significant’. The architecture students’ favourite building was everyone else’s least favourite and vice versa. The disconnect also got worse with experience. The longer architecture students had been studying the more they disagreed with the general public on what is an attractive building.[5]

The young psychologist was David Halpern and he now runs the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights team (often called the ‘Nudge Unit’). Two decades on, he is very clear that ‘architecture and planning does not have an empirical, evidence-based tradition in the sense that … sciences would understand. There are very few studies that ever go back to look at whether one type of dwelling or another, or one type of office or another, has a systematic impact on how people behave, or feel, or interact with one another.’[6]

If he is right then the process of a professionally-derived borough plan, of planning consent and of expert design review is the very worst way imaginable to build our towns and cities. The very act which confers value on a site (the granting of planning permission) is a process whose key players are, empirically, the very worst judges available of what people want or like in the built environment.

But is he still right? A glance at the criteria of architectural prizes is not reassuring. Few if any place value on evidence of popularity or provable correlations with wellbeing. Certainly RIBA’s prizes specifically demand evidence on sustainability but not on what members of the wider public think.[7] Similarly, in a 2004 study into attitudes to housing conducted for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, nearly 60% of the public said they disliked flats. Only a little over 20% of ‘experts’ shared that view.[8]

To investigate this further Create Streets recently conducted an informal poll. We asked our twitter followers and the members of our e-mail distribution list (in total about 4,000 names) to take part in what we termed a ‘pop-up’ poll. In total 283 took part. We asked respondents ‘which of these would you most want to see built on an urban street very near to where you or a close friend live?’ and presented four options whose order was randomised. We also asked their profession. 37% of respondents worked as architects, planners or in creative arts.

Figure iv – Options in Create Streets Pop-up poll[9]

We were not surprised to find that among our overall respondents place trumped time. 87% of our respondents preferred the two options which most clearly referenced historic housing forms (at the top of figure iv) and which had a very strong sense of place. This was nearly seven times more than the 13% who preferred the two more original forms which prioritised a sense of time over a sense of place (at the bottom of figure iv).

We also found that the sharp and important distinction between what non-design specialists and design specialists would like to see built is still there. 25% of supporters of the more popular two options worked in planning, architecture or creative arts. 46% of supporters of the less popular two options worked in planning, architecture or creative arts. People are from Mars. Professionals are still from Venus. In other studies it has been shown not only that architects have different views on buildings to the rest of the public but that they cannot predict what the general public will like.[10]

The melancholy implication of this is that architectural awards are a good indicator of popularity – but only if you invert them. We are aware of nine architectural or planning prizes awarded to the two least popular two options. We are not aware of any architectural or planning awards garnered by the most popular option has received.[11]

These prejudices of too many in the design and planning establishment are not just idle personal preferences. They palpably influence what actually happens. In a 2014 design meeting for a major London site, the ‘traditional’ built form of conventional developments was openly ridiculed and dismissed as unworthy of discussion even though it is what the public most like.[12] Similarly, in a June 2015 meeting of very senior officials and architects at which Create Streets was present the Director of Housing and Regeneration at an important London borough spoke (without apparent irony) of the ‘horrid Edwardian streets that most of us live in’ and complained of ‘dreary terraces.’ When a senior and respected decision-maker does not just disagree with the vast majority of the public but is actually contemptuous of their views it must be time to ask if the whole public procurement and planning prioritisation process needs dramatic rebuilding from the bottom up. Certainly, in public sector design competitions for city-centre development and estate regeneration marks are routinely (in our experience always) awarded very materially for ‘innovation of design’. In at least two cases that we are aware of this was despite the explicit request from councillors that a more conventional, even traditional, design would be more appropriate.

The point is not that design innovation is necessarily bad. Clearly it is not. It is often excellent. But it needs to be balanced with the familiar. And in at least two case, design competitions was being run in contradiction to what had been requested by council leadership. It is hard to conclude that the system is under effective democratic control.

