Miscellany: Cramming us all in
Autumn 2007
Autumn 2007
During some recent local history research, looking at Victorian maps of the spreading city, I wondered how our Victorian forebears felt, watching the rush to build housing on what was previously open land. Maps show the rapid spreading of Victorian terraced housing into the gardens and fields outside the city centre.
The building boom has now reached such a peak that I think I can properly imagine how they felt, though with a slightly different emphasis. The city then was spreading outwards - and though recently announced developments include some of this, most of it is filling in the "brownfield" within the city. Though people's gardens seem to qualify as brownfield too, and a lot of them are disappearing under bricks and mortar (or breezeblocks and string or whatever they build out of these days).
Whether what is cleared and lost and built on is the end of someone's garden or an old gasworks site, it's starting to feel a little bit cramped. (Or crap - as I just inadvertently typed (twice) - and that sums it up just as well, really.)
Everywhere we look there's some developer throwing up some pokey little apartments too small for families to live in and too expensive for most people around here to buy.
Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, quoted in a Radio 4 programme, suggested that 15 percent of new-built 1-2 bedroomed properties have a master bedroom of a size considered unfit for two people. On the same programme, an architect visited one of the houses on a new estate and talked to a mother and daughter who lived in one of the new-build houses. The 12 year old girl commented that the kitchen was too small for several members of the family to be in there at the same time.
Now there's so much emphasis by TV chefs on making cooking interesting and accessible, it seems rather backward-looking if new houses have tiny kitchens that only fit one person comfortably at a time. We built a lot of those in the early to middle part of the 20th century, for the traditional housewife, slaving over the cooker on her own. Now it's important that we all get in there at once, as those five portions of fruit and veg per person per day take a lot of preparing.
I was talking to someone recently who was telling me about property companies that offer a service to householders whereby they basically measure up your garden and tell you how best you can build a house on it. One of his neighbours had cleverly fitted in a house in this way.
Perhaps it appeals to some potential housebuyers that when you're washing the dishes you can have a conversation with a neighbour whose kitchen window is only a couple of feet away. Perhaps if we're all living on top of one another it will rekindle that elusive "community spirit" we believe used to exist and now doesn't. Perhaps we're all secretly yearning to live in the kind of back-to-back houses some of our ancestors lived in - the ones we demolished before building more spacious houses out in the newly-created suburbs.
The Victorians built a lot of houses that were big good solid things, now considered desirable residences. But they also built a load of pokey little back to back places that were condemned as crowded and insanitary and pulled down. This has been highlighted for me in a personal way as I've been researching various branches of my family who lived in York in the mid-19th century. Every attempt to go back to view an 'ancestral seat' has been most disappointing, as they've all been pulled down.
Now, instead, we've stuffed the place full of apartments. These have inside toilets and central heating, but it sounds as if many of them are as small and pokey as the ones our Victorian ancestors built. It appears that some expert statisticians produced figures saying that every single one of us would be living in a self-contained single dwelling by next year. This must be true - I can't see otherwise why we have so many small apartments.
And thanks to Chris who reminded me that back in the 80s, when we spoke more plainly, we used to call them "bedsits". This word doesn't exist anymore, it seems. (It's disappeared off to the same place the phrase "in the future" went - it was replaced by the phrase "going forward", and we don't have problems now, but issues.)
So going forward I wonder if we'll have issues with these apartments. There's a lot of them and I don't know anyone who can afford to buy one, not single people anyway. The politicians seem to be promoting the idea of marriage, and it may be that people will end up getting married to someone they don't like just so they can afford to buy a house.
We want people to think about citizenship and being courteous. We should know by now that if you force too many people to live in too small a space, they don't tend to behave in the way that government and its think-tanks would like them to. Give it a while and frustrated homeowners and potential purchasers might be fighting in the streets, bashing each other over the head with those ubiquitous For Sale signs.