The dream persists that one day again we will recreate the child-friendly streets, housing estates and neighbourhoods beloved of documentary photographers of the first half of the 20th century. The odds are, I think, stacked against this. Even Dinah Bornat, who with her architectural colleagues has devoted so much thought to the issue, and brings evidence of how this dream has at least been realised in a few outposts of radical design in northern Europe, nevertheless equivocates. Perhaps this is not actually a question of housing policy, but one of urban social politics writ large?

It is unlikely that the volume housebuilders and developers currently dominating the housing market in the UK are going to pay much attention to the conviviality and connectivity of their value-engineered product to the wider neighbourhood. Where is the financial return on that? I suspect this is why so many of the new private developments I regularly see from the train going out from Liverpool Street Station out into rural East Anglia are little more than defensible, car-dependent stockades. Under the present government’s ambition for increasing housing supply, largely dependent on these same developers, the requirement for significant elements of more communal social housing continues to be watered down.

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