Avoid leftover space

Avoid those small areas of unloved and unused grass or asphalt between homes that do not quite fit together, bits of space around junctions that are not properly faced by homes, and other spaces where the layout is inefficient or illogical. This can be a common problem with housing development if the layout is designed primarily to accommodate standard building types, required building-separation distances and car-parking requirements, rather than to create a well-structured neighbourhood.

Front-to-front and back-to-back

Most homes (and most buildings) have a public ‘front’ and a private ‘back’. In the home the front door, the hall and perhaps a living space tend to be at the front, and the more private bedrooms and bathrooms at the back. Layouts that put the backs facing the backs of other homes, and fronts facing other fronts, tend to reinforce these uses of space, keeping the noise and activity to the front, and the peace and privacy to the back. This is helped by the type of open space located between and around the homes. A public street between the fronts of homes can be the focus for comings and goings. Private gardens between the backs, by contrast, can uphold their quiet nature, without access for visitors or service vehicles. This traditional arrangement tends to work well, and can work in three dimensions too,

Figure 9.1 Housing over the decades: Tybalds Estate, Holborn, London, showing Georgian terraces, 1960s tower blocks and proposed infill housing.

Figure 9.2 Roding Lane, Woodford, Essex: active frontages with doors and windows overlooking streets, pathways and open space.

with the private rooms and open spaces above the more public-facing ones.

Figure 9.3 A well-connected street layout helps to create a successful residential neighbourhood.

Active frontages

Doors and windows help to make frontages active, and they also give an impression of life, as seen in Figure 9.2, rather than the lifelessness of blank facades. Buildings with active frontages are accessed from the street front, with overlooking windows supporting that access. This gives the impression that the street is in constant use and is overlooked, making it less subject to antisocial behaviour such as urinating in the street, or petty crime such as vandalism. Careful housing design will ensure that internal privacy and active overlooking from the home are both secured, for example by placing living room rather than bedroom windows facing streets at ground-floor level.

Parking

In research undertaken by Kent County Council into developments built since 2000⁴, parking was the issue that dominated residents’ feelings about their neighbourhoods and was a major cause of dissatisfaction and neighbour disputes. In the past, some planning policies have sought to discourage car use by capping the number of parking spaces close to the home.

This approach can work where there are realistic travel alternatives, including walking and cycling, as in the centre of many cities. But wherever residents feel they need cars to access work or services, it can cause what is known as ‘flyparking’ on pavements or green space, or in surrounding areas, leading to conflict over where cars go (see Figure 9.4). Parking has to be designed carefully, and parking capacity needs to be flexible. A neighbourhood that looks like a big car park with some houses around it, will not be as valued and successful as one that accommodates cars in a sophisticated way.

The most efficient place to put parking spaces is on the street, at the edge of the carriageway. This arrangement allows for drivers’ manoeuvres to take place on the carriageway itself, rather than in dedicated space in a parking court. It means that cars do not have to drive over pavements into front gardens – an approach that can demote the pedestrian to second place, reduce the scope for planting and generally degrade house frontages.

Allocating a specific parking space to each home only increases the number of spaces required: once the layout designer has met the local authority policy for parking (say, two spaces per house), they will have to add up to 20% for visitor parking, probably on the street. This could mean 240 parking spaces in the case of a development of 100 homes.

Figure 9.4 The carriageway widths cannot accommodate on-street parking, resulting in haphazard flyparking and inconvenience to pedestrians.

This is wasteful: research has shown that the number of visitors is almost never more than the number of cars being driven away, to work or elsewhere.⁵ Armed with this knowledge, some homebuilders have been successful in reducing the total number of spaces required by not allocating all the spaces. Generally, to enjoy the benefit of trimming the number of spaces by about the level of the visitor parking (18–20%), more than half of the spaces should be left unallocated.⁶

Knowing how many parking spaces will be needed is not an exact science. It will depend on the circumstances of the residents, the location of the development and much more. It can be useful to use a trial approach. For example finishing some spaces as pocket gardens, or even communal growing spaces, and only converting them to parking spaces if and when there appears to be a shortage.

