People who live in flats are shaped to have a totally different outlook than those who live in houses. Living in flats is essentially a substandard level of living because of the lack of privacy and space. Am currently living in a flat. Haha. This’s a really good article. Didn’t really analyse the reasons behind it. Is it overpopulation, lack of land planning, lack of opportunities outside London? It is definitely not ideal for people to live in flats rather than houses. Thanks.
It really depends on the flat though. The uk already has by far the highest house occupancy in Europe. A good apartment built with solid soundproofed walls and floors can offer superior privacy to a house, as you’re too high for anyone to look in, there’s no reason for them to be less spacious and the increased density makes everything from public transport to shopping provision much more simple and viable. Victorian houses converted to flats are very difficult to sound proof, and I agree with you that living somewhere you can hear your neighbours talking – and you know they can hear you – is very uncomfortable, but I would say the problems alluded to in the article can be blamed precisely on a British fetishisation of houses over apartments that inevitably lead to inefficient land use and urban sprawl.
Lived in a flat once (in London). Never again. Flats are only as good as the neighbours. The endless stomping from upstairs, the late night washing machines using cheap overnight electricity tariffs, the almost always inadequate parking. It was awful. It was a new build too, so maybe UK building standards are to blame. I now live in a detached house in Manchester and it is wonderful. Close the doors and windows, the outside world disappears.
Part of our fetishisation of houses no doubt lies in the terrible standards of a lot of apartment buildings and house conversions. Grenfell sure did nothing for the appeal of apartment living either. I love the views you can get with a well placed apartment though.
“A good apartment built with solid soundproofed walls and floors can offer superior privacy to a house.” Except they aren’t built with solid soundproofed walls and floors. It’s like if pigs had wings they could fly.
with you on the public transport / density thing. People in the UK preferring to live in sprawling suburbs makes metros and trams less of an obvious solution than they are in other places. It doesn’t excuse not investing in buses though. Buses are good.
Immigration certainly doesn’t help, but even without it we would be struggling with the current housing stock. The population has broken into smaller and smaller households which require a much greater number of smaller dwellings for a given population.
I lived in flats most of my life, only lately moving into a townhouse, and flats are in many ways better than houses, eg lower maintenance, better security and almost certainly a better location than the house you’d get for the same money. This of course all depends on the build quality: a 1960s tower block will be grim and soul destroying, whereas a 1930s mansion flat will be delightful. As ever, you get what you pay for.
Steve Farrell
2 months ago
Is this really what we want for ourselves & future generations?
Connecticut Yankee
2 months ago
I think it’s great. Why should Essex and Sutton stay the same forever when they could be thriving metropolises?
Dumetrius
2 months ago
I’d prefer outer London to remain the Oliver Bonas & Proseco Belt.
Just personally.
Mark Pester
2 months ago
Sutton has long been a commuter town largely populated by professionals heading into London. The new flats aren’t really changing that- they’re quite expensive!
John Riordan
2 months ago
Personally, I hope London does turn into a 20m megacity. The only reason it mightn’t is if the UK entirely loses global relevance in the 21st century – a distinct possibility given the pace of geopolitical change we’re seeing at this point.
However, I simply don’t accept that we need to lose the Green Belt to achieve it. Some parts of the Green Belt aren’t green at all of course, they’re just chunks of useless, low value land that happen to sit inside the boundaries of the Green Belt, and they can be built upon very easily without sacrificing the principle.
But that’s not the main point anyway: most of the necessary doubling of residential sq ft. needed in London can come from building up on the really quite enormous tracts of underused land inside the Green Belt. There will be some problems with this such as whether every new flat/house can come with an automatic right to a resident’s car parking permit, for instance, but those problems are not collectively as large as the looming crisis in the fact of having confiscated the ability to own property from an increasingly-large proportion of the voters in a property-owning democracy.
The usual snobbery and self interest that says your bits of “nice, picturesque” green space must be sacrosanct – while the other bits in more urban areas – which actually are probably more biodiverse – should be sacrificed.