4. Is national planning policy in England lacking a spatial perspective? What would be the effects of introducing a spatial element to national policy?

We are quite not sure what you mean by a spatial perspective. It is true that it is insufficiently possible for local people’s spatial likes and preferences to be reflected in what is built. But the main issue, is that planning, housing and building rules have too many perspectives.

Certainly in London, these remain misaligned with what most people want. It is worth exploring this point. Borough rules on light seem to tend to larger blocks with more open space between them as opposed to narrower streets. They also make it hard to trade off high levels of light in some rooms versus less light in others. A recent report by four important residential architectural firms explained;

‘Given their enduring popularity (and value) you might suppose that they [Edwardian Mansion blocks] would provide the ideal model for today. But, sadly, modern planning and building regulations outlaw some of the key design features that enabled Edwardian architects to create such opulent buildings on such small footprints. Apartments of this era typically offer spacious and bright front rooms with bay windows and balconies forming their distinctive street facades. Meanwhile the rear rooms are quite dark and have privacy distances way below current standards. To us it seems a satisfactory trade-off, which should be encouraged rather than prevented.’[13]

Rules on streets themselves matter too. In our 2014 survey, a majority felt that (borough-level) highway rules acted as a barrier to street-based regeneration. In our prompted survey of barriers to street-based regeneration the ‘Need to build wider or different streets to meet council rules’ achieved a score of 5.9/10. Many industry practioners were particularly vocal on this point with some of the most emphatic comments we received criticising the impact of highway engineers on good design and place-making via issues such as required turning circles, refuse collection standards, lines of site and road access. Alastair Mellon, of Providence Developments, was clear that ‘Highways engineers should not be allowed close to any development. They insist on a whole series of regulations that kill a development.’ Mike De’Ath of HTA Design agreed; ‘the worst streets are designed by highway engineers and refuse collection people. They’re dead but technically proficient.’ Others complained about inappropriate minimum road widths. There was, however, a sense that the situation was improving with John Spence, an architect at calfordseaden and also a member of Create Streets, one of several commenting that their impact ‘seems to be getting less.’

The ban on recycling open space between buildings into private gardens can make it is very hard to redevelop estates into streets. Key Performance Indicator 3 states that there should be, ‘no net loss of open space designated for protection in Local Development Frameworks due to new development.[14]’ When estates are regenerated this can and has impacted this metric.[15]

However, we also know that most people would sacrifice poor open space for small private or communal gardens.[16] But they cannot. The GLA are quite categorical that, ‘the definition of open space …does not include private residential gardens.[17]’ In our 2014 prompted survey of barriers to street-based regeneration the ‘Need to include more open space to meet the London Plan´ and the ’Need to include more open space to meet local council’s requirements’ both achieved scores of 5.6 out of 10 as a barrier. It was generally felt that planners cared about this more than residents. In the same survey the ‘Need to include more open space to satisfy local residents’ only achieved a score of 4.9/10. Ingrid Reynolds, Director in Housing and Public Sector at Savills summarised the majority view when she said that, ‘the reduction of open space is potentially a barrier. It is more likely to be the planners saying you’ve got keep or add to the open space than residents. Part of the general planning strategy is to retain public open space.’

Although not as widely felt, in our prompted survey of barriers to street-based regeneration ‘Difficult to build this form of flats and comply with London Plan’ achieved a score of 3.9/10. ‘Difficult to build this form of houses and comply with London Plan’ achieved a score of 3.6/10. The impact of national rules on building terraced flats and houses was felt to be less. (3.2/10 and 3.1/10 respectively to the same questions). Andy von Bradsky the chairman of PRP, one of the architectural practices designing many homes in London at present, commented; ‘Lifetime homes are potentially a barrier. .. [for example requiring] level access from street to threshold. But sometimes a raised ground floor is a benefit in terms of house typology.’ Alastair Mellon also complained about ‘the insistence on elevators over four storeys.’ (this has now reduced to any non-ground floor entrance).  Nigel Franklin of calfordseaden and a member of Create Streets was more concerned about the impact on spatially efficient terraced houses: ‘The London plan works well for flats. It is less easy for houses. Stairs have to be shallow pitched – this needs more floor-space. The through the floor lift is easy for two storeys. It is difficult for three or four storeys. It adds challenges all round and costs as well as less ideal storage provision due to the area required for stairs and lifts.’

