084 HOUSING


WHEN I was a budding, 20-something trainee journalist, and freshly located in London, I lived, along with four pals, in a damp-infested, shabby five bedroomeed house over a chemist in Tooting Bec. Tere was mould creeping up the bathroom wall, no central heating (only a five bar gas heater in the living room), and a hole in the kitchen window that the landlord never bothered to repair in the two years I lived there. While cooking dinner in winter, we


‘According to Shelter, over 1m households are waiting for social homes. In 2018, they say 29,000


social-rent homes were demolished or sold’


would keep our coats and scarves on. For this squalor we paid £25 a month. Even in 1987, that was cheap, but not stupidly cheap. And my starter salary as a journalist was £11,000. Shall we do the maths? If my take home pay, after tax, was no less than £650 a month, that was still a tiny percentage – 3.85 per cent, in fact – leaving me plenty of cash for enjoying life. How does that square with the average 20-something in London right now? A trainee


CASE STUDY O’DONNEL BROWN GAP HOMES


Young people exit the care system at 18, at a time when they may have achieved neither jobs nor full self-suficiency. This leaves them vulnerable, and that’s why an alarming 50 per cent of care leavers experience homelessness. Having worked with children’s charity Barnardo’s to provide apprenticeship and training in the construction of


their innovative Community Classroom pavilion for outdoor learning, architect O’Donnell Brown (ODB) was invited by the charity to come up with a housing typology that would create a level of independence but also safeguarding to facilitate their transition to independence. The Glasgow-based practice drew lessons from a prototype in Paisley, then held


workshops with young people who would qualify, to analyse what qualities they needed and desired. The resulting new typology for safe, welcoming, secure but economically viable housing is now nearing completion in Maryhill, North Glasgow, with more emerging in Stirling, Fife and Lincoln. All of these have been facilitated by working with


Local Authorities to animate small, hard-to-sell and infil plots, though O’Donnell Brown is also assisting Barnardo’s with site analysis to ensure that wherever they are built, they are not isolated, but within easy each of shops and transport and an existing community.


This sense of community but also privacy is key in the design of the


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