You think it’s snobbery on my part do you, when the entire point of my argument is to restore the ability of people on modest incomes to afford a decent place to live? And where on earth would you get the idea that self-interest is relevant?
Your comment is daft.
Cam Marsh
2 months ago
Try New Denham just past Uxbridge. 20 years ago a sleepy backwater nestled next to some farms. Typical middle class spread. Now….packed to the gills with multigenerational families and 4 cars to every property. London is popping at the seams.
Not sure what’s wrong with multigenerational houses, would you rather grandparents are knocking about in their own in houses or living in a nursing home?
Try Uxbridge – a creepy place after dusk falls, or the Harows, foreign ghettos, Hayes, Hillingdon, South Ruislip, rough, seedy, squalid, not British anymore – but then Ickenham is good – Ruislip pretty good – Northwood and Pinner Ok.
West London – I watched it from the 60s to now – The Government must Really, Really hate the Native people to have done what they did to the nation – Dirty, scary, grimey, rude, and full of antisocial weirdos from the less plesant corners of the world. litter ankle deep and graffiti everywhere.
Old Deneham used to be so charming – the old flint church, the village green – I think the pub was the Green Man – Rodger Morre’s house was across from it.
Daniel Lee
2 months ago
Has Sadiq Khan named himself Mayor-for-Life? He never seems to have to run for office.
He’s not exactly having to exert himself against the candidates the Tories are putting up against him. Susan Hall? Shaun Bailey? Zac Goldsmith? Only the latter looked even remotely like someone who could win and yet, for no obvious reason, he decided to run an ugly dog-whistle campaign which alienated central Londoners and advertised his own desperation.
Its not impossible, you don’t even have to be all that good (as Johnson’s victories amply demonstrate) but it really helps to have some sort of positive vision for what you want to do rather than what you want to oppose.
Jonathan Andrews
2 months ago
I’d like to read an investigation into why more people are not moving well out of London. Why can’t little start ups set up in Newport or Chesterfield? Why don’t remote workers move to Huddersfield?
Because they can quite literally live anywhere else.
Matthew Freedman
2 months ago
I have to declare an interest as I live zone 5. I hate the way every property move to article is “move to zone 2” or “move to a town in the commuter belt”, but never move to somewhere in zone 5 even if has a tube every 3 minutes and regular buses all around.
I miss the regular buses. Kingston has no tube anywhere in its borders, but there are buses everywhere. The main thing (apart from my neighbours and my garden) that I miss from living there.
I used to live in Zone 3 in Ealing, on Haven Green right next to Ealing Broadway station, with Central Line tubes every 10mins plus it was on the GWR line, so 12mins both to Paddington and Heathrow Airport, and still I had friends in Shepherds Bush who kept asking why I wanted to live so far out of town. They, in turn, probably knew people in Notting Hill who thought Shepherds Bush might as well be Swindon.
It’s a London thing.
Walter Marvell
2 months ago
Excellent. Ballardian indeed. We are like trapped mice on a motorized treadmill. Our statist society is running faster and faster. But we and the whirling wheel are broken. Too few people can earn now the money necessary to support themselves and put a roof over their head. A majority already depend on state bailouts. Energy and food and housing costs are likely soon to bury millions. The essay was a neat sharp snapshot of the upcoming dystopia. Choose magic money and a two year China atyle lock, choose anti meritocracy and DE1 hysteria, open borders & mass immigration of poor, embrace Net Zero degrowth and punitive unsustainable levels of tax? Fine. Now reap the harvest.
Chris Amies
2 months ago
It’s a good question because at least south of the river London ends while suburbia is still going on. I grew up in Worcester Park – the bit that was, and still is, in the Surrey borough of Epsom and Ewell. But London’s boundaries were very close by. I moved to Kingston (not immediately) but left that town three years ago when it had got as crowded as the West Kensington I had quit in 2005 – and which is quite likely less crowded these days, I don’t know. But Kingston had become an overbuilt place of demolition and concrete and no longer felt safe. I was out of there.