To summarise the access and internal barriers;

• Requiring lifts in all apartment buildings makes it more expensive to recreate the typology typical of many dense, street-based areas of London with apartments on a number of floors off one staircase. This also incentivises higher building as the cost of lifts does not increase substantially as more floors are added, once the initial cost is incurred. [18]

• Rules against staircases being too narrow or too steep make it harder to build the conventional tall but thin London terraced houses[19]
• A requirement that ten percent of homes be fully wheelchair accessible and for all homes to be built to ‘Lifetime Home’ standards biases the system in favour of large blocks[20]

Four contributory barriers add to this;

• A dislike for on-street parking biases the planning system against conventional terraces and streets[21]
• Heavy requirements for bike storage, make it much harder to build terraced flats and conventional terraced homes[22]
• Heavy requirements for bathrooms on storeys with bedrooms make it harder to build the conventionally tall but thin modest London terraced homes[23]
• Finally, requiring ‘weather protection’ over front doors adds yet more cost to terraced streets with multiple entrances[24]

A range of rules on windows and room heights also make it harder to build houses which obey the classical rules of proportion and ‘fit in’ with historic neighbourhoods.[25] Regrettably the situation is currently getting worse. Proposed changes to the London Plan will require lifts in all blocks with apartment entrances on more than one floor (currently only required in blocks of four or more storeys). A better disincentive to building human scale terraced streets, particularly in the suburbs, it is hard to imagine. Hopefully the next Mayor of London will stop this insanity.[26]

It should be stated that not all practioners agree with this analysis. Some feel they have evolved adequate work-arounds which allowed them to deliver good schemes under the current rules. Alex Ely of Mae Architects (and one of the authors of the London Housing Design guide) told us unambiguously in 2014 that ‘Planning and design is not a barrier’ and that the current rules made it ‘easier for streets.’ Most, however, at least in private, seem worried by their cumulative impact. Peter Redman (the former head of Notting Hill Housing and of the housing teams at both Lambeth and Southwark), told us that the ‘standards required by those who lay down the rules’ mean that ‘attractive streets just don’t conform.’

When we started to complain about the way that some (well intentioned) regulations were making it harder to build our most popular street forms and housing types it was a lonely battle. One very senior London politician even commented privately that there was no political chance of opening up these issues. Another told us we would be ignored at best, eviscerated at worst. It seems that the situation is, slightly, beginning to shift and that more planners and architects who care about the built form of London are daring to put their head above the parapet and to challenge the collective ‘group-think’ to which the whole industry has subscribed in recent years. Richard Lavington (of Maccreanor Lavington Architects) said in evidence to the GLA in March 2014:

‘One very efficient way of delivering family housing at a certain density is with narrow-frontage terraced houses, but actually Lifetime Homes [embedded in the London Plan] is very obstructive to making that work particularly well. Once you get to three bedrooms, you need a very large bathroom on the entry level and that actually obstructs the width of the plan; which means you have to go into a very narrow kitchen and through that into a living space at the back. . . . you are prioritising the lifetime use of the home and disabled access over its efficiency and use for a family; a family without disabled kids and things like that, admittedly. We are applying that across every new-build single home in London.’

