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How snobbery killed suburbia Britain needs more humble semis

Semi-heaven. Richard Baker/In Pictures/Getty

Semi-heaven. Richard Baker/In Pictures/Getty


July 13, 2024   7 mins

The new Labour government’s day one commitment to a vast national housebuilding effort has been almost uniformly welcomed, yet there are some glaring exceptions. Naturally, the rump Corbynite Left is grouching on social media that plans to work with private building companies will do little to address rising prices, and that the state should take on a construction role itself to primarily build council homes for social rents. But for even the BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, to challenge Reeves directly that “in history, we’ve only had this level of housebuilding when the state has been involved,” highlights the strange lacuna in the national memory over what must be the most successful housing effort in Britain’s, and perhaps the world’s, history. The speculative property boom of the interwar period carpeted London’s near countryside in well-built family homes, and converted the slum-dwelling veterans of the trenches into a property-owning petit bourgeois democracy.

Following the First World War, London added two million people to its population in less than 20 years. To house its new middle-class population, over the Twenties an average of 150,000 houses a year were built on London’s rural fringes. The rate vastly increased over the course of the Thirties so that even at the height of the Depression, 200,000 were being built annually, reaching 350,000 a year by 1936, remaining above 300,000 until the outbreak of war forced workmen to down their tools, suddenly freezing London within its new Green Belt. It was, as the academic defenders of the suburban semi wrote in their classic 1981 polemic, Dunroamin, “a figure not attained again until the Sixties”, and thus markedly more successful than Attlee’s more celebrated postwar efforts.

Enough houses were built between the wars to house a third of England’s population, in hitherto unimaginable comfort and security. Many of these homes were built on landed estates given up by a newly-pinched gentry, and an argument could surely be made that this was a social revolution in prosperity, equivalent, in its uniquely English way, to the land reforms which, just a generation earlier, built a sturdy yeoman class from Ireland’s rent-wracked peasantry. Yet as the authors of Dunroamin noted, “It remains a mystery that none of the leaders of the New Architecture in Europe or England displayed any recognition whatsoever of the achievement of providing over four million homes in the space of just 22 years.” The same can be said of today’s Leftwing YIMBYs, studiously passing over the era’s successes in favour of Attlee’s more modest progress, in a willed act of national forgetting. The reasons are no doubt political: for this wildly productive mass housing project was undertaken without even the vaguest glimmering of reforming zeal, deriving purely from the relentless pursuit of profit by speculative builders.

Yet in this case, greed was a social good. So productive were the speculators — three quarters of homes were built by private companies — that by the mid-Thirties prices plummeted as supply exceeded demand and almost everyone desiring a home of their own had already acquired one. So keen were housebuilders — the very same big contractors of today, the Wimpeys and Taylor Woodrows which made their initial fortunes from the interwar boom — to offload their ever-increasing stock, that homes were put on sale with deposits of 1% or even no deposit at all. The speculators threw in free furniture, rail season tickets and even cars to attract buyers, drawn from tenuously middle class office workers in their twenties and early thirties: the very same class, in fact, which rails against the private builders today. Yet enthusiasts for an active state — including myself — should take comfort that the market flourishing of new housing was enabled by government intervention, namely the vast expansion of public transport routes through the woods and meadows of the Home Counties, creating the vital arteries from which the pebble-dashed capillaries of suburbia would soon branch. It was only the outbreak of war that prevented the Northern Line thrusting through the further reaches of Hertfordshire: among his other sins, Hitler deserves some blame for the Green Belt and today’s Housing Crisis.

For a time, state and market worked smoothly together to forge a historic social good. Yet as the grim spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Ceremony reminds us, our taste-making class remains in thrall to Attlee’s 1945 Labour government, and its well-meaning but decidedly mixed achievements. The socialist modernism of his postwar new town vision — like much socialist modernism, more appealing on the planning board than in lived reality — is surely granted unearned lustre by this generalised air of nostalgia. With New Towns new again, it is worth underscoring Attlee’s role as the under-sung villain of modern Britain’s housing crisis. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act froze London within its prewar boundaries, so that suddenly, as the architectural historian Alan A. Jackson observed, “A hundred years of uninhibited growth had come to an end.” The unintended consequences of the postwar enthusiasm for planning, almost a century later, still burden the young middle-class Londoner, as the new, artificially-induced shortage of building land wrought by the 1947 Act drastically increased land values and with it house prices. As a result, the authors of Dunroamin observed, “It became more and more difficult, particularly in the rapidly-developing South-East, to market semi-detached houses at prices which could be afforded by the kinds of middle and lower middle-class people who had bought them during the period between the wars.” This historic Labour error helped create Generation Rent today.

