TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 11: Cursed Architecture feat. India Block

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Why is it that this island in the North Atlantic has such shit buildings? What is the reason for slapping gravel on buildings and calling it an aesthetic? Why did Britain sell off most of it social housing and make it functionally impossible to replace it? All this, and more, explored on yet another Britainology -- this one featuring architecture critic India Block (@indiablock) If you want more Britainology, (1 episode a month on the $5 tier, 2 a month on the $10 tier), sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

I'm Mother of Woods, as you all know, and I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello. Glad to be back to discuss our favourite island, the island we can't escape. The world's greatest island. An island run by people who know what they're doing. That's our advertising position to the world. And this time, we wanted to talk about not just the island itself, but the things that we've built on this island, the buildings that we inhabit as British people, the cursed architecture, if you will, of Great Britain. And for that reason, we're joined by India Block. India, how are you doing? Hi, I'm great. I'm so happy to be stuck on racist island, the green and pleasant land with the

grey and horrid architecture. Alice always says the UK is a country with sick building syndrome, but we also invented sick building syndrome by making so many sick buildings and not sick in the Southern California skateboarder way, but in the actual literal sense. And the reason we wanted to talk about this is because I think a question that's often played on my mind and also on Nate's mind is, why do British houses look like such total shit? Because you may remember from the Corbin era, which is now kind of a sort of hauntological period in British political history, like a brief chink of light in

the otherwise eternal darkness, that journalists would often camp outside Jeremy Corbin's terraced house in Islington and they would shower him as he returned from buying milk dressed in a polyester shell suit and looking to all intents and purposes, like he'd spent the morning drinking roddles and praying the fruit machines down at weather spoons. Now, invariably, what they were shouting was along the lines of, Mr Corbin, you claim to be a socialist and yet you live in a million pound house. Now, there was one flaw in this line of attack, which was that Jeremy Corbin's house looks like total shit. It is a quite small 1970s yellow brick house with these horrible PVC panels and windows.

And the question it really raised was, why is this house worth one million pounds? And the answer Jeremy Corbin would surely have given them is, because we haven't fucking built any since the 1980s. Yes. Hilariously, I live on a dead-end row in Peckham and the people across the street from us bought their house. There's no way that we could afford to buy in the current prices, even if a British bank would lend to us and they won't because we haven't lived in the country long enough. My wife's not a citizen yet, but the people across the street from us bought their also enterous house that is a huge piece of shit that has to be completely gut renovated.

And they, I mean, when I say gut renovated, they have been working on it with contractors for like five months now. They paid 700,000 pounds for it. I happened to check how much did that house sell for? And I couldn't find that one recently or like long ago, rather. There is a house on the block that was purchased, same thing, row house, purchased in 1995 for 50,000 pounds. But now would be selling for, yeah, 675, 700, 750, 800,000 pounds. Now, why is this? Because these buildings are all huge pieces of shit. Houses are the GameStop stock of Britain, truly. Exactly. And so, India being an architecture critic and an astute observer of these things, we figured we might be to get some answers.

And specifically, there's one in particular we want to talk about, which is the phenomenon of pebble dashing, which is just slathering gravel all over the house until it looks like it's called British grits. Yeah, exactly. Until it winds up looking like, I don't know, like you intentionally cast barnacles all over in a relatively even way. Yeah. What if the thing came on your house? That kind of a, that kind of a vibe. So I figured probably India, a good place to start was to do probably like a bit of a potted history of like kind of social housing in Britain and what has happened to it. I'm not the world's greatest expert, but as I understand it, kind of the history of social

housing is like one that broadly spans the 20th century. We kind of, for the first half of the 20th century, we were building it and some, at some, to some extent, into the second half. And then at some point we stopped. Yeah, that's basically it. We decided to try briefly in the two interwar periods. And then we just kind of went like, Oh, fuck, this is, this is too much like hard work. And we stopped. You can kind of, I mean, if you want to get really boring about it, you can trace it all the way back to our good old friends, the tutors, which is kind of the reason we have a really fucked up attitude towards the kind of the working poor in general and social housing in particular, because when Henry VIII basically got reverse dick poisoning and

decided to break with Catholicism in order to marry Ambulin and take over as head of the British church and state and fucked over all of the monasteries. We've all been hypnotized by pussy. We have all been there and like absolutely no shade to Henry, but the most relatable thing Henry VIII ever did was change the religion of Britain because he wanted to get pussy. Yeah, exactly. But left the situation where previously, and you know, I'm not going to stand for the monasteries, but they had been doing quite a lot of work looking after poor people. And then when they were dissolved and sacked and turned over to the crown, it just kind of fell to a very piecemeal system of local parishes kind of doing what they could. This eventually became

kind of the arms house system, which turned into the workhouse system, which is where you get to the Victorians who kind of got onto this idea of social housing, but in like a really terrible way. Particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when factory owners decided that what would be a really cool idea is if you build these little kind of model villages of houses for your workers. And then they can live in those houses and then you can never be late for work if your boss owns your house. Yeah, they can buy groceries in the company store. Exactly. And you can just shove people in these kind of the technical term is like a back-to-back terrorist house, which does what it says on the tin, which is like you just shove the houses up

back-to-back, kind of notorious for poor sanitation and shitty ventilation. Yeah, you just you live there and you work there. And that was kind of, I guess, probably the first experiment in social housing. Anyway, 1800 pounds per month. No, you laugh, Milo, but I'm telling you, man, I have a bit of curiosity. I got on a wikipedia search talking about back-to-back houses. And obviously, some of them have been preserved in this sort of like museum pieces sort of thing, like, you know, an example of housing of the era. But in Nottinghamshire, apparently, not only are there still back-to-backs that are residential units, but they are particularly popular with student accommodations and vital-let landlords.

So we have actually gone back to that era of putting people into these homes. It's just that's a back-to-back-to-back. Yeah, the modern incarnation of them. Well, the modern incarnation of the circumstances, literally the same houses. Yeah, my neck, my back, my house is back-to-back. And a lot of these Victorian terraced houses are incredibly, incredibly valuable now and held up as this pinnacle of the last time that we were building anything, you know, worth keeping, especially by kind of lovers of period architecture and classical architecture in general. And as we all know, they're extremely well built and they're extremely well insulated.

They don't have any problems. And crucially, no one has done shitty jobs remodeling them over the course of their 150 to 200 year lifespan. Yeah, they're still perfectly suited for our daily modern lifestyles, like no notes whatsoever. Yeah, and this is a key thing to bear in mind for our American listeners is that if we take London as an example, like London is an overwhelmingly kind of 18th century city, if you're looking at like its fundamental of its architecture, like because so much of it burnt down in the 17th century, it was kind of like largely rebuilt in the 18th century. So a lot of the houses that you see either come from the 1700s or like later Victorian. And this is where you

get lots of these terraced houses with kind of like bay windows like this, either kind of Georgian or Victorian aesthetic, which kind of carried on quite similarly into I mean, I'm not an architecture expert, but like Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian houses all look like kind of similar. It's like a similar sort of terrace house with a bay window kind of vibe. As far as I'm aware, yeah, I mean, where I live, the buildings nearby that have the dates of construction like sort of on their facades are all like 1901, 1890, that kind of a thing. And so like, yeah, more or less Victorian. But if you look in around King's Cross, I think a lot of those are Georgian. And yes, similar like they everything is like medium density.

