Here is an older house in the same city that looks much nicer. The brickwork has detailing that is pleasant to the eye, the windows and doors line up with each other. The bedrooms are significantly larger and I suspect the ceilings are higher too.

I find a lot of modern housing soul-crushingly pokey and they cram far too many in to whatever scrap of land they can find.

Imagine if the streets of Britain's provincial cities looked like this!

>>16749
How strange, I've just started watching De Bottons documentary about housing aesthetics.

http://youtu.be/80fb7Lt0z58

You're probably wrong in every regard. Old houses hemorrhage energy and generally need a good demolishing to make way for BREEAM-efficient buildings.

Building in OP might look a bit daft in isolation but it's probably built very well and efficiently manages heat, gas etc. Brand new buildings always look a bit peculiar, they acquire a more pleasant patina as time goes by.

Legacy housing in this country is a fucking blight for everyone. They're structurally unsound, inefficient with energy and generally built for early 20th century blue collar workers without computers.

>>16755
The only thing that's really wrong with modern housing is that there isn't nearly enough of it. Legacy houses, no matter how old and crap, are too lucrative to demolish because they're worth a fucking fortune by merit of location.

>>16755
Perhaps we could have the best of both worlds. There's no reason we can't have rooms that like new houses are energy-efficient and actually have more than just one power outlet in an awkward corner, and like old houses are actually big enough for your average person to stand up and stretch their arms out without touching the walls or ceiling.

>>16757
I know it's /101/ but I think you're overstating the idea that new houses are somehow smaller than older ones. In my experience, it's the opposite that's true. The pokey shitholes I've had to live in are usually legacy buildings from once-industrial towns where working class people used to live like rats crammed into a street sharing a communal toilet.

>>16755

The buildings in your picture look much nicer than the ones in mine. The proportions still look slightly wrong though, in my opinion.

It's just a symptom of our ongoing housing crisis. Land is so expensive that developers are cramming as many houses as possible onto a plot and building them as cheaply as possible. If you shrink the rooms, you can turn a two-bed into a three-bed and so on. Developers get away with it because it's a sellers market - people are desperate for anywhere half-decent to live and don't have better options. The extreme examples come from London, where developers cram a sink and shower into a shoebox and call it a studio flat.

We'll only see a resolution to the situation if the government ease planning restrictions and permit more high-rise construction and the development of greenbelt land.

>>16758
>In my experience, it's the opposite that's true.
Then your experience is wrong. The trend is definitely toward smaller properties.

A major contributor to the problem is that the pricing of property in this country is all wrong. (Well, either that, or the pricing of property everywhere else in the world is wrong.) We seem to be unique in pricing property based on rooms rather than usable floor area. Given a 2-bed and a 3-bed of the same area, on the continent the 3-bed would be slightly more expensive given the extra room, but here there would be a significant premium because the two would simply be regarded as being in completely different classes.

>>16763

Oh God yes. My flat was advertised starting as follows: "700 square foot, three bedrooms, 600 square foot garden". Perfect - I know that that will be cracking for me and the missus. The amount of time I've fucking wasted trailing around "3 bedroom houses" or "Studio flats" in London only to be shown living space proportioned in such away that a Filipino migrant worker used to sleeping on a fold up be on the fucking oven would turn down as too pokey...

It is all a con though. the developers have been restricting supply for since Thatcher flogged off the council housing, knowing their profits would remain ever healthier as a result. I'd nationalise the cunts.

>>16753

I was about to mention a move across the Channel to the Netherlands myself. And you know the worst thing? Den Haag is the most ugly one. Try Haarlem or Leiden, phew, they are beautiful...

>>16763
>Then your experience is wrong. The trend is definitely toward smaller properties.

You're assuming that newly on-the-market housing = 'new houses'. Often 'new housing' is legacy housing carved up into small apartments. Newly dedicated buildings are highly spacious, much more so than early 20th century hovels for mine workers and street sweepers.

>>16773
>You're assuming that newly on-the-market housing = 'new houses'.
No, I'm assuming that newly-built housing = 'new houses' and they're definitely getting smaller. You won't find many Victorian or Edwardian terraces with 2x2m bedrooms, whereas it's a standard part of housing built in the last 20 years, mostly as a tactic to squeeze an extra bedroom in so they can double the price. A typical 4-bed on an urban development will almost entirely fit within the footprint of those old 2-bed terraces, with about as much space between adjacent buildings. I know it's back to anecdote, but the Victorian 3-bed I've just moved out of was only a 3-bed because the front bedroom was partitioned into two. The original two bedrooms were both bigger than a typical master on a recent urban estate. To get bedrooms of the size of those old terraces in a new build, you typically have to buy a 'luxury' property at a substantial premium.

>>16775
>No, I'm assuming that newly-built housing = 'new houses'
Well you're wrong straight off the bat

> You won't find many Victorian or Edwardian terraces with 2x2m bedrooms
That's because those ones which were unacceptably small in 1945 were destroyed.

>it's a standard part of housing built in the last 20 years, mostly as a tactic to squeeze an extra bedroom in so they can double the price.
What, you think this is a development unique to the last 20 years? If anything pressure to squeeze more rooms in has lessened, since A-B travel times have dropped so dramatically since this and the last century.

>>16776
>What, you think this is a development unique to the last 20 years?
Mostly, since it's a direct result of the right-to-buy/no-more-houses policies of the 1980s.

>If anything pressure to squeeze more rooms in has lessened, since A-B travel times have dropped so dramatically since this and the last century.
Nope. It's nothing to do with travel times and everything to do with profit. Taking a two-bedroom design and carving out a third bedroom within the existing footprint might result in a house that sells for £50k more for a small increase in the cost of materials. Today's builders can build smaller houses with smaller rooms (with substantial reductions in the cost of construction) without sacrificing much of the selling price.

>>16780
>Mostly, since it's a direct result of the right-to-buy/no-more-houses policies of the 1980s.

Then you're wrong. Cramming people in to under-capacity housing is Landlording 101. This shit comes up in Cicero's letters.

>It's nothing to do with travel times
It has everything to do with travel times. Property is all about location. Because it doesn't take long to get from A to B, the value of property in cities has rocketed up, regardless of whether it has one room or two. Location is overwhelmingly what sets how much money a property makes its owner.

> Today's builders can build smaller houses with smaller rooms (with substantial reductions in the cost of construction) without sacrificing much of the selling price.

This is nothing new. In fact, regulation of property of this sort is far more stringent than it ever was.

(IMHO...) The cost of property has gone up in the UK because of:

- We have a culture of banks being happy to loan lots of money, and customers happy to take on those loans.
- Foreign investment in (especially London) property fuelled by governments around the world printing money and a lack of profitable investment options.
- Population increases fuelled by immigration.

Sage because I am more interested in architecture than in how much houses cost.

>>16761
I agree. Decently sized mid-rise apartments for all!
I remember having a bedroom and personal space the size of the entire upstairs of a post-war UK council build in Germany for ~60 Euros a week, excluding bills and owned by the local authority.
Remove the parasites from the equation and you ultimately pay less. Democratic statehood and all that, force these tits out of business with decent flats for all.

>>16782
I'd add BTL landlords being fuelled by housing benefit and shite like Location, Location, Location encouraging people to spend more than they can realistically afford to your list.