A chat about social housing

Last Thursday I was invited to speak on a panel about the future of social housing at Clerkenwell Design Week.

In my presentation I rattled through the history of council housing in London - starting with the Boundary Estate, through the LCC estates, WWII, post-war housing including the Trellick Tower and Sivill House, and concluded with an idea of what should be happening vs. what is happening.

Then architect Paul Karakusevic, designer of Hackney's only social housing in...a long, long time, at the Colville Estate spoke about his experiences of working in the sector. There was some really interesting details, especially about the level of community engagement on his projects.

Unfortunately Alex Morton from Policy Exchange didn't turn up (we think he was scared). Nevertheless, we had an interesting discussion, chaired by Sam Jacob from FAT, around some of the issues brought up in our presentations.

I argued for greater awarness from local authorities about clever retrofitting of buildings and a wider range of tenures within new builds - to give people in social housing affordable places to move on to.

It was a great turnout, so thank you to everyone who came. I really enjoyed it!

If you're interested I've linked to my presentation above - it's on Scribd.