Summary

We have analysed the types of abode that those who live in a chosen postcode call home.

Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective

The type of dwellings residents live in is a good indicator of the cohort associations that the neighbourhood generates. Cohort associations are the shared desires a demographic grouping or “cohort” expresses a preference for. It is best understood by way of an example. Although each generation of Londoners have their preferences as residents catered for, younger generations have developed a greater taste for coffee at the expense of tea shops, which were once much more prevalent than the now ubiquitous coffee shops. This cohort association would make it hard to justify the opening of a tea shop in the majority of London locations.

The same applies to dwelling typologies. There are strong cohort associations with certain demographic groups expressing preferences for apartment living whereas other demographic groups prefer detached home living. However, cohort effects are of interest to commercial inhabitants, especially developers of real estate, because analysis of cohort associations would allow them to better provide the range of housing in demand by a cohort within a certain area.

Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective

The type of dwellings in your area will tell you how long your area has been considered a viable place to live and how long it has been en-vogue. The longer your neighbourhood has been considered a residential area, the higher the proportion of houses versus flats and apartments. For example, Canary Wharf was a shipping wharf that received fruit from the Canary Isles, which had fallen into disuse before it was redeveloped in the 1980s into a new commercial area to take the strain off the City of London. The growth of Canary Wharf has encouraged residential developments in the surrounding Isle of Dogs area, but Canary Wharf Group had avoided building housing within the boundaries of the actual office estate, to the extent that it still lacks any residential buildings within the estate.

The types of dwellings in a neighbourhood will also tell you how conformist or non-conformist your area is. For example, if you are in an area where the residential dwellings are predominantly made up of houses, as opposed to bed-sits and flats, then you know that your area was planned rather than just being a product of sporadic growth, and that it was planned with residential living in mind, rather than this being a subsequent use of the land. Parts of Bermondsey, for example, were historically industrial so you will not find houses in those parts, rather more factories and warehouses converted into apartments and purpose-built flats.

The housing type in your area will also tell you what kind of people live there. A high proportion of houses will tell you that your neighbours are people associated with consumptive land use, i.e. those who consider land as an asset, whereas if you live in an area with a high proportion of flats and bedsits, then your neighbours will be the sorts of people associated with high density housing.

General Commentary

As is typical of most urban centres, when compared to the surrounding country, London offers more apartments and flexible living spaces than the surrounding suburbs and certainly rural areas. This is driven by rising population density in London and subsequent rising costs of land, which has caused residential and commercial developers to not only subdivide pre-existing dwellings, but also to design purpose-built homes to be much smaller than the previous minimum allowance.

With this, the stock and affordability of homes has remained at the forefront of public debate. In the 1920s, a very low proportion of people owned their own home- just 20 percent of the national population and an even lower percentage in London. Despite relatively successful house building initiatives, at the time the government could not shoulder the cost of providing sufficient affordable housing so instead made it easier for people already on the property ladder to buy second homes and enabled buy to rent mortgages.

London now hosts 898,000 households that are privately rented, compared to 883,000 that are owner-occupied. The number of owner-occupied homes in the city has dropped a sharp 17 percent since just a decade ago, when there were a million such households in London. In 2000, 60 percent of London households were owner-occupied and 40 percent rented.

The desire to own one’s home seems like a long entrenched cultural norm, but as we discussed, it is actually a very recent phenomenon in London’s long history. In Germany and Switzerland, it is far rarer to own one’s own home in similar urban areas even with higher than average income. Whilst our legislation favours tenants more now than it did in the past, countries such as the aforementioned have far more and better protections and rental housing standard in favour of tenants, which makes such a move better for Londoners.

Trivia

One of the quirkiest and smallest freehold homes in London is a former taxi office in Islington, a single-story abode which stands at only 140 square foot. Wider than a London black cab but narrower than a tube carriage, it was planned using the same principles as caravan design to maximise the space.

History

From London’s settlement up to the Great Fire of London in 1666, dwellings in London were typically built of wood and thatch. Whilst the Romans favoured building in stone for places of importance, such as places of Worship, the average London settler did not build with this material until regulations imposed after the Great Fire made it a necessity. With more than 80% of the City of London destroyed by fire (13,200 houses alone), and a similar percentage of the population rendered homeless, there was an urgent need to rebuild the city and to recommence trade. In the haste to rebuild after the Great Fire, houses and tenements were at times constructed without the requisite due care and skill. Buildings were subdivided, and subdivided again to cram as many people into the available space as possible.

According to Richard B. Schwartz’s Daily Life in Johnson’s London, “The city had become honeycombed with what were intended to be temporary dwellings but which grew to be permanent ones. The scarce available land was continually subdivided. Courts were built upon. Business establishments were cut up into tenements. Hovels and shacks were commonplace. Many of the poor crowded into deserted houses. A sizeable number of the city’s inhabitants both lived and worked below ground level.”

Commercial streets were no less dangerous. London buildings were often made with substandard materials and it was not unusual for them to collapse, such that even the wrought iron shop signs hanging from them might bring a building down.

From 1800 to 1900 the urban population increased at a phenomenal rate. It was one million at the time of the first census in 1801; it had more than doubled half a century later and was over seven million by 1911. In the new urban areas, workers lived in overcrowded houses. Lack of sanitation and fresh water, and poor food often contributed to the slum conditions. Victorian mains connected sewers, flushing WCs and waste collections were a revelation in public health. Public health concerns drove the development of the 1878 Model Bye Laws, which consolidated a process of building control. Subsequently, Henry Roberts’ Model Home established new standards for workers’ dwellings.

The period directly following the First World War saw government take a renewed look at the poor health and living conditions of the average recruit, and also face the realisation that these young, often wounded men were returning home, generally unable to afford a home (at this point 80 percent of Britons rented their home from a private landlord), and this was a swift route to an angry and disenfranchised populous who needed to be attended to before this became a social issue. Prime Minister Lloyd George famously promised to provide them with ‘Homes fit for Heroes’.

The Housing Act of 1919, pledged to build half a million new homes within three years. The weak economic climate of the 1920s meant that only 200,000 homes were ever built but the issue had gained sufficient publicity to move house building higher up the political agenda. Local authorities were made responsible for delivering decent housing as a social necessity as opposed to this being dealt with centrally. Slum clearance and their replacement with housing also became the responsibility of local authorities in the 1930s and the housing acts of the inter-war period saw councils build more than one million new homes in London, across sites covering the then largely rural parishes of Ilford, Dagenham and Barking.

In Victorian and Edwardian times, low- and medium-rise apartment blocks were built but their application was narrow. In the 1930s, the building of apartment blocks accelerated as a response to this slum clearance. At this time the apartments were medium rise, up to five storeys and with no lifts. However, following the Second World War a number of local authorities commissioned medium-rise apartment blocks. The unfortunate faulty application of high rise to the housing problems of the 1960s and 70s undermined public opinion of the residential apartment block. By the 1960s, architects used these opinions and experiences to design more sympathetically designed apartment complexes at a more human scale.

Today the composition of the dwelling stock varies by region, but in 2008, 52 percent of dwellings were houses or bungalows compared with 91 percent in the East Midlands. In London, purpose built flats or maisonettes and terraced houses were most common (39 per cent and 32 per cent respectively).