Yet who today will speak for the humble English semi, so ubiquitous as to appear invisible, still tarnished by a century of elite satire and contempt? To anyone who grew up in Metroland, the mock-Tudor semis of the period instil an instinctive Proustian rush, the bay-windowed living rooms and neatly tended gardens of Edgware, Stanmore, Pinner and Rickmansworth. Yet these quiet, leafy Drives and Avenues were mocked — detested — even as the speculators threw them up, with Betjeman famously wishing on the friendly bombs, and the architectural satirist Osbert Lancaster remarking in 1938 that their existence “does much to reconcile one to the prospect of aerial bombardment”. For Orwell, in Coming Up For Air, an Etonian snobbery against the rising middle class, in all its cultural and political conservatism, outweighed compassion for the lower orders in his sneering contempt at “the same long, long rows of little semi-detached houses . . . as much alike as council houses and generally uglier”.

“Who today will speak for the humble English semi, so ubiquitous as to appear invisible, still tarnished by a century of elite satire and contempt?”

Architecturally speaking, Orwell was wrong: the Tudorbethan affectations of the interwar semi, with its leaded windows and pointed gables, were a conscious rejection of the neo-Georgian style favoured for council housing, a mark of social distinction and independence harking back to the idealised sturdy yeoman of Merrie England, master of his humble plot. In his excellent, recent and sadly posthumous masterpiece, Interwar, the architectural critic Gavin Stamp attempts to reclaim the half-timbered semi of the Twenties and Thirties for the British cultural imagination, observing that “Architectural writers may have sneered at such houses, but as designs they are worth taking seriously,” and are, in any case, “no more monotonous… than the Georgian terraces that the Victorians found so intolerably boring.” Architecturally the unloved descendant of William Morris’s longing gaze back to the High Middle Ages, by way of the asymmetric, steeply-pitched and tile-hung Arts and Crafts villas of Voysey and Lutyens, the humble suburban semi, Stamp observes, democratised the pastoral dreams of the Edwardian upper classes. As he reminds us, “for millions of families, the spec-built suburban house, with its neo-Tudor details, its false half-timbering, tile-hung gables, bay-windows and rough-cast walls, represented an image of home, of freedom and domesticity, for millions of families able and willing to afford a down payment and the mortgage instalments”.

Striking against the taste-making grain while serving in Egypt in World War Two, the architectural writer J.M. Richards tried to weigh the strange hostility the suburban semi aroused among critics, architects and self-described progressives against “the appeal it holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen, an appeal which cannot be explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration.” Indeed, he wrote, after a lyrical passage extolling the virtues of the pram in the oak-panelled hallway, and the view of the tree-shaded garden enclosed by the leaded bay window,  this “is the picture the ordinary Englishman has in his mind when he is away at the war… It is each individual Englishman’s idea of his own home, except for the cosmopolitan rich, a minority of freaks and intellectuals” attracted instead to the concrete rationalism of Continental Modernism. It is an idyllic, inward-looking and cosily domestic image, Richards confesses, “but then the Englishman, being an optimist, thinks idyllically” — and is there anything wrong with that?

Yet at the time, architects and planners, enthralled by Corbusier’s visions of towering concrete edifices — which time proved better suited to the bright light of Provence than the lowering, rain-lashed skies of Hackney and Cumbernauld — found themselves exasperated at the unerring preference of working class tenants surveyed for suburban semis with gardens. Perhaps the political and aesthetic preferences of tastemakers were intertwined: if the Modernist apartment was, as Corbusier asserted, a machine for living in, then semi-detached suburbia was a giant sprawling factory for producing conservatives. The suburban dream is after all a profoundly conservative vision, centred on the small nuclear family — the basis of English social structure since records began — acquiring modern comforts while surrounding itself with echoes of an idealised past.

