In the original London of the Future publication from 1921, WR Davidge (a former housing commissioner) foresaw many of the changes that were to take place in his view of housing within the boundaries of London. He identified and bemoaned the onset of the capital’s ‘ugly’ suburban sprawl: “In all the suburbs there has been a steady creeping paralysis of two-story [sic] villadom, mile after mile of brick and mortar slowly eating up the country-side.”
There was regret expressed at the continuing unhealthy overcrowding in the centre of 1920s London. Some of the author’s proposed solutions came to pass, starting about 25 years later. With political will perhaps galvanised by the aftermath of war, a ‘green belt’ was introduced to combat sprawl. London attempted to solve ‘overspill’ outside its curtilage in a few notable New Towns, which attracted pioneer Londoners willing to leave the city for the promise of a new and better life.
Yet sprawl burgeoned beyond the author’s wildest nightmares and, despite the substantial amount of social housing built in the middle of the 20th century, overcrowding and poor condition of stock are still with us. Post-war population shrinkage radically reversed in London in the early 1990s, largely driven by the increase in the number of financial-sector jobs.
And while the 100-year doubling of the capital’s housing stock absorbed some of that growth, the same period saw a near-halving of the number of people living in each of those homes. London’s 3.6 million homes still appear to be under pressure; but what now for housing supply and demand in the capital in the wake of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic?
The year 2023 feels like a very unstable vantage point from which to answer that question. On the face of it, home building is still not keeping up with demand. We appear to be back in an era in which, despite the qualitative ambitions of the London Plan of 2021, numbers are ‘our blinding passion’, as the pioneering social housing expert Elizabeth Denby one put it.
Land in the capital is expensive. Build costs are spiralling. Developers are pushing building heights on every plot. They’re building flats almost exclusively – both in the centre of London and in the suburbs – and debates are raging about whether the increasing number of tall blocks are good for either residents or places. We may not all find this comfortable, but these surely aren’t signs of a London in retreat? Or does the pausing of major new infrastructure such as Crossrail 2 and the Bakerloo line extension signal a different future?
London housing: populations and projections
The Greater London Authority (GLA) projects that despite the pandemic-induced population downturn, London’s population is already growing again and may add two million people by the middle of the 21st century (a slower rate of growth than since 1990). This continued rise may seem counter-intuitive, given the current transition to remote working and the cost of living in London, as well as uncertainty about international migration and the future of London’s economy post-Brexit.
The pandemic has accelerated the dislocation of jobs and homes forever for about a third of the working population. That’s 1.5 million Londoners who in theory could be somewhere else, though many may still be drawn to the London magnet by family, friends and myriad cultural offerings.
International migration as a feature of London’s short-term future growth is very unclear; most commentary suggests that calculating ‘births minus deaths’ is the more likely net population contributor. But will there be anything for all these new Londoners to do?
Diverse forecasts for London’s economy and jobs are impossible to interpret so soon after a major economic shock. The GLA is predicting medium-term economic growth for the capital, in spite of Brexit and a national refocus on the regions. And perhaps they’re right – London got through a plague, fire and blitz, as the cliché goes. In the long term, London may experience more international migration as climate change renders more of the world uninhabitable. So we can probably assume that London’s population has not peaked yet.
More people, more homes
The implication of two million more Londoners is, of course, more homes. Is there room for a million more homes in London, to add to the existing 3.6 million? The GLA thinks so, and has published that in its London Plan. But the game of ‘fitting more homes into London’ is getting harder to play.
The city’s growth has historically occurred through boundary expansion into green fields as well as through slum clearance, remediating bombsites and repurposing defunct industrial land. The capital’s boundary is now proving stubborn, with the green belt (much of it inaccessible) seen as untouchable.
‘Intensification’ is now the watchword, but that’s a highly contested activity. The next 50 years are likely to see homes built on roofs, on car parks and on former industrial land. Housing estates may continue to be redeveloped, but this way of adding new homes can be unacceptably costly both in terms of embodied carbon and community fracture.
Some predict suburban intensification through resident-led redevelopment, but will individual households really coalesce as first-time developers and strike land deals with small-scale developers? Perhaps the 25% of London’s land that is currently back garden could be pressed into service. Or is it finally time to set out some brave new policy by asking our best designers to create high-quality, carbon-positive homes in the green belt?
[Read more: Tubes, bridges & sewers: The centuries-old infrastructure Londoners still use today]
Numbers are only part of the future housing scene: the types and arrangements of homes in which Londoners live also have a material impact on their quality of life. In some ways, homes themselves have changed surprisingly little over the centuries.
