Home troubles

Away from the pandemonium of the spectacular collapse of Labour's political house of cards, an exhibition charts the philosophies that will shape or misshape the future of housing in London.

The evidence on display fills with foreboding. In London, over 330,000 families - that is well over a million people - are waiting for rehousing.

Since 1999, the number of overcrowded homes has increased by 30 per cent to over 200,000. House building fell by 20 per cent from 24,000 in 2004-2005 to under 20,000 in 2007.

London already holds the unenviable record for the smallest new homes in Europe.

New Labour zealots' suicidal faith in market forces has left the delivery of housing policies in the hands of private developers whose sole preoccupation is profit margins.

Former mayor Ken Livingstone's commitment to increase the numbers of affordable homes to 50 per cent of any development rested entirely on the developers' willingness to pay for the proportion of social renting and shared ownership units to be included in their projects.

It was a high-risk strategy at the best of times, but, coupled with the present slump in the market and the costs associated particularly with the required introduction of the "zero carbon" level 6 of the government's Code for Sustainable Homes, it has meant that, "too often, specifications are pared to the bone ... too often, good architects are hired to get planning permission and then replaced with less skilled practices."

This perfidious "dash for trash" is all too predictable in a race for instant high profits but, equally, the long term damage to urban infrastructure of the city is rather easy, if painful, to imagine.

As the self-emasculated new Labour government is unwilling to devolve responsibility for planning and construction to local councils and to support them with adequate budgets, it has further eroded its own ability to deal with the near catastrophic homelessness.

Perhaps unexpectedly, there is little among the 150 or so designs submitted for the exhibition that is aesthetically inspirational, never mind breathtaking.

Of those providing a higher proportion of social-rented units, the Leopold Estate by PRP Architects or Levitt Bernstein's Queensbridge Quarter in Hackney display rudimentary high street elegance, lightness and eminent promise of spaciousness.

The exceptional medium-scale design comes from Peter Barber Architects in the shape of the Donnybrook Quarter for Circle Anglia Housing Trust in Waltham Forest. It has astonished fellow practitioners and gathered accolades from critics left, right and centre.

From the air, with individual units linked by a series of spacious walkways, it replicates the kasbah's feeling of community and togetherness.

The brilliant white of its facades stuns, as do the abundant dynamic proportions of shapes, while eloquent spaces between the units offer unexpected vistas connecting to the world outside.

Tellingly, Barber's manifesto is a quote from One Way Street (1924) by the Marxist cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, "the passion for improvisation, which demands that space and opportunity be at any price preserved. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stages and boxes."

Elsewhere, images of the 1970s English Heritage-listed estates such as Lillington Gardens by Darbourne and Darke, Brunswick Centre by Hodgkinson and Alexandra Road by Neave Brown, the first by Westminster and the latter by Camden council, remain powerful and articulate testimonies to the success of locally designed and built social housing.

Their beauty remains as timeless as their courageous aesthetic simplicity and reassuring functionality. These are living monuments, as Donnybrook is, to the urgent need to "act responsibly by attempting the impossible."

However, an intimation in the introduction, that "there may be trouble ahead" sounds particularly ominous now that an unreconstructed Thatcherite sits at London's helm.

Shows until June 14. Exhibition is free.

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