No wonder the great interwar housing boom was overseen by Stanley Baldwin, who consistently extolled to housebuilders and architects the virtues of the traditional English cottage as a model — as Stamp reminds us, “Baldwin had Arts and Crafts credentials —  his uncle, by marriage had been Edward Burne-Jones and his cousin was Rudyard Kipling” — for warring visions of the political and the aesthetic good were as intertwined then in housing as they are now. Unashamedly populist, marrying technological advance with bucolic nostalgia, the suburban semi of the interwar period was perhaps Anglofuturist rather than Modernist, enabling social and economic progress from the deepest conservative impulses.

Conservatives today, to their detriment, have lost this vision and have rightly suffered for it. Baldwin’s contemporary acolyte Lord Lexden terms him “Baldwin the Builder” like some semi-mythical Dark Age hero, and from the perspective of today’s Tories, he may as well be. Thatcher’s political career may have rested on the half-timbered conservatism of Finchley, yet she never saw fit to expand this worldview for future generations. Johnson’s contribution to Britain’s domestic architecture, the inner-city New London Vernacular shared-ownership flat, may be quietly tasteful — and interwar in its own, Stripped Classical way — but as a contribution to family formation and the creation of a conservative worldview it is rather lacking.

It is ironic, and perhaps heartening to instinctive conservatives, licking their wounds at a generation of Tory failure, that today’s heir to Baldwin’s vision may be Starmer himself, who after all lauds the three-bed pebble-dashed semi of his childhood, embedded in a peri-rural, deeply English landscape, as the building block of his worldview. As visions of social mobility go, there are worse outcomes than a new suburban renaissance. Sneered at by tastemakers, despised by radicals, perhaps, somewhere beneath the Green Belt, the spirit of Dunroamin still slumbers on like King Arthur, waiting to be reawakened in the nation’s service.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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David McKee
David McKee
2 months ago

I think Aris enjoyed writing this piece. It verges on the poetic.

I will be terribly prosaic by comparison, and talk about population density. Those spec-built semis were – are – desirable, but London straggled into the countryside. The new boroughs had barely half the population density of pre-1920 London. All those gardens…

There is much to be said for leaving the Green Belt alone, and building more densely within London’s boundaries – and taking care to build better transport links and amenities. Enlarging London would only make transport even more of a nightmare than it already is.

David McKee
David McKee
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

I might also add two points.

New builds these days are tiny. Look round a show house, and the chances are the developer has not installed interior doors. Otherwise, people might work out that they can have a bed in the second bedroom or a door, but not both.

And the quality of new builds leaves much to be desired. I think so, and according to a recent survey, about a third of the population agrees with me.

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

I’m American but lived and worked in the UK for several years in the late 80s (yes, a long time ago). It is obviously a small country and even back then it was, to my eye, densely populated.
For me, the fundamental question the UK has to address is how many people (immigrants or otherwise) do you want in your relatively small country? How much land do you have that’s suitable for high-density construction, such as large neighborhoods of semi-detached houses? How much infrastructure would you have to create to support economically-sustainable housing development away from the South East? How much nature and “green belt” are you willing to give up?
Perhaps I’m biased because I live in the Western US where there’s still wilderness.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

I think you are missing the point. Let the market decide. Sure commuting is a pain but if say Tom can live in a nice 3 bed with say a 1 hour commute instead of a co ownership house share or some other dystopian reality than maybe Tom can make his own choices.
Anyway building more would reduce prices in city center also

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

Excellent article. Let the market do its thing and let the state build some infastructure with our taxes.
A simple elegant solution. People can decide themselves if they want a high rise in city center or a semi d in commuting distance.
But i would note that social housing and the vast array of housing benefits and the market distortions it creates is still outside the overton window also, even at unherd.
Basically i think the free market would solve a lot of these problems allayed with a pro active state clearing the way planning wise and providing infrastrusture ( as oppose to inflating asset prices with housing subsidies and supply restrictions)

