Kielder in Northumberland, population 194, is by most accounts the most remote village in England. The nearest cash machine is 18 miles away in Bellingham and the nearest shopping centre, Hexham, is a 53-minute drive – there are no public transport options. On the other hand, residents enjoy a deeply rural location and the 580 square miles of star-lit sky known as the Northumberland International Dark Sky Park. To some of us, its history and design will be of even greater interest – the village provides a small blueprint of the ideals of one of Britain’s most influential planners, Thomas Sharp ..read more

My apologies for the long delay in updating the blog but it remains an ongoing project. After all, with something over 6 million council homes in Britain in the early 1980s, there’s quite a lot to cover. In the meantime, I’m also always pleased to welcome guest contributions from people with particular local knowledge or experience. Today, I myself am offering a brisk survey of Gloucester, a city with its unique characteristics but one, in other respects, that provides a typical but illuminating history of council housing. Gloucester dates back to Roman times and by the First World War was a ..read more

I’m very pleased to feature a new post from Jill Stewart, the third of a three-part series. Jill is Associate Professor in Public Health at the University of Greenwich and has worked in housing for over 30 years. She has written previously for Municipal Dreams about the earliest environmental health practitioners before 1914 and after the First World War and om the South Oxhey Estate. This is my review of one of Jill’s books, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health. You can follow Jill on social media @Jill_L_Stewart and @housing-jill.bsky.social and ..read more

I’m very pleased to feature a new post from Jill Stewart, the second of a three-part series. Jill is Associate Professor in Public Health at the University of Greenwich and has worked in housing for over 30 years. She has written previously for Municipal Dreams about the earliest environmental health practitioners before 1914 and after the First World War and om the South Oxhey Estate. This is my review of one of Jill’s books, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health. You can follow Jill on social media @Jill_L_Stewart and @housing-jill.bsky.social an ..read more

I’m very pleased to feature a new post from Jill Stewart, the first of a three-part series. Jill is Associate Professor in Public Health at the University of Greenwich and has worked in housing for over 30 years. She has written previously for Municipal Dreams about the earliest environmental health practitioners before 1914 and after the First World War. This is my review of one of Jill’s books, Environmental Health and Housing: Issues for Public Health. You can follow Jill on social media @Jill_L_Stewart and @housing-jill.bsky.social and see more of her work on her p ..read more

If you think of Switzerland (beyond cowbells and cuckoo clocks), you probably think of it as one of the richest countries in the world – correctly so given that one in fifteen of its citizens are millionaires and average wealth per adult stands at around $700,000. You won’t, therefore, think of it as a nation of renters but only 43 percent of the population are home-owners, a fact reflecting the expense of home ownership, a restrictive mortgage market and the existence of a highly regulated private rental sector. In Zurich, almost three-quarters of households rent and around one in four homes ..read more

These photographs are a supplement to my main post providing a full history and description of the Chemin-Vert ‘Garden City’. Housing The Église Saint-Nicaise ..read more

The ‘Garden City’ of Chemin-Vert was an unanticipated pleasure on a recent short visit to Reims. The city is well known as the place where French monarchs were crowned before the country got radical and as the centre of champagne production. But it’s also somewhere that stands out for progressive town planning and some of the finest working-class housing of the interwar period. The latter will be our focus. Reims, like many other towns of its time, grew rapidly in the nineteenth century – from a population of around 25,000 in 1825 to some 115,000 in 1910. Typically, such rapid growth cre ..read more

Barnet’s Dollis Valley Estate, completed in 1970, is an estate of two halves. Its southern section comprises two-storey housing opening onto the green open space that fringes the Dollis Brook. Its larger, northern section, on higher ground towards Chipping Barnet, is made up of predominantly five-storey blocks of flats and maisonettes. This part of the estate is now subject to a major scheme of regeneration and, typically, it’s one that increases the number of housing units whilst overseeing a net loss of social rent homes.  This OpenStreetMap illustrates the layout of the estate. The fiv ..read more

In 1983, Andrew Saint argued that the New Architecture Movement (NAM): (1) has consistently been the only pressure group within architectural politics in Britain to grasp issues beyond the scope of self-interest, and to combine its suggestions for reform with some deeper understanding of the relation between architects, the construction industry and the general public. The organisation had been founded in November 1975 at its Harrogate National Congress; its goals: (2) to channel effectively the collective action of architectural and allied workers in order to bring about radical changes in ..read more