Would you like to build your own home? More than half of us say we’d like to live in a house we have designed ourselves. A poll earlier this month showed that one in eight Britons expect to research how to build a home for themselves in the next year.
That’s hardly surprising: an individualist, DIY spirit runs deep in our national culture, and nowhere more so than in London. It’s one thing that makes the city the deeply unruly and creative place that it is.
Yet hardly any of us ever get a hand in the fundamental design of our homes. Here the stereotype breaks down. Only about 10 per cent of new UK homes are self-built or custom- built, compared with a little under half in the US and over half in most European countries.
The explanation lies with Britain’s uniquely dysfunctional housing market. Land is so expensive, especially in London and the South-East, and the planning system so daunting, that all the advantage lies with major housebuilders.
Their dominance is bad for would-be self-builders and designers. But it’s bad for the rest of us, too. All the evidence shows that self-built and custom-built developments tend to be more visually appealing and human in feel. And local people are much less likely to oppose a development where it is custom-made or self-built rather than mass-produced.
As the Policy Exchange think-tank argued in a report published last week, giving residents a greater hand in shaping and building their homes could help unlock new development and drive up design standards of new homes as a whole. If we could increase the number of new self-built homes significantly, we might even begin to get the more dynamic creative relationship we see between producers and users in other sectors, with developers learning from home-builders and adapting their product accordingly.
Creating a custom-built house does not need to be as hard or as expensive as it sounds. It’s not all Grand Designs. In the Netherlands and elsewhere, there are well-established services, with developers providing a clear planning framework and architectural types, and architects and customers working together to adapt these to individual needs and tastes.
The good news is that the custom-built approaches seem to be taking off. A decade or so ago, around two per cent of new homes were custom-built. Now it’s one in 10. According to Ted Stevens, chair of the National Self Build Association, a number of London boroughs, including Westminster, Newham, Lewisham and Waltham Forest, are promoting or supporting custom-built approaches. And the Mayor has said he would like to see a good part of the Olympic Park given over to this sort of development and has just launched a survey to test “what demand there may be from local people to be involved in the building of their own homes on part of the site”.
All this is pretty modest stuff by international standards. But while London’s housing crisis is about numbers, it is also about quality. Custom-built housing could offer a way of unlocking development and raising standards — at the same time.
Ben Rogers is director of Centre for London: @centreforlondon.
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The Future of London’s Property Market debate is tomorrow, 6.45-8pm, at the Emmanuel Centre, Westminster. Free tickets: standard events.co.uk/housing
