[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/21/fight-to-save-ringo-starr-estate[/url

Have a read of the article above regarding Liverpool Council's long term and ongoing plan to demolish what it sees as Victorian slums to be replaced with fewer modern dwellings rather than spending a much lower amount of money on simply refurbishing those terraced houses, maintaining the community, retaining at least twice the number of houses, and selling them at affordable prices (circa £80k) and still making a profit.

Why do we do this, why do we automatically assume that we know better than the turn of the century architects and builders who planned these estates ?

I have some experience of this being as I was involved in both refurbishment and new build projects in the building industry from 1974 to 84, yes, the group of companies that I worked for was directly responsible for a lot of those 1970s cheap build council estates that are now so loved of TV documentary crews when looking for "problem" families.

You all know the type of housing I speak of, block built, frontages hung with tiles to save on having to buy bricks, large windows taking up whole elevations for the same reason, internal walls of hollow stud partition, a minimum use of wood or brick or anything that cost more money than glass or concrete tiles, street upon street of uniform rows each with a back yard enclosed by cheap fencing and "open plan" front spaces, built in blocks that formed short "cul-de-sac" ghettos with no local resources other than a flat roofed "estate pub" - forty years on if you are lucky enough to sell one you'll get only slightly more than they cost to build in the 1970s, even the private landlords don't touch them.

The company I worked for built thousands of these houses all over West Yorkshire and the North East, they were knocked up from scratch in a handful of days, they were cheap even at the time, ecologically a complete disaster with single glazing that often didn't even fit properly and no insulation at all in roof or wall cavities - they replaced solid brick built terraced rows of houses with the same number of bedrooms, they demolished houses that were built to last for 200 years and replaced them with fewer houses that are now looking ready for demolition again.

I enjoyed my time in the building trade as a surveyor but frankly its a bit embarrassing now to see estates that you worked on being demolished, projects that you worked on 40 years ago being condemned as unfit for use or habitation simply because they were cheaply constructed and definitely not as good as the properties they replaced.

Are we going to make the same mistake again ?

Space is the argument used - population densities were never really an issue 150 years ago, in fact builders would cram as many terraces and back-to-back houses into a space as they could, hence the reason why in the story linked to above they are proposing to demolish 440 houses and replace them with just 150, everyone wants a garden, everyone wants one or two spaces to park a car, we don't work locally or shop locally anymore, we don't have good enough public transport systems, so we all need a car, or two, and if we don't have a driveway then we all need wider streets to have two rows of parked cars lined up every evening .

Of course you could achieve the same effect by simply removing every second terraced row, but is that too simple a solution ?


Refurbish or new build, low cost resale/rental or redevelopment and subsequent market value sale/rental prices ?

Because the previous government offered money to councils who undertook this wanton vandalism.

There's (nearly) always been money available to councils for refurb or new build of council housing stock, its just easier now to hand a project over to a developer who may not have the same outcome in mind as a now non-existent local authority housing department who have proper control over affordable housing.

I had some involvement with these developments in Beaconsfield St & Cairns St for Lovells and to be honest, the money spent on keeping the facades and building what was effectively new houses attached to them was horrendous. The most cost effective way would have been to demolish them and build new. The problem was the council bent over to the stupid rantings of a few locals who did not want anything to change. My first visit was when the cabins went on and the houses were boarded up, six months later there had been no change due to protesting locals. These properties were in a dangerous state and needed pulling down.

I'm all for 'people power' but at some point a sensible approach needs to be taken, no matter who gets upset.

Are they building the new housing stock using the same lack of concern for materials and construction?

The main aim of construction today is to keep the carbon footprint down, which tends to mean lighter materials, such as a massive resurgence of timber frame construction to achieve low emission targets. I doubt there are many house built today that will have the longevity of good Victorian stock (although they also built some e).

The 1950s/60s/70s were all about quantity and low cost with experimentation with new materials thrown in there for good measure, insulation was ignored, carbon footprint not even dreamed of, the country needed hundreds of thousands possibly millions of low cost social housing units and it needed them fast, hence the race to throw up tower blocks in the 50s and 60s and the move to high density estate housing utilising terraced units to save costs and unit footprint.

Looking back at the time that I was involved the amounts of money that was provided to councils for new social housing must have been huge, we were involved in developments in every local authority area, the likes of Newcastle Council throwing up several new schemes concurrently every year, if the building industry ever returned to that level of investment then we would have full employment overnight.

