Housing

We had occasion to catch a bus home from Shanklin the other day, prompting various thoughts about housing.

The bus stop at which we waited was opposite the property illustrated (courtesy of Google Maps). To our right was a single fronted house from which emerged a probably Polish couple, to our left was what was a hotel in the middle of serious structural alteration & refurbishment, a hotel which was still more or less alive at the time of the Street View, June 2009.

The immediate prompt was the hole to the right of the property opposite & illustrated, of which it once looked to have been the guest car park, now occupied by a half built house. This house confused us because the outside walls & detailing looked old, but a passer-by explained that the council had insisted on this new-build house conforming to old-build visual standards, at which the builder was doing very well.

It was clear that a lot of the housing stock behind the beach at Shanklin was no longer fit for purpose, having been built at the time when there was good business for boarding houses and small hotels, a time which was already passing when it was celebrated by 'Fawlty Towers' in the mid seventies of the last century. And it is now well and truly passed, and the buildings which once served that business are struggling to find new business, just as in dozens of other once popular seaside towns on the mainland. Are these towns destined to moulder on as brown-field, as sinks for the metropolitan homeless for years and years to come?

I am not sure that the council is helping by insisting on the new build conforming to the standards of its left hand neighbour (in the illustration), when I am sure that the example on its right is more to the point, nice new, purpose built retirement flats for the seniors of both i-land and main-land. It would be interesting to know the history of the new build; who thought that building such a house was a good idea?

I associated to a vision of the outskirts of Manchester from the late sixties, when I was little, when vast tracts of 'Coronation Street' style housing were being razed to the ground to make way for the now discredited housing estates and tower blocks of that time, some of which are now being razed to the ground in their turn, having lasted a mere fifty years or so. From where I associate to a good customer of TB who reckons that we should not build to last, that we should build like they do in the US, build to last fifty years, after which fashions will have moved on and starting over will be the way ahead.

Which organ of government worries about such matters these days, or do we leave it all to the ebb and flow of market forces around the breakwaters of what is left of council planning departments? Were there council planning departments when Mr. Cubitt knocked up Belgravia for a forerunner of the preseent Duke of Westminster?

PS: Wikipedia tells me that there are statues of Mr. Cubitt at Denbigh Street, where a good friend used to live, and opposite Dorking Halls, where we visit. Clearly need to inspect both of these (contemporary) wonders. Perhaps his building of Osborne (see 16th July) for the Queen was what really earned him his statues.