Yeah, everything's like the overwhelmingly London is like a two story city, which is part of the reason why there are so many problems with housing. So if you go to a city like Berlin, every building is like five, six stories. But that is not the case in London. There are there are obviously like the post war social housing towers and such. But yeah, yeah, like it's buying large like your average. The weird thing is something that I didn't expect was in New York, for example, where I used to live like your sort of standard default expectation of like an apartment in New York is living in either a more recent build or like primarily in an old tenement building. Old tenements are typically five or six stories tall. And you know,

like they have fire escapes and they have like one entrance and that kind of a thing. But they're like higher density. Whereas here, yeah, it seems like it's mostly old family or multi family housing that has been that is in some state of disrepair and costs a fucking arm and a leg both to rent, but especially to buy. Yeah, that was the biggest shock to me was if you take obviously UK salaries are way lower. But if you take impure dollar terms, like translate the pound cost to dollars, rentals in London are maybe slightly, maybe 10, 15% cheaper. And you do tend to get a little more space than you would in New York. But in purchase prices, it's like an order of magnitude worse even than New York.

And that's in a country where like, you know, a starting salary for average white collar job is what like 25,000 pounds or something like that. Yeah, and that's actually would be a pretty good starting salary. So yeah, that's it's insane. Yeah, it's you better off being a podcaster. Well, sometimes. Yeah, so I guess India, let's talk a little bit about the about the 20th century and what and what that brought in terms of British housing. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you've said about the Victorians, I guess, just like one thing to say before we move along is that the Victorian ideal of housing was really focused on the family, which is why they were all these single family houses. And you'll get a very specific layout

as well, which is that you have the kind of public facing rooms at the front. So you have your parlor or your living room, and then you will have the kitchen to the back, which is the kind of the feminine sphere of the household. And you shove that all on the back out the site because it's disgusting and gross. And then you have like the bedrooms for the fellas. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you had like a rich Victorians person's house, they would have like your smoking room and your gun room and your snuggery and all those kind of fancy things for fancy men. But your bog standard London Terrace house is built in this way that kind of forms the family under this particular Victorian ideal. So that and that's the kind of the better off

parts of London, then you've got your kind of your East End, which essentially, like it's a very loaded word, but we'll be coming back to it. So slums, essentially kind of. Yeah. So people packed into homes that tend to be like a couple of rooms at most sharing a tap that you know, your running water would be shared between all of your neighbors, and it could be down several flights of stairs, no indoor plumbing, that sort of situation, which is where the kind of Britain found itself at the start of the 20th century. And as far as I can tell, no one, occasionally a council would be like, Oh, wow, this, this kind of looks kind of crap. Maybe we should try and build some, build some houses for the people that live here. But it wasn't until

the First World War, where kind of afterwards they were like, wow, like everyone we recruited from urban areas was like, just not not in a good way. Like people's people's health was so bad that it had impacted the war. And then notice this kind of. You spent your whole life in a British house, so you go to the West, wouldn't rest in front, and your trench for actually gets slightly better. Obviously, you're going to make the jokes like, and we're finding these recruits, their lungs can't function without suiting them. They take a fish out of water. I was just laughing also at the fact that you mentioned indoor plumbing not being a thing.

And I've noticed that's the same with the row houses that like oftentimes the, there's one toilet in the entire house in a row house, there'll be one bathroom and it's in the back. It's sort of been tacked on because it was added later, because when these houses were built primarily, like they were either outdoor laboratories, like just straight up outhouses, or, you know, they, they had, there was, and I think with the, the back to for front to back houses or the back to back houses, they were, there was like a block of toilets in the center courtyard. And that was the only toilets for like the whole neighborhood, the street, if you will shit like a Roman legionary. It's my favorite way to do it.

Yeah. And this is still within living memory. I mean, my dad grew up in a kind of town of the century house on a hill and they didn't have indoor plumbing. I don't think to begin with. And actually a lot of people, and I think this was the same in New York when they started bringing toilets inside. People were like, this is disgusting and unsanitary. Like, have you seen the state of the streets out there on the street? Like, I don't want to bring this into sight, like my fucking house. So a lot of the kind of sanitation campaigns had to deal with the fact that people just did not want literally that shit in their house. It's like, explain, like, well, there's water involved and it cleans everything out. It's not,

it's not literally an outhouse in your house. But I suppose, yeah, if that's all you could conceive of, that makes sense, why people might be bothered by it. You're telling me, I'm supposed to have a shitter in my own house, like an Arab. I mean, I suppose like trust in the water quality was probably at an all-time low as well. Like a lot of British history can just be put down to the fact that people were just mildly drunk the entire time. Yeah, I think that does explain a lot about our national psyche, that, you know, everyone was basically drinking watered down alcohol all day to avoid getting cholera and like, you know, just the kind of policies we came up with with the product of

that sort of being lightly sourced 24 hours a day kind of approach. Yeah, only good ideas if you've been just like drinking me since you were weaned. Absolutely. And going back to the like the slums thing, I know that there's that, there's that really freaky statistic that the population of London only got back to its 1939 quite recently, like in the last 10 years or whatever. I don't remember hearing someone say, like, well, how the fuck did they, because we've built more housing since then, like how the hell did they fit all those people in there? And it's like the answer is slums. Slums, yeah. Well, I mean, our old studio is in a, like, I think Victorian or maybe older

row block of houses in Whitechapel that had been converted. And I'm pretty sure that those houses, like, like an entire family would be in a room. Like, yeah, I mean, that was definitely how my grandmother grew up in like kind of one room or two rooms of a big house. Yeah. My, my mom was born in a similar thing in Norfolk. And yeah, when she was an infant, they just, they, there wasn't any room. So they just put her in like an empty dresser drawer. Like, I'm not joking. Like a fucking Furby, like she won't shut up. Just put her in the drawer. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that does sound like a very cursed British thing. Like, oh, and I was a child, my mother would put me in the child drawer. I wouldn't be quiet.