We did lots of refurb projects too, full refurbs with tenants moved out, houses stripped to a shell and all services and joinery replaced - those were in houses that had been built 50 to 100 years previously, Walker and Benwell in Newcastle benefited from thousands of those refurbs which were of a far better resultant quality than the new builds.

We were also involved in the first large scale timber framed house building projects in the North East around 1980-ish, mainly from one particular developer who invested heavily in what was seen as new technology and an almost instant solution to most of the problems encountered in traditional on-site construction methods, if you've ever seen a three bed semi built on site and finished internally within seven days then you'll realise just how much of a revolution it was - it just wasn't popular with the public and by the time I bought my first brand new house in 1984 our builder had reverted to traditional block and brickwork half way around the development.

I've been looking at new houses recently as one of my daughters is house hunting and I have to say that I am very impressed with the standards today, far, far better than anything I was ever involved with and having some builders as clients in my current job its easy to see on site visits that things are done very differently.

Timber frame houses are certainly not uncommon in Scandinavia and North America and have lasted decades without problems. The main difference bein: in Scandinavia and Canada, the timber used is red cedar, here and in the US, they'll use any old wainey-edged softwood shoite they can get away with

We are having some of our windows re-furbed.
They've been there since 1898 but have come up a treat ... those red cedar frames last a long time.

If red cedar is good enough for roof shingles, it should be fine for window frames. The window frames in my old house back in Staffs were made of oak (built 191icon_cool.gif. The cills had weathered and opened along the grain but you'd have thought they were cast in concrete.

We don't know how to do timber frame in this country I'm afraid, usually kits made up in a factory slapped together by semi-skilled wood butchers.

Saw a Huf Haus being erected on Grand Designs, well impressive that was.
Everything fitted perfectly first time.
When they finished they swept the house out completely and then cleaned out their tool boxes and the van ... and when everything was neat and tidy, they went.

That was brilliant, wasn't it?

And they had neat little German waistcoats too.

Had a client a few years ago who built one as a self build project, very nice.

My little daydream is: once I've got me Euromillions, I instruct a lawyer to buy a house that sits on the seafront at Beesands, South Devon. I'm not bothered how much they want for the house, I'll just pay the price. Once that's all sorted, I'll nip over to see Mr Huf and get him to design me a house. Then it's back to Devon to present the plans to demolish the existing [is[/ihitheap and build me Huf. No doubt there'll be a few bungs along the way but it's nowt that good old Euromillions can't handle.

Huf not only build extremely stylish houses, they are also incredibly energy-efficient

I wasn't aware Huf manufactured for self-builds, I thought they controlled the whole process themselves

It was shown again last night so I just had to watch it again.
Embarrassing when they had to wait for the British firm (Non-English-speaking Bosnian driver) to deliver the concrete [ulate[/u.
Good job that was months before the delivery of the actual house.

They had quoted one week for the actual construction, so it was quite funny when they finished so fast (4 days from concrete raft to watertight structure) that Kevin McCloud nearly missed it.

IIRC, he was really sceptical to start with, but was won over by the end.

OK, I had a client who bought a Huf house for himself to live in which was built on a piece of land he bought and we provided the inspection and warranty for it. The policy we flogged him was a 'self build warranty' as Huf are not registered in UK for warranty purposes and the guy had to have one for his mortgage.

Sorry for any confusion.

So a company that could rip the ar[is[/ie out of the vast majority of UK building companies can't get "registered" for warranty purposes?

Sounds sadly about right

Are these Huf jobs expensive? They certainly look it.

Oh yes, £1m+ (plus land) ain't out of the ordinary.

On the flip side, we also have [url=http://www.onecommunityranch.org/low-impact-development/Earth Pods[/url

Where did you see 'can't' in my post, I said 'aren't'. They probably could if they wished. To get a mortgage in this country a warranty is needed from a UK based insurance provider such as NHBC, Premier or similar and most provide a 'self build' warranty, which is actually a bit misleading as anyone 'self building' has to have professional input, either as some form of project management or a full build package. Either way, an inspection regime to satisfy the warranty & building control is necessary no matter how 'genius' the builder is.

Modern take on the stuff archaeologists are digging up and wetting themselves over currently.

Straw bale and cobb houses have been built in these parts for centuries and are still being built today.