Mansion blocks filled London with stacks of flats
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I live in London now, and the buildings are far less impressive. London is a very low density city - it very quickly becomes 2-3 storey terraced houses, even in central areas. With the exception of a few grand mansion blocks in the centre, flats in this city are pretty small - most of them were built as social housing or created by subdividing existing houses. It's a shame, as living in a well built large apartment can be excellent.
The English problem with flats is primarily a legal one. The leasehold system puts power in the hands of an uninterested landlord - and so makes owning a flat an exercise in frustration. Nobody desires to live in a flat because they're small and owning them is bureaucratic and expensive. The system perpetuates itself.
My experience of flats in London was almost exclusively badly-converted victorian terraces, where rooms could have really odd shapes because of the way they needed to be divided, and terrible noise insulation.
To me this was actually quite surprising. I remember my first time visiting London. Apart from the very center with a bunch of towers, the impression I had was "this isn't a city, it feels like a small town".
It's so funny.
> Architects are terrified of producing so much as a fluted column, because they believe their peers will think they are stupid, nostalgic, and unsophisticated.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
1970s-80s: stone cladding.
1980s-90s: cream brickwork, porticos
1990s-00s: boxes with white upvc windows, red tiles, garages
2020s: grey plague - grey windows, grey doors, grey plastic faux-wood cladding, grey roof tiles, car 'ports'.
The current awful trend would be hilarious if it wasn't actually dangerous. And by that I mean modern UK houses are very, very well insulated. And we recorded our first 40C temperature in England. There's a reason why houses in the Mediterranean are absolutely not grey, and are very definitely white. There have even been one or two TV programmes where they've measured these houses and apartments having indoor temperatures of high 20s low 30s C, long after the sun has set.
If your home is meaningfully affected by the outdoor temperature it is very much not "well insulated".
Windows are a bit special in that you can get solar gain through them, but modern windows can have coatings that filter UV and IR from entering a building.
People and electronics are heat sources inside a home, but pretty minimal ones. Any reasonably speced ventilation system a modern home needs to exchange outside air will easily handle keeping a modern house cool.
In common language usage, UK houses are insulated to stop heat escaping in our mostly temperate climate for energy efficiency reasons, not to stop heat entering.
Everyone opens their doors and windows in the UK allowing the heat in. Aircon is rare, but increasing. So houses stay hot long after the afternoon peak.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62126463
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23180965
and so on.
I think you need to use a more precise term, maybe something like heat retention.
For the ones who hate buildings: they will oppose anything.
In a world like that, every bit of ornamentation is a novel handle you give someone who will use it to pull you down, and they're going to try to extract as much surplus value as possible out of the construction process through various mechanisms.
So the simple thing is, you say things but do not care, so those who build do so by listening to those who care.
Adding fluff to the outside costs money, and in England these days, it's a race to the bottom to maximise profit and minimise cost. Council planners have little power to demand things on buildings outside of that which meets legislation requirements. Hence we're getting some pretty awful buildings, not just apartments, in existing suburbs that don't blend in at all.
That’s why we should tax land and not tax development. Then all the upside of building a particularly nice place goes directly into the pockets of the people who choose to build a particularly nice place, instead of 70% of the value going to the landowner regardless of what piece of shit gets built on it.