Then at a talk to the National Housing Federation, in December 2014, Ben Derbyshire the Managing Director of HTA Design, one of the larger London residential practices, agreed: ‘it’s actually quite difficult to design streets which are streets in the sense that citizens will recognise.’[27] The architect Peter Barber echoed this in a lecture to the Royal Academy in July 2015: ‘planning law makes it very difficult to design streets.’[28] The report cited above, Superdensity the Sequel, rightly picked up on these concerns. Andrew Beharrall of PTE architects stated publically at the launch that ‘it is time for a review’ of the London Housing Design Guide which is ‘leading to rising homogeneity’ and, he stressed, making it impossible to build well-loved housing types such as the Edwardian Mansion block.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has agreed with much of this analysis though also made clear he plans to do little about it. In GLA Questions in July 2014 he stated;

‘One of the difficulties of course is that within the London Plan there is this stipulation that any building above 3 storeys must have a lift. Now we could take that out and say that you wouldn’t need to have a lift till you were at 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 storeys. The trouble is that I think we’ve got to the stage now where people would find that suddenly a restriction on the accessibility of the building and people would say ‘are you really seriously taking going to take lifts away when we have so many elderly people, so many disabled and so on and so forth. Walk ups which are so attractive are limited in their flexibility. And that is one of the problems that we face. If you put in a lift for a building of 4,5,6 storeys people will say well why, the economics of it won’t add up. You’ll be spending an awful lot on the core and shaft of the lift and not actually maximising the potential habitation in the building.’ [29]

Hopefully, the next mayor will be bolder. Because it does matter. In case this discussion about regulations seems abstruse, here are two real world examples of the impact that the rules are having. Firstly, in January 2015 an architect in East London explained to us in the presence of senior DCLG officials that he had not been able to meet residents’ passionately felt preference for streets of terraced houses. ‘Of course we couldn’t do that, we wouldn’t have got planning…the council would have insisted on open spaces, you just can’t build houses like that any more, all the space standards, all the rules….’

And currently being built in a (good) development in Kensington and Chelsea are a row of terraced houses to the north of Portobello Road. They are in the right of figure v.

Figure v – Terraced houses from 1825 and 2015

The houses are manly 7.5 or 7.9m wide and are shallow with wide corridors and gently-sloping wide stairs. Of course they are fully compliant with all national, London and borough requirements. But they are also grossly inefficient terraced houses in consequence and compared to historic norms. The house on the left of figure v was built in 1825. It has narrower staircases, a narrow corridor and is slightly deeper. It fails current London rules on at least 13 separate points (and probably far more). It is also, like many thousands of similar houses across London both very valuable (because very popular) and a vey spatially efficient way of building a house - the preferred type of home for about 80-90% of Britons. It has an almost identical Net Internal Area as the new homes which are 35-45% wider than it. If the modern homes had been built on the template of (though not necessarily in the style of) the historic homes there would have been about 22 of them not 16. That is an example of the ‘price’ of the London Plan. We are sacrificing what most Londoners want on the alter of narrow codes and ill-informed dogma.

5. Is there an optimum timescale for planning our future built environment needs and requirements? How far ahead should those involved in the development of planning and built environment policy be looking? We have no view on this.

Buildings and places: New and old

6. What role should the Government play in seeking to address current issues of housing supply? Are further interventions, properly coordinated at central Government level, required? What will be the likely effect upon housing supply of recent reforms proposed for the planning system?

The Government should remove unnecessary internal rules and require local planners to reference, empirically, what people in their area like. It should be less possible to frustrate neighbourhood plans in urban areas via multiple rounds of questions from councils over many months. The new brownfield zoning approach set out in the recent Bill should firmly reference evidence on popularity of different built forms and styles.

7. How do we develop built environments which are sustainable and resilient, and what role should the Government play in any such undertaking? Will existing buildings and places be able to adapt to changing needs and circumstances in the years to come? How can the best use of existing housing stock and built environment assets be made? We have focused our answers on other points.
8. To what extent do we make optimum use of the historic environment in terms of future planning, regeneration and place-making? How can more be made of these national assets? We have focused our answers on other points.

Skills and design

9. Do the professions involved in this area (e.g. planners, surveyors, architects, engineers etc.) have the skills adequately to consider the built environment in a holistic manner? How could we begin to address any skills issues? Do local authorities have access to the skills and resources required to plan, shape and manage the built environment in their areas?

