Text 2. Housing in Britain

Blocks of flats have offered greater scope for bold conceptions and architectural use of modern materials and methods than terraced, semi-detached or detached houses. In the new towns architects designing houses have had opportunity for variety of design within a general plan, and the same is true of larger local authority building schemes.

As the main demand has been for urban housing, de­velopment of ideas in planning and design since 1946 has been most noticeable in housing schemes.

Quality of design has been high in the new towns. Much thought was given to individual house design, to layout and grouping of houses, to landscaping and to community amenities or the relationship of houses to shopping centres, schools and other public buildings.

In large older towns much more thought than formerly has been given in recent building to such questions as orientation for sunlight, space between high blocks to allow daylight to reach the lowest floors, and to balanced mixing of tall, medium-height and low dwellings, of housing and public building of private and public open space. The uniformity and monotony of a good deal of earlier building is now avoided. The trend towards concentration of siting has been made possible by the growth of the realisation that good urban surroundings make a town a better dwelling place than a sprawling dormitory suburb, that urban and rural living each have their own pleasures.

Much attention has been paid in the last five years to the details of town development, such as outbuildings, street furniture (lamps, traffic signs, kiosks, etc.), shop frontages, pedestrians facilities and noise abatement.

Building materials. The vast majority of houses built are of the brick and timber construction traditional in Great Britain, and stone has been used in certain districts, where it is at hand. Rendering, timber-boarding and tile hanging are also used. Roofs are normally of clay or concrete tiles, but roofing slate is used in certain districts, and some low-pitched roofs are covered with heavy-duty roofing felt. The trend towards the use of prefabrication is growing especially as regards the factory production of joinery, interior fittings, etc. more concrete is being used (for houses as well as blocks of flats) and productivity of hand labour on site is being increased by the use of power tools (e.g. power-driven barrows, pneumatic hammers, laminates, articulated conveyors.) New or substitute mate­rials, such as plastic, laminates and glass fibre, are also finding a useful outlet in building construction.

The principal materials used in the construction of dwellings however, remain timber, bricks, roofing tiles, cement, sand and gravel, and, principally in the construc­tion of flats, steel and reinforced concrete.

Non-traditional building. The difference between tradi­tional and non-traditional building is more in the methods employed in making and erecting the component parts than in the actual materials used.

Traditional methods are based on the principle of an on-site operation where all the materials traditionally required for the building are first gathered together, such as bricks, cement, sand, ballast, timber, tiles, plaster, etc. They are then fashioned as required and put together with a labour force working on the open site. Non-traditio­nal building may use new or the same basic traditional materials in new ways, employing new techniques in fixing and erection which differ, for instance, from the traditional method of laying by hand on brick, or concrete block, on top of another. In the main, new methods have been applied to alternative systems of walling, employing concrete posts and infilling panels; thin concrete slabs supported on light structural steel framing; pre-assembled panels of brickwork; stressed-skin resin-bonded plywood panels, asbestos sheeting in varoius forms; curtain walling and the line. These are usually produced in a factory and transported to the site, requiring only to be placed and secured in position.

Although traditional methods will die hard the influen­ce of new techniques are gradually making headway in present-day building practice especially in multi-storey buildings of all kinds and more particularly in school construction.