A drawer would be preferable. Have you seen the baby cages? No. So because they were worried about babies getting rickets, they used, they used to hang these metal cages outside of a window. And it had a kind of platform. And then you would kind of see that. That was kind of a New York thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think like mainly in America, but they haven't now still in New York, but for a different reason. So hilariously, I have seen them where it's like, you can't have a balcony. So instead, they built like a cage on the window that you can kind of step out onto like a Versat balcony. But the only place you see them anymore in New York are in ultra orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, because for families who

want to celebrate Sukkot, which like, if you're ultra orthodox, you celebrate all the holidays. And Sukkot is one of them. One of the, the, those sort of rules is that you have to basically eat outdoors in a, like a covering that has like exposed to the stars and whatnot. And obviously, it's much easier to do that. It's sort of to commemorate being in the desert in exile. But like it's one of those things where you, you can't really do that and have everyone build like a dwelling on the street if their whole apartment building is going to do it. So instead, they have these like, these balconies that then get covered with palm fronds, but they're cages. So it does still exist. And I guess it's still technically illegal, because I mean,

I presume if it was illegal, they would, they would shut it down in New York City. But yeah, the idea of that being an anti-Ricketts baby cage is insane, but also very plausible given the circumstances. Yeah, I don't know if that actually worked for stopping kids getting, I have no idea what, how you actually get Ricketts or what it does. It's like, it's a bit like scurvy, isn't it? It's like a kind of malnutrition thing. Yeah, I think it's like something with, with malnutrition, because I remember a lot of people in the American South had Ricketts because like they're basically everything they ate was corn, like cornmeal, everything. And like, I guess, I don't know if it's iron or niacin or something

like this, something you can't, you need to get that you're not getting if you're on that diet. And yeah, you get Ricketts. Yeah, I think it's dietary, but also sunlight related, I think. Yeah, I'm not sure. But I do, I do find that fun. Also, to tie it to the New York experience, one of the things that I find really funny is that, you know, obviously a lot of the, the American Jewish population is from Eastern Europe, and they were fleeing pogroms in the late 19th century, primarily. And a lot of people, not all, many people from that community came to the UK first, and they saw white chap, they're like, yeah, fuck this shit, and got back on the boat and went to New York, which was better, had better housing. And if you know anything about

New York around the turn of the century, the greatest city in the world, maybe saying something. So that's kind of the, I suppose, like really, in, you have in London, you have all these sort of like social housing blocks, I guess the first like proper big blocks that you see are probably like 1930s India. Yeah, so the 1930s, when they decided that this was an issue, they basically went around and made every local government come up with a slum clearance plan. So they had started to mobilize. It was like passed into into law, basically, that they had to start planning how to to rehouse people. But then, so you started getting a few, but then the Second World War came along, and kind of interrupted it, but also, I guess, fast forwarded it by

bombing the shit out of a lot of these places. Yes, I mean, particularly because our studio is in Whitechapel, I mean, you can kind of see it really obviously where you'll have like a street of Victorian houses and then a street of like brand new stuff or stuff from like much later, because just like it's a pepper pot of like what got bombed and what didn't essentially. Yeah. I was thinking about that. My great-grandfather was born in Plumstead, not that far from where Hussein lives now. And the street he lives on, he lived on at the time when he was born at home, doesn't exist anymore because that whole row of terraces got bombed, or enough of them got bombed, they were like, fuck it, we're demolishing it.

The Luftwaffe were terrified of Dave Courtney. They were trying to eliminate him. They couldn't do it. Couldn't be done. Yeah. I mean, and that's a familiar story, I think, especially, you said it was the East End too. I think the East End got hit way harder if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I mean, because it was nearer the docks, but that's also Plumstead is quite near the docks. So that makes sense. They were kind of, yeah, the East End got bombed really hard. And so correct me if I'm wrong, India, but as I understand it, post-war between the damage in the Second World War from the Blitz and from the Luftwaffe, and then from the demobilized population of servicemen, that there was just a massive, massive housing crisis in the UK.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, a lot of people, when we talk about some clearances, to be clear, did not want to be moved. And I guess a kind of a more appropriate way of saying it would be decanting. But yeah, pretty much a huge mobilization starting with the 1950s, where you've got flats and masanets, and then progressing through the 60s and 70s, where you have the towers, you get into more of this high rise building mode, you get councils who are able to bring on architects who are bringing in a lot of ideas from across Europe, which is where you get the kind of the modernist and the brutalist era. Yeah, because if you look at, say, I know that nowadays, the 1930s blocks are considered quite desirable, because they tend to be brick

built, they're not so high rise, they're typically like five, six stories and quite long. And then, but then the more modern blocks, like you say, you get more high rise kind of the brutalist stuff, which is what really I think sticks in people's minds of your British council housing. Either those tower blocks of concrete, which can be, I mean, one of the town I grew up in in Essex is a new town, which we should get onto as a concept, but I think they have one of the tallest tower blocks, and it's about like 25 floors or something. Yeah, and you see some really wild ones in Glasgow and Edinburgh too, because there's huge slums there, so like the Gorbells towers and stuff like that, and I think they've been demolished, but yeah, you had like, I think

over 30 stories, you know, situations like that. Similarly, I live very close to the former site of what was once North Peckham estate, which was like one of the biggest estates, I think, in Europe even, and there's a lot of these big estate buildings in Southern, in and around sort of Old Kent Road, that area, but most of them have been, most of them are getting cleared out, like the council is destroying them and they're rebuilding, but like they're, it's all market rate housing. Yeah, because I mean, one of the phenomenons that you see is that they kind of built the most social housing like immediately after the war, and then it gradually tailed off until by the 1980s, they were barely building any, and I think since then, we've effectively built

nothing. Well, there is also, there is the big, big reason for that, which I'm sure we can get into. Oh yeah, we can get to that. Right to buy, which is, to me, a hilarious concept and still exists, but basically the government is obligated to sell you your council estate. When you've been housed by a local authority, not only are you obligated, they are obligated to sell it to you, but like the price is incredibly low. They're not allowed to reinvest that money in new social housing, and you can become a buyer to let landlord with that property if you want to. And so, my first apartment in the UK was a privately rented former council flat, and yeah, you know, had been sold to somebody in the early 80s for like 10,000 pounds, and the landlord was trying

to sell it for 350,000 pounds. It's not worth that, but I mean, what is anything worth when you get down to it? Because like the price is here so insane. But yeah, so I believe that came in under thatcher in like 1980 or 81, but obviously like I might be wrong too. Yeah, I think it was 1980. Yeah. So I guess let's talk, before we get on to thatcher, let's talk a little bit more about the kind of like 50s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, because you get these tower blocks, but then also you get the new towns where they built a lot of these towns around London. I mean, in preparing this episode, I focused a lot on the south because it's just more what I know about. I assume these stories were kind of reflected elsewhere in terms of the way that social housing was built,

but certainly in London because so much of it was bombed out, they decided that the quick and easy thing to do, and this is an eternal British government solution to like housing people in London, is to not house them in London at all and just build some new houses outside London. So they built, they wholesale built new towns in what were previously like incredibly rural communities. You've got like Harlow and Essex, Wellingarden City and Hartfordshire, various others. Like you can see there's like Milton Keynes's in Cambridge here, isn't it? Milton Keynes is in Bedfordshire. That's slightly newer than the others, I think, but yeah. And so basically you had these things where they kind of wholesale just took a strip of like, in Harlow's

case, it was a series of like little villages and just built a fucking concrete metropolis on top of them effectively. And in these houses, they kind of repeated what they'd done in London earlier by building terraced houses rather than building apartments or whatever. You got these kind of terraced houses which weren't back to back, they had gardens and whatever. But this is where you really start to get what we like to call some cursed architecture. Because in terms of the stylistics of these houses, they came up with a with pebble dash. And I'm just going to read to you something from the Wikipedia for pebble dash, which says, though it is an occasional home design fad, it's general unpopularity in the UK today is estimated to reduce the value of a property by

up to 5%. However, it remains very popular in Scotland and rural Ireland, with a high percentage of new houses still being built in this manner. The exterior wall finish was made popular in England and Wales during the 1920s when housing was in greater demand and house builders were forced to cut costs wherever they could and used pebble dash to cover poor quality brickwork, which also added rudimentary weather protection. Pebbles were dredged from the seabed to provide the building material needed, although most modern pebble dashes actually not pebbles at all, but small and sharp flint chips and should correctly be called spa dash or spa dash. Sorry, those things are actually spelt differently.