People who live in flats are shaped to have a totally different outlook than those who live in houses. Living in flats is essentially a substandard level of living because of the lack of privacy and space. Am currently living in a flat. Haha. This’s a really good article. Didn’t really analyse the reasons behind it. Is it overpopulation, lack of land planning, lack of opportunities outside London? It is definitely not ideal for people to live in flats rather than houses. Thanks.
It really depends on the flat though. The uk already has by far the highest house occupancy in Europe. A good apartment built with solid soundproofed walls and floors can offer superior privacy to a house, as you’re too high for anyone to look in, there’s no reason for them to be less spacious and the increased density makes everything from public transport to shopping provision much more simple and viable. Victorian houses converted to flats are very difficult to sound proof, and I agree with you that living somewhere you can hear your neighbours talking – and you know they can hear you – is very uncomfortable, but I would say the problems alluded to in the article can be blamed precisely on a British fetishisation of houses over apartments that inevitably lead to inefficient land use and urban sprawl.
Lived in a flat once (in London). Never again. Flats are only as good as the neighbours. The endless stomping from upstairs, the late night washing machines using cheap overnight electricity tariffs, the almost always inadequate parking. It was awful. It was a new build too, so maybe UK building standards are to blame. I now live in a detached house in Manchester and it is wonderful. Close the doors and windows, the outside world disappears.
Part of our fetishisation of houses no doubt lies in the terrible standards of a lot of apartment buildings and house conversions. Grenfell sure did nothing for the appeal of apartment living either. I love the views you can get with a well placed apartment though.
“A good apartment built with solid soundproofed walls and floors can offer superior privacy to a house.” Except they aren’t built with solid soundproofed walls and floors. It’s like if pigs had wings they could fly.
with you on the public transport / density thing. People in the UK preferring to live in sprawling suburbs makes metros and trams less of an obvious solution than they are in other places. It doesn’t excuse not investing in buses though. Buses are good.
It’s the effect of continuous mass immigration.
Immigration certainly doesn’t help, but even without it we would be struggling with the current housing stock. The population has broken into smaller and smaller households which require a much greater number of smaller dwellings for a given population.
I lived in flats most of my life, only lately moving into a townhouse, and flats are in many ways better than houses, eg lower maintenance, better security and almost certainly a better location than the house you’d get for the same money. This of course all depends on the build quality: a 1960s tower block will be grim and soul destroying, whereas a 1930s mansion flat will be delightful. As ever, you get what you pay for.
Is this really what we want for ourselves & future generations?
I think it’s great. Why should Essex and Sutton stay the same forever when they could be thriving metropolises?
I’d prefer outer London to remain the Oliver Bonas & Proseco Belt.
Just personally.
Sutton has long been a commuter town largely populated by professionals heading into London. The new flats aren’t really changing that- they’re quite expensive!
Personally, I hope London does turn into a 20m megacity. The only reason it mightn’t is if the UK entirely loses global relevance in the 21st century – a distinct possibility given the pace of geopolitical change we’re seeing at this point.
However, I simply don’t accept that we need to lose the Green Belt to achieve it. Some parts of the Green Belt aren’t green at all of course, they’re just chunks of useless, low value land that happen to sit inside the boundaries of the Green Belt, and they can be built upon very easily without sacrificing the principle.
But that’s not the main point anyway: most of the necessary doubling of residential sq ft. needed in London can come from building up on the really quite enormous tracts of underused land inside the Green Belt. There will be some problems with this such as whether every new flat/house can come with an automatic right to a resident’s car parking permit, for instance, but those problems are not collectively as large as the looming crisis in the fact of having confiscated the ability to own property from an increasingly-large proportion of the voters in a property-owning democracy.
The usual snobbery and self interest that says your bits of “nice, picturesque” green space must be sacrosanct – while the other bits in more urban areas – which actually are probably more biodiverse – should be sacrificed.