In short, no but we’re out of space to address at greater length. More understanding of what people like and want and better data on wellbeing are key. Design of homes and places has become dangerously over-specialised and obsessed with innovation at the expense of normality. Place-making should be a service industry. It thinks it is an art form. And local planners are too busy micro-managing to these rules to actually be able to spatially plan in their areas.

10. Are we using the right tools and techniques to promote high quality design and ‘place-making’ at the national level? How could national leadership on these matters be enhanced?

No. Design needs to be dramatically democratised with far greater use of design codes, co-design, direct planning and empowered neighbourhood plans.

Community involvement and community impact

11. Do those involved in delivering and managing our built environment, including decision-makers and developers, take sufficient account of the way in which the built environment affects those who live and work within it? How could we improve consideration of the impacts of the built environment upon the mental and physical health of users, and upon behaviours within communities?

No. The growing research on wellbeing and the built environment is being insufficiently used or actually misapplied because so little read or understood.

To give two examples, it has become axiomatic that ‘green space is good for residents’ and that ‘light is good for people.’ These are both true points but, as in all things, they require compromise. Not all green space is good. It can be scary, little-used, ill-kept. Worse, the trade off for over-providing open green space can be less private green space (which most people prefer), less modest elements of green space scattered through a development, more flats, higher rise and fewer houses (all likely to be correlated with less good wellbeing outcomes[30]). Similarly, the search for maximising light at every window frequently has the effect of ‘pulling urban developments apart’ into a series of larger more discrete buildings with large elements of green space between them. More windows may have more light but the price, again, is a less fine-grained urban form with fewer houses, flats in bigger buildings, probably less private green space. We are categorically not using emerging

Another example. Current UK national rules demand level access for all homes to a property. In an urban context where properties almost always have only one public primary entrance this prevents steps up to a front door as used to be common in terraced streets of houses or flats. This is ostensibly to help elderly or disabled residents. Clearly some, perhaps many, new homes should have this stipulation. It must be right to increase access for the disabled and the infirm. But should all ? Might we actually be making worst. There is actually very credible evidence from the US that older residents actually stay healthier for longer when they have steps up to the front door. For example, one US study found that ‘elders who resided on blocks with more front porches, stoops, and buildings built above grade had significantly better physical functioning at 24-month follow-up than did elders who resided on blocks with fewer of these architectural features.’ [31] This level of interaction between evidence and housing and building regulations, or their interpretation at local level is just not taking place remotely sufficiently.

12. How effectively are communities able to engage with the process of decision making that shapes the built environment in which they live and work? Are there any barriers to effective public engagement and, if so, how might they be addressed?

It is very hard. Much (not all) consultation is a faked ‘post hoc’ PR exercise. Consultation should follow pre-application review not vice versa. Strong and credible quantitive evidence of public support for a development should be a good reason to consider it appropriate even it fails detailed borough, GLA (for London) or UK specifications.

Financial measures

13. Are there fiscal or financial measures potentially available which would help to address current issues of housing would encourage better design and place-making by private sector developers?

The problem for London and the South East is that land values are so high that development volume is pushed to absurd densities as higher build cost becomes irrelevant in comparison. Where high density is not permitted and density is capped then downward pressure on build costs is likewise immense. In the South East it is hard to resolve the problem in the short term.

However, one (partial) solution is to encourage investment from long term patient capital who properly understand how the values and maintenance costs of different types of places pan out over time. This would be better correlated with more conventional urban forms. Long term pricing data is fascinating in this regard. The Halifax data series shows that ‘traditional’ pre-1919 homes in a ‘conventional’ street format in London have risen by 1284% in price since 1983. Their more modern contemporaries have risen by half as much. Older homes are worth 50-70% more as well.[32] Meanwhile, Savills research shows how parts of London which are well-connected and in the form of high-density terraced streets and squares are more valuable, other things being equal, than areas which are not.[33]

Figure vi– Streets provide better long term returns

19 October 2015