So, I mean, first of all, it turns out that not all pebble dashes even really pebble dash, we've been lied to all this time. And to me, at least, I think it's incredibly British that the whole thing was come up with initially to just cover up poor workmanship. Yeah, I mean, it's technically been around since like, oh, fuck, like the 16th century, but it is always a kind of cheap and quick way of filling in because building architecture is so fucking expensive. And it's usually quite like a high skilled profession, not just like architecture, but construction work. So if you're going to build out of bricks, then you need to be a pretty like skilled bricklayer, like I could not go outside and build a brick wall

without it falling on top of me and crashing me horribly. Equally, if you're building out of stone, you often need to need to know how to like chip and kind of carve that stone into the right shape before you lay it on top of all the other stones. Pebble dashing is kind of like, I would describe it as the Instagram cake phenomenon of architecture. You know, that kind of craze that sort of started, I guess, in like 2018, for those incredibly dramatic looking cakes where you kind of... Oh, like the sort of like Trompe-Loy cake where like you couldn't quite believe it was a cake. Yeah, it's like covered in like inches of icing, and then you kind of like smash a load of sprinkles

on it, and then you like drizzle some icing like down the top, and then you smash the macaroons and like a donut and like a waffle cone to kind of create this... And then it's 1800 pounds a month. Pretty much that is what Pebble Dash is. You kind of smother on kind of a cement mix, and then you just smush, which is... Put some rocks on that, bitch. That's how I feel. It's like, it's basically, what if you made stucco depressing? And I mean, it could technically be done sensitively. The Edwardians enjoyed it in moderation.

If you use like a local stone, but it's pretty fucking hard to get off like once you've put it on, and it's also... It's designed to be waterproof, which is important in the UK because we are just so fucking rainy. But then you are also just sticking all of the problems behind this impregnable layer. I had heard that one of the issues with a lot of the very hastily assembled towers and blocks of flats that were built as social housing up until the 70s that were Pebble Dash, one of the concerns was that when the Pebble Dash was not done, the seal wasn't particularly good, which is typically, I think. You then actually have a ton of additional problems

with rising damp because of the cement and gravel and stuff, or that sort of finish, kind of locking stuff and making it... Once moisture is in, it's hard for it to escape. So yeah, like I said, it seems to be like... To me, Pebble Dash is inextricable. It's inseparable. From the impression of it being rainy and shitty out, I don't know why it's such a British image, and as such, it's always rainy. But it seems as though it's also the case that the... It doesn't have Pebble Dash houses in Gibraltar or somewhere. It's stuck-o. Just make it stuck-o. But no, we don't want stuck-o here. Yeah, I think for me, Pebble Dashing, it's kind of interesting. Just as a layperson,

just having grown up around this shit, and particularly in a town like Harlow, where everything is ugly, just like everything about... And it's one of the things I think that always really interested me, even as a child, was like, why do they build things in such a just unpleasant way? Because you go to... You look at social housing in other countries, and it just doesn't have to be this way. You go and look at blocks of flats or whatever in Berlin that were built as social housing. They look fine. They look perfectly attractive, just like big rendered buildings, whatever. But for some reason, in Britain, we have this addiction to Pebble Dash, covering things in fake Yorkstone. That's another one. And my personal hatred is the PVC window.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the Perspex boxes in the entryway is another one. And the Perspex box on the back and call it a conservatory. Yeah, I mean, I've noticed the same thing. Like there is just a general... And I've said this before on Trash Future, but maybe not on Britanology, that one of the funniest and most redeeming things for me was during the 2019 general election, there were so many Americans paying attention to all the canvassing, because obviously there were a ton of Americans who pro-corban and supporting Labour. And one of the constant refrains that I kept hearing from people seeing these pictures from people canvassing was like, wow, is every building in the UK about

to fall over and a huge piece of shit? Yes, basically, yes. Yeah, I don't know if you have any input on the architectural stylistics of British housing. Yeah, I guess, I mean, everything you've said is completely correct. I guess my personal pet theory is that we have just done such a shit job of learning from the mistakes of what's been done before. I mean, partly because we've only been building social housing or like mass, mass housing for such a short period of time. But like, I mean, I do have a soft spot for architects, they often mean well, but it's really easy to... We're not completely cancelling architects. But if you, you can't always control how people are going to live inside your building. But you

do have to take certain things into account, which is often the weather or the lifestyles of the people that are going to be living in them. And it does seem that kind of again and again, little mistakes have added up to create environments that are kind of uniquely depressing or ill-suited for the people who are trying to live in them. And then this has become the kind of political axe to grind where it's like, oh, well, they built such... We tried public housing one time and look at how like disgusting it is and everyone hates it. And we just need to like knock it down, which is like, no, you're missing the point of the entire endeavour. But if we just keep kind of essentially like, thatting the castle full down and then just like build another

one right on that same swamp, then you're just going to keep perpetuating the issues. Actually, when I was like thinking about doing this episode with you guys, I had just finished Deborah Orr's memoir, which is about like growing up in Scotland. And I'll just like, I'll read you a bit of it because it's, I think it just perfectly encapsulates how like minor fuck ups when it comes to architecture can kind of just completely bring a community to its knees, essentially. So Deborah grew up in like outside of Edinburgh in a, in a, like Motherwell was this huge steel production factory. And when she was a child, her mum like swapped them into a council flat that they thought was going to be in like a better

part of town. And it just turned out to be another shithole. So this is, I can't actually find the architect for this. So like, I can't, I can't like retroactively council. But it's, it's mere house, which is, I think to the east of Edinburgh. And she, she says, lots of aspects of actually living there hadn't been thought about or of dying there. Mrs. O'Brien's wake had gone without much incident. But in the 13 towers, it was a different matter. The lifts were too small to accommodate a horizontal coffin. So bodies had to be taken down in a chair. If your tradition was to have a wake at home, this was difficult. Especially if you were higher up, it was very hard on the Catholics.