The location of parking spaces is very important. A fashion for rear parking courts, sparked by their use at the Prince of Wales’s model development of Poundbury, has led to many schemes copying that example – nearly all of them wrongly. Carriageways of between six and seven metres wide at Poundbury are generally wide enough to accommodate on-street parking in front of properties, and the rear courts tend to be used for the storage of second or less-used cars. In many of the copycat examples, the streets are used for parking even though they are not wide enough – and even though parking courts have been provided, householders seem reluctant to use them. Residential streets should be 4.5 metres wide to accommodate this, otherwise people tend to park half on the pavement.

Figure 9.5 Well-integrated bin stores and planting at Kidbrooke, Greenwich, London.

Parking properly accommodated along the street or within the curtilage of the house is generally most successful. The spaces should be integrated into the streetscape with generous planting, which might mean adding a tree after every two or three kerbside places; planting around a mid-street grouping of spaces; or ensuring that part of the front garden includes plants at least a metre tall to soften the visual impact of parked cars. It is the mature planting that helps make the tree-lined avenues of our Georgian and Victorian streets such beautiful car parks.

Waste storage and collection

Waste storage and collection have become a significant design issue for residential neighbourhoods since the arrival of the wheelie bin and the separation of waste for recycling. Before 2001, homes generally had one or two 90-litre aluminium or plastic bins. Today it is common for residents to have three or more 240-litre wheelie bins. To complicate matters further, each waste authority has its own policy for the number and division of waste collections. For example, Newcastle-under-Lyme asks for seven separate receptacles for waste (not all wheelie bins),⁷ while Bedford works with just one. This makes it impossible for homebuilders to produce a single strategy that works from one waste authority to the next.

Figure 9.6 Large landscaped buffer zones at Jericho Waterside, Oxford.

Generally, wherever there is easy access to the rear gardens of a property, the wheelie bins can be stored simply, and modular stores that can hide two, three or four wheelie-bins are starting to be used. Where houses are connected in a terrace, a bin store can take up a significant proportion of the front of the plot; however, if well designed and integrated with landscaping this can be a practical solution to a difficult problem – see Figure 9.5.

It can be useful to ask for a ‘waste walk’ plan. This will show how people from each home in a development will get their waste to the bins from where it can be collected. These routes should not be excessively long, or routed through closed doors or areas where smells or dirt from the bins could cause problems.

Buffer zones

The area between the front door and home facade on one side, and the public thoroughfare on the other, can be considered a buffer zone. Figure 9.6 shows large buffer zones in front of homes. These create semi-private areas for residents, shield the privacy of ground-floor units from the street, and ensure that the parking does not dominate the streetscape. This space can help to protect the privacy and quiet of the home itself, preventing people from coming right up to the front windows. It can also provide space for storage and an opportunity for residents to personalise their homes. Traditionally the space is taken up with a front garden or, for a building with a basement, a light well, with or without steps.

In the case of a flatted development, the buffer zone can become even more important for ground-floor residents, especially if their only or main windows face the street, if the ceilings are not particularly high, or if the windows are the only way of getting fresh air into the home. Windows at this level need to be big enough to allow generous light and openable to let air in; without a buffer space windows may be covered, leading to dark and stuffy rooms. In these cases privacy can be provided by evergreen planting in the buffer zone.

Streets

A residential street should be seen, as much as possible, as an extension of the homes that it serves. Designing for low vehicle speeds can help to achieve this, as can minimising the amount of highway-related furniture that contributes to making vehicle movement the street’s defining feature. In a higher-density area, the street might have to accommodate living and communal activities such as exercise, gardening and play. In a lower-density area the street can provide a neutral area that everyone can use and feel ownership towards. Either way, the street is the lynchpin of the neighbourhood and should be designed with great care.

Figure 9.7 A delightful and well-overlooked playground at the rear of housing at Horsted Park, near Chatham.