David McKee
David McKee
2 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Sadly, if we let the market do its thing, we will end up with jerry-built rabbit hutches on Green Belt land. Biggest profit margins that way. People who are desperate for a home of their own are in no position to be fussy.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

Well very hard to say what would happen. You might be right in the short term but i think over time prices would fall and quality would improve as the market figured things out over time. The alternative is that supply gets more scarce and prices continue to rise so family formation becomes harder and we all the problem everyone spends their time griping about here get worse.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

If you read the article your thesis is entirely disproved by history. The 1930 suburbs are still among the most desired housing in the land. The “rabbit hutches” are being produced because land costs are very high and planning restrictions and that yes there is very little choice – they are a lot better than not having a house at all!

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  David McKee

People “desperate” for food or cars or mobile phones – are in no position to be fussy…..

Brian Kneebone
Brian Kneebone
2 months ago

Interestingly, thanks to the Luftwaffe, post war planning and industrial decline, Greater London’s population declined through to late 1980’s.
Substantial net immigration and big property developers have subsequently turned up the pressure on the old Great WEN.
Something has to give, for better or worse.

j watson
j watson
2 months ago

Not a great fan of this Author but did appreciate this.
It appears thus far Starmer/Reeves are looking to ‘free’ the market and thus may play to Author’s interwar years lesson. The Country though of course not the same, nor our demographics. Navigating the acceptable path more difficult, but a sensible start in only a week.
London of course benefits, despite what we sometimes might think, from an immense public transport infrastructure, much of it fairly new. It’s one key reason it remains such a vibrant part of our economy. The same infrastructure is lacking in many of our other cities and mitigates against economic growth in these. This is not quickly addressed but the move to more devolution may assist.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
2 months ago
Reply to  j watson

It will be interesting to see, given that Starmer is in No 10 principally thanks to home counties property owners, whether Labour is actually willing to reform the market at all. I suspect not.

Andrew D
Andrew D
2 months ago

Excellent article. My only quibble is the inclusion of Betjeman amongst the elite sneerers – his Metroland is an unadulterated love letter to interwar suburbia.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

Voice from the off: I love them semis. Take one in a heartbeat!

Russell J Cole
Russell J Cole
2 months ago

Interesting article (especially to one born and raised in Pinner – bay-windowed, but, by golly, detached). However, re reference to Betjeman and bombs: Slough was hardly Metroland. Much as I loved Betjeman – still do – his views on “developers” were rather inconsistent. When I’d finally shaken off the stigma of a very suburban (very nearly semi-) upbringing, I realised what a great and effective apologist for Metroland Betjeman was.

I must put in a huge word for the Municipal Park, enduring playground of my youth. In suburbia, that’s where your dreams and self- knowledge began. However well-tended our gardens (as indeed were the parks that I recall), paradoxically perhaps, parks yielded the first brush with nature, human and otherwise.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
2 months ago
Reply to  Russell J Cole

I’d agree with that.
I’d add, the municipal parks in my northern vicinity are now utilised mainly by the Asian diaspora and increasingly, more recent arrivals from Africa. There had been some signs of tension between these two groups but i now see them kicking a ball about and wielding cricket bats in friendly competition. Meanwhile, white families largely keep away; to be fair, they’d already started keeping away before the recent influx of migrants.
Urban and suburbanites live increasingly in enclaves, and this is something that any renewal of housing for the future should address if we’re to have any chance of building a cohesive society. We’d be starting again, of course, from a very low point of cultural dissonance.

Dennis Roberts
Dennis Roberts
2 months ago

I really hope that Labour do succeed in building large numbers of high quality housing, but I just can’t see it. Govts have failed to meet their own targets for decades.

It’s just not in the interest of house builders to build so many that they have to sell them cheap as the article says they did. The quality and size won’t be there either as they are made to build smaller, affordable housing as cheaply as possible, which is nevertheless still expensive due to the underlying cost of the land.