You're just like, like, yeah, you got, you got to think about the fact that if you're building places for people to live in, then you've got to think about them dying in there as well. And if you build these towers with lifts, then you need to be able to, to remove a body. It's amazing to imagine some like dastardly English architect coming up with the idea of like forcing Catholics to do weekend at Bernie's ship by making all of the lifts slightly too small. I mean, I just find it funny because I mean, before I moved to the UK, even as a kid, because of being a fan of the clash and hearing songs by then, there's one in particular that I remember that basically talks about social housing, just like being built by people who didn't give a

shit and like the conditions being bad, stuff like the lifts being broken and turning into like people just pissing in them nonstop. And I didn't really understand that until I lived in, you know, a council estate where like it was perfectly fine, but they couldn't keep up with the cleaning because of just how much people were using it, you know, in fucked up ways. And it's like, it would be perfectly fine to live in if like they had just had, if they had just done, like if they could have, for one, if the council had could take better care of the buildings, but also you realize like there are some, some big design flaws. And it's like, there are some really, really highly regarded brutalist social housing projects,

both in the UK and elsewhere. I mean, you think about the, was it Unité de l'haptation and Marseille, which is like one of the most famous modernist buildings, or even Trolliq Tower in London is like very highly regarded as like a brutalist building. But then for every one of those, you've got like these just horrendously slapdash panel towers, you know, where even just like, for example, panel construction, not that much explosive pressure can cause the whole panel to fucking fail. Which you see in Russia all the time. I was going to say, the Khrushchevkas are like that too. And then there are buildings in the UK that are similar issue that, I mean, as I understand it, Khrushchevkas look particularly alarming because you can,

they look like they're fucking put together with glue. And you can see between the panels, the stuff like kind of like oozing out. And you're like, yeah, that doesn't look great. No, I wouldn't want to live in that. Yeah. Khrushchevkas always are great too, because of the fact that like the sort of wood bay window attachments onto the concrete just make them look like the building has grown tumors. Well, yeah, well, because mostly that was people had a balcony and they enclosed it to make more indoor because who needs a fucking balcony in Chelyabinsk? Like, yeah, you're not going to get much of use out of that. Oh, it's minus fourth ish. Oh, you do that outside? Like, no. Even Russians aren't that insane.

Well, yeah, if you look around Tbilisi and where people are just like, well, if you're not going to build any more fucking houses, we'll just like build our own personal extensions and stack them on top of each other. So you get this like tower, like Soviet era tower blocks that then everyone has built their own extension on top of their neighbor's extension, just to like create which is which is coincidentally Tory housing policy for the next 10 years. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just no planning permission at all. Yeah, Tbilisi is phenomenal in that regard because everything, everything about it is so like chaotic and pile one on top of the other. I remember being there once, we're like, how are you nice? I'm like, oh, yeah, it's so cool.

At least he got the people these streets and stuff. And then it started raining and we were like, oh, my fucking God, because just there's no drainage at all. And everyone's drain pipe from their roof comes out of the wall rather than going to the ground and into a gutter. They jar out from the wall about head height and they just shoot into the middle. So as soon as it starts raining, it's just like running a fucking gauntlet of like drain pipes spewing water at you. That's what happens when you kind of have unsupervised planning. Yeah, I mean, well, I don't want to make this all about like the trauma of various like buildings I've lived in, but I did. And actually, I'd have to say this is like one of

my favourite London flats. I lived on the brand in a state for a couple of years, which is like considered like one of the better versions of these kind of 60s concrete builds. I didn't live in one of the towers I lived in a kind of stack of duplexes. So about six, seven stories high. But when it rained too hard, the water would just start spewing back out of the shower. Oh, that doesn't sound very good. Not good. This was also how we discovered that this problem had been ongoing and a landlord who had kind of bought it presumably either under right to buy or kind of from someone who had

his response to kind of the plaster and walls getting damp was simply to buy some of that kind of polystyrene foam board from a craft shop and just stick it to the to the ceiling. That was landlords being cool. But yeah, it turned out that the these kind of flat roofed buildings have a downpipe so that when all of the rain that happens very often in the UK comes, it all kind of funnels towards this downpipe. But the council had forgotten to kind of they send in someone with a huge chain grinder to stick it down the pipe and kind of clear out all of the crap and they just hadn't done that. So all of the crap and all of the water was just like backing up into our

bathroom. In Soviet Britain, shower takes you. We were in some situation in in Bell's Gardens estate in Peckham, which was that the the every all the flats had balconies or on the we were on the fourth floor, the fourth and second floors had balconies. But they hadn't cleaned the gutters in so long that like the leaves had turned to soil, which had then grown moss and plants in the gutters. So the gutters didn't really drain. Everyone's balcony would flood when it rained. And it's like what had netting the safety netting on it too. So you couldn't really get up there to clean it yourself, even if you wanted to be industrious. And so you had to just become accustomed to using a broom to sweep all of the

water into the drain, because it would flood every time that that it was like, it could be nice. But once again, like it wasn't even a bad building. And I knew it had a bad reputation, but it wasn't even a bad building. It was actually far better built than new builds that I've seen in this country. It's just that we should definitely come on. Yeah, like if you get a new build, it's not going to be like rain. It's going to be throw in and I'm sorry to cut you off. The one point I want to throw in is that like I feel that same way. Because when I go running in Burgess Park, there's like these big, big, big tower blocks that were probably 60 70s era construction, and they're all getting demolished and replaced. And it's like, I realized that there were some

huge problems that came with like unforeseen issues with those like the maintenance and like just problems overall. But like the thing about it is those were low cost housing for so many people. And like once that once that's gone, it's never coming back. Yeah, a block of luxury flats that are poorly built with a sort of 10% social housing or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like the Brandon estate was it was nice to live on it was I had a kind of a public library, a laundry, a shop, a pharmacy, everything was down on the central courtyard. And the heating was done like as a building, you didn't pay for your own heating. Like there was a else garden was like that too. Yeah. Which is incredible. And you were you were kind of

the way that the flats were all laid out. You're also sharing a lot of walls with your neighbors. So the warmth was kind of it was like the warmest winter I've ever had in England. Yeah, we moved after one year, we moved to a new place that's a much older building. And yeah, we realized just how cold even though it's like temperature wise, it's not cold just how cold it feels because yeah, you have solid brick walls with no insulation. They just became like cold radiators in the wintertime. Yeah. And I was going to point that out something that I thought was really funny just to side note, you might laugh at this too similar situation for us. We had a we moved into the place like there was actually a boiler room and there was a huge cistern that

filled with a pump from the like municipal boiler for the whole estate, like the whole complex of buildings. So we didn't pay for hot water or for heat. However, the hilarious thing was the cold water same thing pump put it into a tank, but the cistern was made of asbestos cement. Right. And it still had the original labels from when it was installed in like the mid 70s and like that company hasn't existed since like 1979. And it's just like, well, I hope they've done whatever maintenance one has to do on asbestos cement because I got a PPE contract actually. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, and it's an interesting phenomenon that I think will move us on nicely that you often find that with in terms of British social housing, which like