As with any street (and discussed in more detail in Chapter 13), key to success is finding a balance between movement and non-movement uses. It may seem odd to think about a street being used for anything but access, but streets also provide the outlook from homes, they let light and air into buildings, and they can be used to sit in, to chat to neighbours in, or learn to ride a bike along. Streets are the places where most interaction with neighbours takes place. Streets also have to cope with surface water and accommodate sewers and cables. Finally, they are the public image and heart of most residential neighbourhoods. All this needs to be taken into account within their design, ensuring they provide space for all activities, not just movement.

Play spaces and public open spaces

Play spaces and public open spaces must be provided within a short walking distance of people’s homes. It can be tempting to allocate different spaces to different uses and rigidly design them as such. But this might not allow residents to use, adapt and love the spaces as their own. It is wise to talk to existing or potential residents about the type of spaces they want, will use and will be likely to look after.

A neighbourhood will benefit from spaces of various sizes. You can discuss what is wanted with local communities, but it is also important to think about how space can be used for different activities at different times by a variety of people. A large grassed area might be great for after-school ball games, early-morning dog walks (who pick up after their pets) and the annual summer fete. Small areas for informal play might also be good places for older people to sit. Generally, shared spaces for recreation work better when they are at the front of properties and at the points where pedestrians coming from different directions meet. That makes the spaces more likely to be busy and to feel safe. Figure 9.7 shows some ingenious examples of play spaces behind homes at Horsted Park near Chatham, where the use of courtyard houses means that the rear of a property is neither a fence nor blank.

Indoor climates

Indoor climates within homes can affect people’s health and wellbeing. For this reason, designing homes as single-aspect (having windows facing only one way) must be avoided: if windows face north, homes may be dark, will never receive direct sunlight and be susceptible to damp; if windows only face south, however, rooms may well overheat. In a well-designed dual-aspect home there will be cross-ventilation, and people will be able to close the curtains on one side while still receiving light from another side. Just adding a window facing sideways to a balcony is not enough to create a dual aspect.

There are other ways of controlling temperature and air quality inside the home. The latest building regulations for energy performance have driven the use of mechanical ventilation and heat-recovery systems that restrict the number of air changes in a room by mechanically improving air quality. Among other benefits, this is an advantage in cases where it would not be comfortable to leave windows open, such as on ground floors or beside noisy transport routes.

Figure 9.10 A well-integrated private amenity space at Pilgrim Gardens, Leicester, enjoys protection from bad weather.

Security

Security can be enhanced by the physical protection afforded by strong doors and secure windows. Historically this was part of the Secured by Design initiative managed by the police. The core specifications of Secured by Design have been subsumed into the new Building Regulations Approved Document Q.⁹ Layout, lighting, surface materials around homes, and boundary treatments can all make a difference to security.

Space

Space within the home has been controlled for new homes built in London’s 33 planning authorities since 2012. The same standards have been made an option available nationally to local planning authorities from 2016, provided they can prove this will not affect market viability. There is a general assumption that the standards will be adopted in high-value markets, probably pushing the prices higher, but not beyond the means of the more affluent households underpinning those markets.

Private amenity space

Most residents will appreciate private amenity space. This might be a balcony (as shown in Figure 9.9), a small courtyard, a roof garden or a traditional garden. There is evidence that many amenity spaces are shunned by residents because they are not sufficiently private.¹⁰ The degree of privacy is potentially more important than the amount of space provided: residents will happily sit outdoors on a small balcony if they are not overlooked. Inset balconies or winter gardens, as shown in Figure 9.10, should be designed carefully as they can darken the rooms that they adjoin, by pushing the windows back from the outside wall of the apartment building. Carving up rooftop space into private terraces is another option; very private spaces can even be provided in notches between top-floor apartments.

Figure 9.11 A shared communal stairwell at Golden Lane, London, provides informal amenity space for gardening and socialising with neighbours.

Shared and communal space

Shared and communal space can usefully and efficiently augment facilities for residents if it takes the form of a communal garden or gym. More commonly, shared spaces are entrance lobbies, lifts, stairwells and corridors, as shown in Figure 9.11. Generally, anything shared has a cost that will be paid for through the management charge. With the costs of buying or renting a home, and reductions in what housing benefits will cover, developers have turned to minimising communal access in apartment buildings.