Deb Grant
Deb Grant
2 months ago
Reply to  Dennis Roberts

It’s actually successive Government diktat that has forced smaller and smaller homes to be built, in the name of housing density, not market forces.

andy young
andy young
2 months ago

Loved this, a wonderful piece. I think he may be a little wrong about Betjeman? His feelings towards suburbia may have been ambiguous, but were, at bottom, affectionate. I’d love to see Metro-Land again (- nostalgia squared!).

Malcolm Webb
Malcolm Webb
2 months ago

If we continue increasing our population each year through net immigration of 700,000 or so people, what hope is there of ever having enough decent housing , of whatever style, to accommodate everyone?

Jeff Dudgeon
Jeff Dudgeon
2 months ago

Well researched piece.
I live in a 1939 semi and have done for 40 years. They were well built with quality materials.
Important to note that the later surge in building under Macmillan produced houses and flats that have had to be replaced while the suburban semis remain in place. Cheap builds don’t last and the universal devotion of architects to a monster like Le Corbusier ensured the later product was a disaster.
However I can’t understand why Aris has such faith in statism, even calling himself ‘an enthusiast for an active state’, after writing this.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
2 months ago
Reply to  Jeff Dudgeon

Socialists don’t live in the real world.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
2 months ago
Reply to  Jeff Dudgeon

He explains how some level of state intervention was required even in the interwar period

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago

But it was sensible and subtle state intervention including mainly giving cheap loans to London transport and other railway companies to carry out sensible expansion plans that they already had. It wasn’t top down state mandated demands that people should live in a particular location or even that they should use a particular means of transport to get to work.

charlie martell
charlie martell
2 months ago

There are almost three quarters of a million unoccupied houses in the UK.

There is not a shortage of housing. There is a shortage of intelligence in this, the last and most other governments. All governments appease small vested interests, artificially support house prices for electoral gain and do nothing to address the issue properly.

This one will be the same. They know nothing and are interested in nothing other than looking after the South and South East . Nothing new there at all.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago

The housing has to be fit for living in and also in the right places. It’s not just a matter of numbers. As anyone would realise who has had any significant building work carried out, bringing dilapidated buildings into habitable condition is extremely expensive, and building new can be cheaper (VAT rules don’t help).

J Boyd
J Boyd
2 months ago

If you think the ‘housing problem’ is that people are homeless, disincentivise second home ownership.
If you think it’s that people can’t buy homes, disincentivise ‘buy-to-let’.
If you think it’s insufficient supply, reduce demand by reducing immigration to a sustainable level and convert redundant office and retail space.
But leave the Green Belt and countryside generally alone; we’ve already lost too much of it and we need it.

Frederick Dixon
Frederick Dixon
2 months ago
Reply to  J Boyd

Well said

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
2 months ago
Reply to  J Boyd

It’s ‘when it gone’ it’s gone: it cannot be replaced easily, if at all. With an insatiable demand for more houses, even more people wanting to visit the countryside, but having even further to travel to access it, we would be in an even worse state.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago

This actually isn’t true. if you get rid of buildings the land can recover in a relatively short period of time. There is a great book called “The World Without Us”

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
2 months ago
Reply to  J Boyd

Or disincentivise living in London by incentivising commercial activities into farflung reaches of the country. UK has much empty spaces.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  mac mahmood

Yes it does but that’s called “countryside” and a number of commentators on here are opposed to developing on any of it!

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  J Boyd

Second home ownership has almost nothing to do with the problem of homelessness which is much more complex than simply a dearth of physical buildings. Changing the mix of tenure does absolutely nothing in itself to address supply.

Actually the amount of England that is built up on is very low

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2021/land-use-statistics-england-2021-statistical-release#:~:text=England%20has%20a%20land%20area,being%20'built%2Dup‘.&text=When%20including%20land%20designated%20as,one%20or%20more%20natural%20designation.

Much of the countryside is intensively managed agricultural land which isn’t particularly beautiful. If we if our population is growing rapidly, for whatever reasons, there is no alternative in my view but to relax severe restrictions on development

Hilton Holloway
Hilton Holloway
2 months ago

Perfectly outstanding

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
2 months ago

England has 96,000 square miles of land; why is all the housing clustered around London?

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
2 months ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

It’s where the jobs are: the attractive, well paid jobs, at least.