What are homes, in essence? They are places for a discrete family unit to cook, eat, sleep, wash, play, relax and store their ever-burgeoning ‘stuff’ behind a lockable door. Now, through the tragedy of digital technology, they are also places to work, shop and access almost any information or entertainment the inhabitants could possibly want. No one needs to leave their home ever again in order to live.
Moving beyond the individual unit, the way in which those homes are laid out and managed can make a surprising amount of difference to human flourishing. London has an equal mix of flats and houses, built at various heights and in various formats, suggesting that there is something for all tastes. But are London’s existing and emerging homes actually fit for our current or future demographics, and what should be done if not?
Space invaders and London housing
Space standards in London – whether for existing or new homes – are notoriously meagre compared to those of most other Western cities, and with the advent of homeworking, these standards are now problematic for many.
Office floor space has been notionally redistributed to our homes, but there’s been no associated redistribution of wealth to allow the rental or purchase of a new home with that crucial extra 10m2 (108ft2). The home ownership cohort in London will undoubtedly extend upwards and into their gardens, or just purchase more space. But what will the renters (half of London’s households) do?
It would be interesting to see estates, old and new, where rentable workspace became an integral part of the accommodation mix, with rents paid by employers. Such local workspace may actually be better off on the capital’s many high streets, making the dormitory suburbs into thriving villages again. The obvious danger is a hollowing out of London’s many centres – but perhaps homes will begin to appear in converted office space there once the workplace spasm has abated.
Shared living models are gaining some attention in other parts of the world, but are they a part of London’s future? The nearly million Londoners who live alone may find the long-term cost of solitude prohibitive in terms of both practicalities (rent and bills) and their well-being.
Young Londoners are beginning to benefit from purpose-built rental blocks – now comprising every sixth new home – with amenities to suit their lifestyles. But older Londoners are the least well served by London’s housing stock, which is largely inaccessible, hard to heat and the wrong size for their life stage. Co-housing models for older people are currently a fringe typology which needs to be enabled and mainstreamed in the capital. Applying these models would free up family houses for the many who need them, releasing 2.75 million spare rooms (and a value of £200bn) back into full-time use.
A final observation about housing types in London must concern the high-rise block, the scourge of many a suburban planning committee. High-rise flats may appear a panacea, maximising housing numbers, enabling social and commercial infrastructure, and providing views and light to residents. Opposing views usually run as follows. High-rise living is suitable only for perhaps 5% of the population: primarily those without children and the wealthy.
High rise is expensive to build, expensive to maintain and energy-hungry, making it a profligate building type, in spite of its land efficiency. And finally, some Londoners resent the visual and environmental impact of a high rise on their largely low-rise city.
In East Asia, and latterly in Toronto and Melbourne, high rise has been embraced as a mainstay of city-centre living. Will London continue to go the same way? It may well do so in the short term, but only because the inevitable urban trade-off between quantity of life and quality of life will have fallen towards the former. There is currently no rigour in comparative long-term cost and sustainability data for high-rise versus lower-rise flats. A future London where high rise has been abandoned due to prohibitive upkeep and running costs is not fanciful.
Affordable London housing
The causes of housing non-affordability in London are disputed, some citing undersupply of homes in general, with others pointing to rock-bottom mortgage interest rates raising values beyond the means of many. If we believe the ‘scarcity’ camp, three reasons given for London’s undersupply are an absolute lack of land, restrictive planning policy, and excessive numbers of empty or visitor lets.
Clearly, there is less available land in London than there was in the previous 100 years, but might we soon see the obsolescence of space in the commercial sector? The idea that planning policy greatly constrains supply is vehemently contested – would the market really deliver substantially more if allowed to let rip?
The green belt is the most obvious constraint, and only 4% of it could yield a million homes, according to some. Short-term rentals of entire homes, via such online platforms as Airbnb, and the practice of ‘buy to leave’, or purchasing properties as investments and leaving them unoccupied, are tying up more than 130,000 London properties (1.25% and 2.5% respectively of the total London stock). Changing policy in these areas would be a move towards a more equitable city, but would not cause a major adjustment to affordability in the capital.
The demand-side camp firmly asserts that the non-affordability of housing in London is mainly caused by numerous factors: global city status, wealth distribution, cheap mortgages, tax incentives, tech-enabled visitor demand and some job-related population growth. Radical external shocks or new policies would be required to rock London demand: are these coming?
London’s market renters – 26% of residents – are the ones least well served. Their wages have stagnated, their housing benefit has been cut and social housing is disappearing. Their security of tenure and minimum home quality standards are both shockingly poor. All these issues could and should be fixed now, never mind in the next 100 years.