as a phenomenon, which kind of goes from let's say that the 1930s to sort of like the 1980s. Generally speaking, the older the block is, the more desirable it is because like a lot of the blocks from the 50s and 60s are kind of ugly, but they're spacious and they're warm and they were built with like kind of communities in mind. Like India was saying, you've got a shop and they're kind of built in a way that makes sense according to those kind of like mid-century ideals, if you like. And then as it got later and later, the building's got uglier and uglier, smaller and smaller and less and less practical. And so you get like these housing estates that were built in the 80s that just are like horrendous, like built out of like bright,

yellow bricks and like all the rooms are tiny, like there's no provision of like services or anything, which I guess kind of like neatly leads us into the right to buy. Like India, do you have any thoughts on right to buy? I mean, it just like, you can't like be opposed to it as a concept, but the problem like, and I'm far beyond for me to kind of become an amateur economist, but I don't. There's no one to stop you India, honestly. If you want to become an amateur economist on this ship. If you get the council to build all the buildings and then people want to buy them, which is fine. Like I can understand that, you know, I mean, especially if they've built something

great, like it's an incentive to build something nice that people want to like live in and pass down to their children and create communities, which in and of itself isn't a bad idea because a lot of their problems with these estates that were built, even the ones that are architecturally pretty sound and solid and still standing, which we can get to. But is that the idea was when these kind of scare quotes, slum clearances are happening, you would move an entire street worth of people. So like this is what you find in like Park Hill and Sheffield, they would literally transpose entire neighborhoods into just like stack them up inside a housing estate. And you would keep the road names, you would keep people's house numbers so that you were

moving like an entire community wholesale into these new developments. So I can understand why you then several years down the line, you know, people were clamoring to buy their houses. But then you kind of go to build more. Whereas, and we've touched on this before, but the problem is, is that if you've got council housing, like it's not free in the UK, it's you pay a subsidized rent to the council. But then that is money for the council to then go and build more houses. Apart from under our current government, that doesn't work because you as a council are not allowed to take on debt. So you can't ever put out the money for building more houses because that would be bad. And then you can't like build any more houses for people

to live in and pay the council rent before they then buy it off the council. And the council rent, I mean, we should specify is, I mean, I just recall this from living in Southwark, still live in Southwark and the rates for like a one bedroom in Southwark, I think the council rates are like 550 pounds a month for a whole one bedroom, which I mean, for American listeners, you have to realize, it's like you can't even get a fucking bedroom for 550 pounds, unless you're like pretty far out in London. I know people who pay that for one bedrooms, but they live in like wood green, you know what I mean? Like really, you can get a room for 550 if you're prepared to live in somewhere like, I don't know, like seven sisters,

like somewhere that's a little bit rough, maybe that's kind of, but it's still like, it's easily it's not more. I mean, I now prices have come down for one bedrooms a little bit in London, but like when we first moved to London, yeah, 12, 13, 1400 pounds a month seemed to be pretty normal in South London and like, in nicer areas or closer to the central city, it was far, far more expensive. So yeah, this is the discount is great. But then like, you know, like India was just saying, you then turn around and the council can't really use that money to continue. And as I recall, right to buy was an idea that was proposed for under labor when Jim Callion was the PM,

but they didn't do it. And then Thatcher did it. And obviously like, they made sure to make it like, as landlord friendly as possible, which is as you will find the trend in this country. It's proved to be kind of a genius move from Thatcher in terms of keeping the Tories in power effectively forever, because they sort of created a new constituency class of landowners of homeowners. Yeah, 47% of people in the UK lived in council estates before 1979. So like, but then simultaneously pulled up the ladder for anyone else to become homeowners, because that route of, I mean, it just goes back to the kind of Taylor's oldest time thing of like the boomer who benefits from like every piece of kind of social investment, and then proceeds to like,

haul up the ladder behind them and say like, well, I never needed any of that shit. And it's like, you bought a council house. You bought a council house like back when like the median income was, I don't know, 6,000 pounds a year, you could buy a council house for like 12,000 pounds, like the median income, the median family income in this country is like 28,000 pounds a year. It's far less for individuals and the average house price in the Southeast is what like 354,000 pounds. Like, yeah, so it's like, it's gone from a factor of two to like a factor of 10 or worse. Yeah. And so now as a result of that, as India was saying, it's basically illegal to build more council housing, like because councils aren't allowed to like, it's all very clever this stuff,

how it's never like, it's never, they don't say to councils where you can't build council housing, but they just make it effectively impossible. Like India was saying, you can't take on debt, like all councils are constantly under huge amounts of pressure in the opposite direction to sell off their assets in order just to pay for their running costs, as though that's a system that's going to work because eventually you just run out of assets to sell. And so now frame just like entirely the council's fault. It's like, oh, look, like you're sitting on all of this like stock that you're not doing anything with because you don't have the money to refurbish with it. So really what you should do is sell it to your helpful, friendly local developer who will redevelop

this plot of land for you. And then because it'll be so nice, you'll like give you a couple of flats back. I mean, everyone will have to use a separate doorway to get into their flats because we don't the poor people to be getting anywhere near the luxurious flats on this development. And then like still at it, I think like a few weeks ago, the government has like started trying to like pass the law that basically anyone can like go up to their council and basically be like, well, you're not using this like piece of land here. So you really should like sell it to us or sell it to a developer. I mean, I was thinking about this recently that Southern council is like, we're our ambitious plan to build 11,000 units of social housing by 2040.

It's like, wait, you're building 11,000 by 24, that's that's what 19 years from now. So that's basically like, we're going to build 500 units a year. It's like, that's ambitious apparently. Like, yeah, that's probably more than most any other council is doing, but it's just not that much at the goal post have been when you think of the scale of the housing shortage and the price crisis here in the city and elsewhere in greater London and what's like, yeah, because now I mean, I feel like, I mean, again, not being an expert, but you get these kind of, there are just a few big development companies in Britain that you feel like a kind of writing the housing policy at this point, like Persimmon and Taylor Wimpy and Red Row,

whatever, who invariably get the contracts to build these, you know, kind of like private social housing block combos where like, they build development either of houses or apartments, and then some percentage of it has to be like either social or what they call affordable in quote marks, housing, often with a separate door or whatever. And crucially, as the, we discussed this with India on the trash future about their help to buy homes, which are very much cut from the same cloth. Often our total pieces of shit is built very poorly. Well, yeah, because you're also like, when you're putting it into private hands, like, like what house builder has an incentive to kind of find a nice plot of land to build,

to build these houses on, like, they're not going to try and like, they're not hanging around, like a council is kind of stuck there, like you will have to deal with whatever shit you like, you build eventually. But I think it's like, it's something like 11,000 houses are currently like being planned in major floodplains across, across the country, which is like, I just love that tweet I sent it to you. Oh, yeah, this is not all the shirts. And like, in the kind of torrential rain that we've had in the past week, someone had snapped a picture of one of these. Like the board, they'll put up in the field being like, Oh, by these, like, wonderful, like three bedroom houses, like with help to buy. It's just like, under like, three foot of water.

