London's housing estates to be rebuilt as mid-rise streets

Eric Pickles has unveiled a £150 million programme to rebuild the capital’s most deprived housing estates, saying: “Londoners who have been forced to endure 40 years of these concrete carbuncles deserve better”.

The communities secretary said he favoured a combination of five- to six-storey homes and blocks of flats laid out in a traditional street pattern.

The intention is to increase the population density in inner London, he said, likening the new communities to Pimlico and Islington.

The government has commissioned Savills to report back this year on the fastest way to get building, while also “fully involving” communities in the design and planning process.

Pickles said: “Past experience tells us mere tinkering won’t work. We need to be more ambitious. Completely re-building traditional streetscapes can provide more housing and commercial space using the same amount of land.”

He also said Britain must seize back the initiative of modular construction in order to build quickly and cheaply.

“Off-site construction was a technique pioneered by world-class British architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, but it’s since been neglected here while being widely used on the continent,” said the minister. “Britain needs to catch up.”

But he was critical of Britain’s earlier post-war architectural heritage, claiming high-rise council estates built in the 1960s and 1970s were “only attractive to the architects who designed them”.

He added: “These are monuments to human folly: poor design and crass planning, from an era of intellectual arrogance by bureaucrats who thought they could tear down centuries of development in favour of a new concrete and pebble-dash utopia.

“It didn’t work. These eyesores may have temporarily solved a few social problems, but they created and entrenched many more.”

The new approach would create homes that were valued by their occupants and investors in a way that was “not possible with the incremental, building-by-building regeneration” favoured in the past, he said.

“This means more potential for private investment, which over 10 years could lead to several hundred thousand new homes in London,” he said.

If the model is successful it could be rolled out across the commuter belt and other areas with high housing demand, such as Brighton, Oxford and Cambridge.