Deb Grant
Deb Grant
2 months ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

Jobs.

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
2 months ago

I grew up in 1920/30s built suburbia, but I was in Hampstead the other day admiring Victorian townhouse terraces. You can build up to 6 storeys, in the right way and still retain a sense of it being low rise, and villagey. Whatever happened to the sunken basements of many Victorian homes. Surely new homes should have basements for storage, giving homes an extra storey of living space without impacting the skyline by another storey.

Dr E C
Dr E C
2 months ago

So this author thinks we should raze the Green Belt – for which we only have Hitler to thank anyway (absolute nonsense. People smarter than he have campaigned for 2 centuries to leave something green for future generations).

At the same time he extols the quiet, leafy English countryside, but wants to see it concreted over or have its secrets dug up. This article is a mess. London is already one of the most sprawling cities in the world, virtually impossible to drive across in less than half a day. We need to build vertically, not horizontally. And we need a legal minimum for room sizes, so that it’s actually possible to live & raise a family in an apartment. Currently, in this country, prison cells have one, but newbuilds do not.

Finally, we should heavily tax those who own but leave empty a house/flat for long periods, ie foreign property investors who buy up the stock we already have as a way of growing (& in some cases laundering) their own fortunes.

Dr E C
Dr E C
2 months ago
Reply to  Dr E C

Finally finally, the author has utterly misrepresented Orwell’s views in _Coming Up for Air_. His character returns to the idyllic scenes of his boyhood in the countryside only to find the pond where he used to spend all day fishing under a willow tree has been drained & turned into a literal rubbish dump. Not some kind of Etonian architectural snobbery, then, but one of the saddest & most prescient moments regarding Greenbelt destruction in any novel ever.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago
Reply to  Dr E C

You obviously don’t know much about Australian cities American cities Chinese cities or Indian cities to make that claim.

Building vertically quite astonishing that you shouldn’t still advocate that after such a number of planning disasters. But we are doing that as well.

Tom K
Tom K
2 months ago

Wow. A rare sensible piece but Fazi, normally only here to annoy us.

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
2 months ago

A major contribution to the housing shortage was Margaret Thatcher’s sale of social housing without building any replacements.
Today, in Manchester, where corporations are required to build a school for every 100 homes built in a particular area, the construction companies build 99 homes.

Deb Grant
Deb Grant
2 months ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Thatcher took millions of families out of poverty for generations. It was the biggest social mobility initiative we’ve had in my lifetime other than extending university attendance from 10% to 50%.

Do we really want swathes of the population, including new immigrants to be dependent on the state? I suggest that would be decay, not progress.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

I think you may be overstating the length of the interwar building boom. Housebuilding did hit exceptional peaks in the mid to late 1930’s, but only once went above 200,000 in the 1920’s. This can be largely ascribed to the same problem Britain faced after WW2, namely a shortage of workers and materials to build with and no pipeline in place coming out of a disruptive war.
Here’s the chartcomment image.

Deb Grant
Deb Grant
2 months ago

My husband grew up in one of those bow window semis, not that far from Starmer’s. It was reasonably spacious and extremely well built, and is still going strong today, in quiet tree lined streets, having been cared for by several families since. What’s not to like.

There’s nothing more fake than a Socialist snob.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
2 months ago

Pebble-dashed semis were I believe an innovation prompted by the wartime and postwar shortages of manufactured building materials like cement and brick. As such most of the pebble-dashed buildings may be dated between 1930 and 1960.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 months ago

This is another excellent article from Aris Roussinos. I would only quibble with one things: John Betjeman certainly didn’t wish destruction on suburban semis – he in fact famously championed them but on ugly trading estates in Slough. He may have been wrong there anyway, but in any case isn’t the same phenomenon.

It’s true that the New Works Act by giving cheap loans for underground and Southern Railway expansion enabled the new suburbs to be developed and profitable. Another interesting point is that London’s Metropolitan Railway, uniquely among British railways, was allowed to own and develop land of its own. This is a model that has been successful and more widespread in Japan. But certainly some arbitrary artificial boundary around a city- just like an artificial boundary around a particular technology (net zero!) is not likely to be a sensible strategy.