One emerging solution is a reinterpretation of the mansion block, where the ground and first floor is composed of a plinth of three- or four-bedroom maisonettes for larger families, with smaller one- and two-bedroom apartments above. There are benefits in keeping the families with more children out of the lifts, cores and corridors, while providing them with some ground-floor amenity space, not least for prams, buggies and bicycles. There are also advantages to offering a different lease that isolates those financially burdened with housing a family from also having to pay towards the maintenance of the lift. It is yet to be seen whether new requirements for lifts in this type of block will affect this trend.

Figure 9.12 Well-landscaped courtyard homes with private amenity space at Accordia, Cambridge.

Detached, semi-detached and short terrace

• Creates up to around 35 dwellings per hectare.
• Helps to create front-to-front and back-to-back layouts.
• Dedicated bin and bicycle storage is required in a convenient location for the resident of each home, where bins and bicycles themselves must not be visible from the public realm.
• Can be built and occupied in stages, so are sometimes easier to fund.
• Management and maintenance for each house can be arranged separately.

Figure 9.13 New semi-detached homes in Horsted, Chatham.

Terraced

• Achieves up to 80 dwellings per hectare.
• The streets should be designed so they can be closed for street play days or community events. Sub-20mph design speeds will be beneficial.
• Can maintain front-to-front and back-to-back relationships.
• The ends of the terraces should not end with blank gable walls to the public realm.
• The width of the terraced home is important.

Mid-rise slab blocks

• Achieves 120–140 dwellings per hectare.
• Ground-floor flats should ideally have direct access to the street.
• Avoid developments with no amenity space, where buildings sit within car parking.
• Ensure that amenity space (private or communal) is genuinely private from public view, is convenient for residents, is located so as to receive sunlight, and is laid out so as to be useful.
• Avoid communal entrances that are tucked down side streets.
• Better served by a number of similar or identical cores, allowing allocation to different tenures, rather than by a pair of accesses serving different tenures.

Courtyard blocks

• Can achieve very high densities if the spaces between the blocks are narrow and the blocks themselves are around ten storeys high.
• Often made up of a combination of blocks in a doughnut shape around communal space, which provides light and air to the backs of the buildings.
• The best schemes have lower blocks on the south side, allowing sun into the middle of the blocks.
• The best schemes provide glimpsed views and practical access into the central areas from surrounding streets, maintaining their usefulness and quality. These spaces are often rather like a university quad; private, but understandable to those outside.
• The blocks do not need to be in the form of a square or rectangle: often Z or C shapes can work well.
• Avoid schemes that treat each block as an entity. Instead, two or more blocks should be thought of as meeting across the street.

Towers

• Can create super densities as they often use most of the site and do not provide their own ancillary spaces.
• Can be successful in high-value areas for those who choose to live in them.
• Matters such as window cleaning, cladding maintenance and rubbish collection need to be well managed (see Chapter 15).
• Consider whether entrances should be overseen by concierges.
• Some outdoor spaces on lower balconies and in winter gardens (enclosed balconies) can be provided, but winds can be too strong for this to be feasible higher up.

Figure 9.14 This neo-vernacular terrace at Portobello Road, Kensington, has street-door entrances with flats above.

Figure 9.15 A mid-rise slab block with balcony amenity at Bridport Place, Hackney.

Figure 9.16 A courtyard block with private gardens and balconies, with communal and play space at rear, at Beveridge Mews, Stepney Green, London.

Figure 9.17 Tucking the cars behind part of the building makes them less intrusive.

Integrating into the neighbourhood

1. Connections
2. Facilities and services
3. Public transport
4. Meeting local housing requirements

Creating a place

1. Character
2. Working with the site and it’s context
3. Creating well-defined streets and spaces
4. Easy to find your way around

Street and home

1. Streets for all
2. Car parking
3. Public and private spaces
4. External storage and amenity space