It's, yeah, stubbly meadows in Rothschild, Manchester, and starting prices are 245,995 pounds for a bit of flooded field. And Christ, I just remember that being like, like the North supposedly being cheaper. I mean, obviously that's cheaper than London, but still, I mean, that's, that's wild. Yeah. It's hardly cheap, is it? Yes, it's not cheap at all. Once again, I mean, that's still like 10 times the median family salary for median family income for, for a house that's going to be shit. I mean, the right to buy stuff, there was recently a story in The Hated Guardian about somebody in, I believe, Sheffield, or Manchester, saving up and doing help to buy, to buy her own flat.

She bought a one bedroom for like 110,000 pounds. And I'm not joking. The cladding that they put on the roof was so poor quality and so flammable that they wound up charging people like an additional, in her case, it was the same as her mortgage payment on top of her mortgage to hire a private security firm to do fire watch, like they were in a fucking barracks building, because they had to be somebody monitoring the place 24 seven to make sure that it wasn't catching on fire. Oh yeah. I mean, this is the kind of like the post-gruntful situation is where they've realized that not only are lots of kind of social housing schemes covered in flammable cladding, but a lot of new builds that people paid like serious amounts of money for are now covered in

this cladding. And you can't sell it because it's very dangerous and illegal to live there. But people are going to go bankrupt because the developers are like, well, we're not fucking paying for it. You bought it now. You've got to pay to fix it. Your fault. Deal with it. Yeah, you shouldn't have bought this shitty house that we built. That sounds like a you problem to me. It's amazing that people have bought the idea that we've suddenly realized that covering apartment buildings in flammable cladding is a bad idea because an apartment block burnt down. Surely someone could have done the math on that beforehand. We just used to build apartment buildings out of paraffin wax. It was never a problem before,

but now people are moaning about it. Well, yeah, in the fact that these buildings that they're covering are often concrete 60s and 70s era, which are perfectly functional. Sometimes then not as well insulated as they could be, but in some ways the concrete was a lot better than what they are currently using to make houses. They're usually covering them for aesthetic reasons. That's normally my understanding of it because I don't know if this was ever proven true, but supposedly Grenfell Tower had that cladding put on it because other residents of wealthier neighborhoods that could see the tower had complained about what it looked like. I don't know. I just remember the cladding, the difference between covering the building in

fireproof cladding and flammable cladding, which they wound up going, was something along the lines of like- I like the idea that that's what it's advertised as. Can you have the fireproof or the extremely flammable? The stuff they had was not fireproof and was not, as I understand it, was not safety rated for long enough for a building of that size with regard to how long it would take to evacuate a building. It saved them like 200,000 pounds in the whole project. 72 people died for them to save 200,000 pounds. On a tower block, which must be worth at least 10 million, if not 15, 20 million pounds. This is how desperate councils are to save money to try. It takes a lot of money to look after architecture. You can't just build a house and

then leave it and expect it to be fine. It's the same with tower blocks. I think with Grenfell, they haven't proven that it was entirely an aesthetic decision, but I think one of the telling features is that the way the fire spread around the building was via this crown at the top, which served absolutely no function. It wasn't there to keep the rain off. It wasn't there to keep anything in place. It was a purely decorative element that was bolted around the top, and that was how the fire spread to different faces. I mean, I feel a bad joke about it, but then they also feel like the council can decide circling the building with hay is a particularly nice design stuff. It's bleak, isn't it? I mean, it's bad, but I can get my head around

the way that people don't care about social housing because they're like, well, I'm never going to need it. I've got my house, so who gives a fuck? But you get to this point where not only does the fact that we don't build any social housing skew the entire housing market, house prices, even if you don't need social housing are completely insane. You might not need social housing, but you're now trapped in renting because there is no supply of housing to keep up with the demand. Also, there seems to be no incentive. I feel like social housing functioned in a bit of a similar way to the Soviet Union. I wouldn't have liked to have lived in the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union kept

the West on its toes. The West couldn't indulge its absolute basest instincts while it had a competitor. And then since the Soviet Union collapse, we've just been like, hell, we're going to go hog. We're going to see, you want to sell your blood? Let's try it. Do you want to fuck a baby? That's 50,000 pounds. You want to eat a baby? 60,000 pounds. We got it all here, don't worry. Exactly. The logic of the market. And social housing is like a similar thing. I guess most people would rather not live in social housing if they couldn't afford better housing or whatever. But the very existence of social housing means that private developers can't build absolute shit and expect people to live in it

because there's a state-provided alternative that's safe and affordable. And for me, also, the point that I always make is I would absolutely love, I mean, I wish I could own my own home, but I don't think that's going to happen without some serious luck. So I would prefer if I was going to pay rent to pay rent to the council and my rent go towards the maintenance of the building that I'm living in and improving the community I am in and helping build more housing in schools and stuff and things people need as opposed to some fucking Tory and Sussex who's just skimming off with everybody, which invariably that's what it is. And it's like, I'd like that to be the option. But I mean, I know that in, I keep bringing

back Southern because it's the only place I've lived in the UK, but like the waitlist to get on the waitlist for social housing and stuff like you have to prove that you've lived in Southern for at least five years. And then you're on the waitlist, but I don't even know how long it is in New York City. It depends usually depending on your circumstances. Like you skip the queue a bit if you've got kids and like various things. But yeah, I mean, it's long. Like you're talking like at least five years, but probably longer. The last time they opened up the public, the waitlist to new public entries in New York City was before 9-11 for public housing there. That's it. 9-11 ruined it for everyone. Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, we lost some real estate. So

until we rebuild all of it, you can't be able to put any more people in public housing. So yeah, it's wild. And it's like, you see, I think that point of the sort of like counter hegemon of ideas, if you will, like just something to oppose the idea that the only thing that's available is for you to exist as a profit making vehicle for assholes who build very poor quality housing. Yeah, because this was something that I wanted to, and this is maybe like a little thing to round out on with India is that like, I don't know, they build, obviously you do get the real horror stories like the thing you were talking about with the cladding on the help to buy place up north where like they were just all went bankrupt because they had to have a fire watch or

whatever. But even in just a low key way, I mean, in lots of towns, they build these huge developments of like what we would call like cookie kind of houses where they all kind of look the same. And it's like, you know, you're Taylor Wimpy or you're Redra or whatever. And they all just like, not only are they kind of depressing to look at, but they're the sizes are ridiculous. Like they say it's a three bedroom house, but a like two of the bedrooms are sort of like minuscule like they might work maybe for like young children, but otherwise there's no real there's no real living space. And also the space in the rest of the house isn't sufficient for a three bedroom house. Like if you're in a three bedroom Victorian house, it would be like double

the size because they would think like, well, you need so much kitchen space, so much living room space. They're like, no, a three bedroom house needs three bedrooms, but it can have the apartment of like a studio, it can have the kitchen of like a studio flat. And like the gardens are similarly basically non-existent, they're almost back to building back to back again. And it's like, is this the kind of bright future of private housing that we can expect? Well, yeah, I mean, this like people, when they want to demonize the mass housing projects of the 60s and 70s, like a lot of the reasons that they were being built on that kind of philosophies and politics of the architects. So kind of like a lot of the couple you see