You think it’s snobbery on my part do you, when the entire point of my argument is to restore the ability of people on modest incomes to afford a decent place to live? And where on earth would you get the idea that self-interest is relevant?
Your comment is daft.
Try New Denham just past Uxbridge. 20 years ago a sleepy backwater nestled next to some farms. Typical middle class spread. Now….packed to the gills with multigenerational families and 4 cars to every property. London is popping at the seams.
Not sure what’s wrong with multigenerational houses, would you rather grandparents are knocking about in their own in houses or living in a nursing home?
Try Uxbridge – a creepy place after dusk falls, or the Harows, foreign ghettos, Hayes, Hillingdon, South Ruislip, rough, seedy, squalid, not British anymore – but then Ickenham is good – Ruislip pretty good – Northwood and Pinner Ok.
West London – I watched it from the 60s to now – The Government must Really, Really hate the Native people to have done what they did to the nation – Dirty, scary, grimey, rude, and full of antisocial weirdos from the less plesant corners of the world. litter ankle deep and graffiti everywhere.
Old Deneham used to be so charming – the old flint church, the village green – I think the pub was the Green Man – Rodger Morre’s house was across from it.
Has Sadiq Khan named himself Mayor-for-Life? He never seems to have to run for office.
A good description of SK by Dan.
He’s not exactly having to exert himself against the candidates the Tories are putting up against him. Susan Hall? Shaun Bailey? Zac Goldsmith? Only the latter looked even remotely like someone who could win and yet, for no obvious reason, he decided to run an ugly dog-whistle campaign which alienated central Londoners and advertised his own desperation.
Its not impossible, you don’t even have to be all that good (as Johnson’s victories amply demonstrate) but it really helps to have some sort of positive vision for what you want to do rather than what you want to oppose.
I’d like to read an investigation into why more people are not moving well out of London. Why can’t little start ups set up in Newport or Chesterfield? Why don’t remote workers move to Huddersfield?
“Why don’t remote workers move to Huddersfield?”
Because they can quite literally live anywhere else.
I have to declare an interest as I live zone 5. I hate the way every property move to article is “move to zone 2” or “move to a town in the commuter belt”, but never move to somewhere in zone 5 even if has a tube every 3 minutes and regular buses all around.
I miss the regular buses. Kingston has no tube anywhere in its borders, but there are buses everywhere. The main thing (apart from my neighbours and my garden) that I miss from living there.
I used to live in Zone 3 in Ealing, on Haven Green right next to Ealing Broadway station, with Central Line tubes every 10mins plus it was on the GWR line, so 12mins both to Paddington and Heathrow Airport, and still I had friends in Shepherds Bush who kept asking why I wanted to live so far out of town. They, in turn, probably knew people in Notting Hill who thought Shepherds Bush might as well be Swindon.
It’s a London thing.
Excellent. Ballardian indeed. We are like trapped mice on a motorized treadmill. Our statist society is running faster and faster. But we and the whirling wheel are broken. Too few people can earn now the money necessary to support themselves and put a roof over their head. A majority already depend on state bailouts. Energy and food and housing costs are likely soon to bury millions. The essay was a neat sharp snapshot of the upcoming dystopia. Choose magic money and a two year China atyle lock, choose anti meritocracy and DE1 hysteria, open borders & mass immigration of poor, embrace Net Zero degrowth and punitive unsustainable levels of tax? Fine. Now reap the harvest.
It’s a good question because at least south of the river London ends while suburbia is still going on. I grew up in Worcester Park – the bit that was, and still is, in the Surrey borough of Epsom and Ewell. But London’s boundaries were very close by. I moved to Kingston (not immediately) but left that town three years ago when it had got as crowded as the West Kensington I had quit in 2005 – and which is quite likely less crowded these days, I don’t know. But Kingston had become an overbuilt place of demolition and concrete and no longer felt safe. I was out of there.