Things may get sticky soon for the homeowners too. External global factors pushing interest rates up and overseas investment down could cause structural changes to values in the next ten years. Remote working may yet redistribute dwellers from London’s grip to places further afield. In the long term, it’s far from clear how the concentration of wealth among older generations will trickle through to the young. Who will be able to buy all these £500,000 homes in 20 years’ time?
Both camps agree that increasing the supply of institutional low-rent homes would be a good idea. In 1921, municipal housing was in its infancy (spurred and funded by the Addison Act of 1919, which promised government subsidy for 500,000 council houses within three years), with only 1% of the London population being housed by the London County Council and local authorities.
Public-sector housing peaked in 1981 at 35% of homes in London, before falling to 21% in 2022 (mostly as a result of ‘right to buy’). The cry often understandably goes up: ‘We should just build more council housing.’ It’s hard to argue with this, but the gap in funding needed to build the desired 30,000 affordable homes per year in London is £7.5bn, which is not currently on offer. £200bn then, to double London’s existing affordable housing stock, and no ability for London to raise that subsidy from its wealth-making business and financial sector.
Climate risk in housing
The whole of the above narrative may be rendered entirely irrelevant by the impacts wrought by climate change, which is without doubt the single most significant life-changing issue of the coming century. Its relatively slow onset (compared, say, to that of the pandemic) is unfortunate: politicians appear unable to enact the radical policies required to reverse the effects because there is no immediate catastrophic outcome.
The building industry is barely waking up to its own contribution: conferences abound, and policies exist, but design and building practice remain stubbornly wasteful and detrimental. London’s existing housing stock is poorly insulated and the longer-term impacts of climate change could be wide-ranging, from overheating through to flooding and inward migration.
The only correct way to start mitigation is to reduce the demand for energy and the use of virgin materials. Retrofitting the whole of London’s stock to a meaningful standard would cost in the order of £100,000 per older home, giving a total cost of £200bn, or £22,000 per head. (This compares with pandemic spending at about £5,000 per head.) More draconian, and likely to be politically unpalatable, would be to constrain household energy use, although the prohibitive cost of energy may be the most powerful incentive most people need.
We may end up living in a single insulated room in our homes in the winter. The 2.6 million cars parked outside London’s homes are already reducing in number, but many of those homes require far better access to public transport. Car-dependent homes may lose their value, as might the 10% of homes in London’s flood-risk areas, though the Thames Barrier looks set to do its job for some time yet.
Migration to London from the rest of the world is a longer-term possibility, as the proportion of global land area rendered uninhabitable is set to increase from 1% to 19% by 2070 and migrants tend to go to cities. However, climate migrants are more likely to move within their continent long before taking the drastic step to go overseas.
[Read more: Urban heat islands: New research puts London in a hot spot]
So after all that, which scenarios emerge? Climate change could propel London in two radically different directions. Extraordinary levels of global migration could cause us to provide a whole new generation of homes in London and its wider hinterland. Conversely, a draconian clampdown on resource use would stop us from building anything new at all.
The first scenario is akin to a bursting dam: temporary homes proliferate, planning laws become more permissive (or are routinely broken) and infrastructure (and social relations) are under severe pressure.
Big incentives are provided for under-occupiers to take in refugees. Systems for erecting small prefab houses developed to help local authorities and others deliver at speed – think of the assembly line of the temporary Nightingale Hospitals constructed during the pandemic.
But would all this be happening in London itself? It feels more likely that London’s green belt and the outskirts of south-eastern towns would take the strain, much as they did when post-war ‘London overspill’ translated into ‘expanded towns’ such as Swindon in Wiltshire. The second scenario – effectively a de-growth model – is in fact far more radical, and perhaps even more feared.
There is a ban on the use of all virgin materials. Demolition is forbidden without explicit justification. A major retrofit programme is instigated. New builds must be carbon-positive. Energy and travel are rationed. Even if ethically ‘right’, this entirely new paradigm would need a profound public health shock to bring it about.
Perhaps in every era, essayists have suffered from the hubris of imagining themselves and their city to be on the brink of great change or disaster. It therefore feels ill-advised to conjure up, as did the novelist JG Ballard, a future for London consisting of riots, refugees, starvation or abandoned real estate.
But equally, it’s hard to imagine that climate change is not going to catalyse a revolution, both social and industrial, over the next century. Rather than another 100-year doubling of London’s housing stock, the focus must surely turn to the more urgent task of making London’s existing homes sustainable.
Now our first act must be to create an environment where a high calibre of political leaders can emerge to guide us through these very challenging options.
This is an edited essay from London of the Future (Merrell Publishers and The London Society, £40)