thinking was about working out how much space an individual individual person needed to live a good and healthy and comfortable life. So a reason that a lot of these housing projects, like despite having like, like some of them certainly had like really big issues and, you know, some of them had minor issues, they were built for living in. And this idea that you just like knock them down and start again and build something kind of that might look kind of a little bit like nicer, but it's just crappier to live in. I mean, the thing that really frustrates me is that this is not a problem that we solely have in the UK. Like this is an issue that happened like certainly across all of

the rest of Europe where they've had to reckon with the like increasing need for social housing. And if you look at the last two winners of this, the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture has like clearly their jury has been making a statement. They have picked these two projects that were not new builds, but redevelopments of existing housing. So last year, I think it was, it went to this project that was like 530 houses in France, like built across a couple of blocks. They built in the 1960s and like three architecture firms took it on and they basically looked at it and were like, well, no, we shouldn't demolish this, like knocking it down is going to be like, it's also incredibly environmentally destructive to

knock down a building. But people were living there and like their lives were there. So they came up with a design where they kind of built these extra decks kind of like in the Tbilisi style, but like planning permission and health and safety, and they built these decks up the side. And then everyone, everyone's apartment got this new kind of garden sunroom that they were allowed to kind of do with what they, what they liked. And they were able to kind of customize it. And the disruption was very minimal, they kind of would do it in like sections. So you didn't have to like move out and that you could still enjoy living there. And then in 2017, the winner of this prize is biannual was a, again, 1960s kind of Amsterdam building that had fallen kind of to

this, the problems of urban decay and stuff beginning to like look pretty crappy and then it gains a crappy reputation. And they needed an inexpensive solution. So they, they like sexed up the facades and the communal areas. And then they gave people the money and the support to renovate their flats inside them and just modernize them and make them a nice place to live. And you're like, this, like, this is not beyond the wit of men. Like a lot of architects are like, like smart, kind people that want to do good. You go to the graduate shows and you see people coming up with all these like exciting solutions for living. And then the British version of that would probably be the Park Hill estate where, which is the one I was talking about, where they

kind of transposed everyone. And then they were like, Oh, no, like there's the crime and the drugs and it's terrible. And like, Oh, I guess like, we'll just let it fall into disrepair. And then the council has had to seek a private development partner to kind of reinvigorate it. I'm just laughing at the idea of the renovation budget, what that would look like in the UK. And it's like, Oh, we hired a private company and gave them the money and they're going to give you and you just get like a new toilet and a single piece of PVC pipe. And it's like, all right, luxury flat, yours at last. That's right. They're doing quite a lot to it. But the way that they're doing it is they've like chopped it into three. The first phase was like the council, like the

council housing. So that's like the cheapest phase where they've kind of like put some like rainbow colored panels on the side. So that's your social housing and then woke and inclusive. Yeah. And I mean, so the developers are called Urban Splash and they're not like the worst that I've met, but then I already hate them just based on the name. Because then they so they completed the first phase and they moved kind of the people who people who've been on like waitlist pages kind of like moved in and then they were doing the second phase, which they had like different architects in and they were kind of making them a bit fancier because they were they were going to be selling like a lot of these. And then they kind of finished that and

everyone was like, wait, you said that like, you are actually going to have like 20% affordable in this like 20% affordable in that but there's like no affordable houses in this, which I put to them and they were just like, Oh, yeah, but like, you see, we we actually just built so many of these affordable homes in the first phase that we just didn't have like any money left over for the second phase. So unfortunately, unfortunately, we can't deliver that, but we over deliver it in the first phase. So it's fine. And also like vibe actually, because because of the crime, like because it's like a crime issue, potentially, now like all of the all of the floors have their own key fob. So all of these like communal areas that you're supposed to be able to share and like,

that even if you're living in the social housing, you'll be able to access everything. They're like, well, how exactly are you going to be to like access that if if there's a key fob and you have the key to like get into it. And then they built the third phase, which is student housing. So, oh, good. Well, that always goes well. Which is like, I mean, again, I don't know for like American listeners, whether this is as much of a phenomenon, but that student housing as well, like the real money is for developers, because now people pay an insane amount of money. Well, I mean, not for like American, not for Americans, but it used to be kind of like free. And then it was like three grand a term. Now it's like, minimum nine grand a term a year to go to

Most of the accommodation is like something which in Sweden would be considered unfit for prisoners. Yeah, in the US, you typically you typically have dormitories and they are building new ones, but most universities like a lot of their stuff was built immediately post war. And so you have dorms, but they're, you know, you'll either if you're lucky, you get a private room, normally you share a room with one other person, and then you'll have communal maybe like an ensuite bathroom that you share with another room. Or when I was a university student, we just had a bathroom on the floor that had showers and toilets and stuff like that. But there's not really the equivalent of the student apartment blocks that are sort of official university housing. If that

stuff gets built, it's entirely private and entirely privately rented. It's not really. Yeah. No, no, I mean, this is like private student accommodation. So it's like fancy. They're aiming for the overseas student market. It's very like shiny. You know, you would not be sharing a bathroom here, you're going to have like a cinema room that you can rent out. And, and the kind of the way that they're selling this, which I just, I just don't even know how to feel about it, is they're like, Oh, this is like this brilliant development where we've, we've brought back to life as like symbol of like Sheffield. And, and you can now like be a student and you can rent one of these student apartments. And then, you know, you can have your successful career that you'll

definitely have because you've paid all of this money for a degree. And then you could buy your first house and like another part of this development. And you're like, is that like, that's really the best. There's, there's, there's, there's a care home in another one of the buildings basically this dormitory. This is this dormitory. It's just the entire set of snow piercer. Yeah, it's never a Logan's run. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's all, it's all just such a mess. I mean, I guess, I guess the meme, the meme I would draw of it all is like, you know, you've got your, you've got your working poor and you've got your government and that the, it's like the Jesus meme where it's like,

we're going to build some social housing and it's like, do you consent and the working poor are like, yes. And it's like, do you consent and the local authorities like, yes. And like, there isn't there someone you forgot to ask and there's a big picture of Jeff Fairburn and he's like, but I don't consent. You're living as big as Bestos Tower Block. Wait, no, actually, as Bestos isn't sufficiently flammable. As Bestos is, if anything, not very flammable, it would have to be made out of like, I don't know, jellied kerosene or something. For decorative reasons only. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think that, I think that kind of brings us to a neat, if not particularly optimistic conclusion. I think nevertheless, we've given

people a pretty good rundown of just, just how, just how cursed the swamp castle that we're all living in is. So it remains only to thank India very much for coming on. Thanks for having me guys. Oh, it's been an absolute pleasure. Do you have anything you'd like to plug? Not really. Just follow me on Twitter. It's at India Block. I'll be doing a newsletter at some point. Won't we all? But if you'd like to learn anything more about the horrendous ineptitude of British property developers and so on, give India's newsletter a read. All right, phenomenal. Well, this has been another Britonology. As ever, I've been joined by Nate Bethea, and we'll see you next time.