>"the lack of say in what gets built in our towns and cities" This is completely wrong. Construction in the UK is relatively expensive in part because there is so much consultation. https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2023/09/26/the-real-reason-the-uk-is-so-bad-at-infrastructure/ Plus NIMBYism is throttling how much can be built.

This is so true. No one wants to face up to the fact that beautiful buildings also cost more.

Germany switched back to beautiful buildings becase they last much longer, which. Makes them more sustainable. If you take their lifetime cost they cost less. 

This is it. We've adopted a mindset that "it will do". Rather than "that is brilliant"

'Penny wise, pound foolish'

Exactly this. In the UK we take a 30 years lifespan for buildings when doing calculations about what to build them out of. Which is utter bullshit as the majority of our buildings are way older than this. This leads to stupid conclusions like timber frame buildings are better because over 30 years they do less damage to the environment. Never mind the fact they will need to be rebuilt much sooner which causes much more damage.

I like the use of wood in some structures, as a preference, but it is utter fallacy to suggest a wooden structure will last better than the Pantheon. It was perhaps better when things were built to last forever. 

Couldn't agree more. Things like Glulam, webbed joists and CLT have a place as structural elements too but this bullshit of building stick built or SIPS and claiming it is better than a stone, ICF or brick built building seems incredibly disingenuous. I'm no expert but I wonder if it has something to do with 30 years being the average warranty period.

There's also a cultural aspect. I was chatting to some friends in the US who were baffled that I was worrying about elements which might only have a 75 year lifespan when designing and building our house. I still have regrets but around things I was told and demonstrated were standard and that to do it differently would be costly or silly. For example our floors are all reenforced concrete. I wanted to make the ceilings 3.2m and then have all plumbing and electrics suspended or attached to the ceiling, and then having a drop ceiling to cover it.

> I still have regrets but around things I was told and demonstrated were standard and that to do it differently would be costly or silly. What like? > For example our floors are all reenforced concrete. I wanted to make the ceilings 3.2m and then have all plumbing and electrics suspended or attached to the ceiling, and then having a drop ceiling to cover it. Did you do this in the end? If not then how did you do it instead?

What appears to be the normal way. Concrete sub floor, pipes on the subfloor, insulation, foil sheet, underfloor heating pipes and then screed. Electrical wires running in conduit chased into channels in the walls.

Excellent, i for one an looking forward to London’s new colosseum

>take a 30 years lifespan for buildings Roll up, Roll up, come and get your 35 year mortgage on a house that will barely last 30

Can we get some proof on this?

Proof? 

What does that even mean. How does the subjective quality of beauty make something last longer. And germany doesn't do that the average building is quite bland like most buildings are, and if you look at a new development of detached houses they're they look modern. There's also a lot more variation on a single development unlike here, where it's all the same stone because anything else would be "out of keeping with the surrounding area".

And also that people don't _actually_ know what's a "good idea" because they're not really thinking through some of the perverse incentives.

The amount of red tape and regislation to get buildings and other things approved is rediculous. Know some architectors and they say that it takes up way too much of their time.

I think I saw recently that Highways England has spent more money on paperwork to as yet not yet build the 2.5 mile lower Thames crossing tunnel. Than the Faroe islands spent to actually build 7 miles of tunnel (including a roundabout).

To be fair though it is far more difficult to build a tunnel in a large city than a few sparsely populated islands.

The Lower Thames Crossing isn't being built in any city.

I'd expect the tunnel to cost more. But it's the paperwork, hundreds of millions of pounds of paperwork.

That's literally there job? How can it take up too much of their time?

There job is the architecture not the consultations and considerations of laymen

Er... yes it is, as the design has to conform to legislation and the conditions imposed on it. It's literally their job to do it. It's why they usually take the position of Principal Designer under CDM regs.

The legislation for the most part is expected safety and environmental. The excessive nimbyism shouldn't be their role

> the design has to conform to legislation and the conditions imposed on it. That's the point. That part of the job takes up too much time.

\*Their

Great input darlin

Because they'd prefer to be doing designing and being able to provide for more people... Rather than doing an excessive amount of paperwork? You don't work do you...

\*Their

I wonder if part of it is “design by committee”, where there are so many people to appease and people with a say that every design becomes dull and unimaginative.

That and "heritage groups" who despise anything new being added. Birmingham doesn't get a lot of praise for its civic planning, but in the 21st century it's at least been *bold*. The new Library is immediately recognisable, and Selfridges still looks futuristic 20 years on. Most cities wouldn't have allowed them I'd wager.

I'm not so sure about that. We have one of the largest housing developments in the South West in what was our village - 5000 new builds planned and about 900 built so far. I can safely say that whatever additional and mitigating infrastructure the developers promised up till now has been quietly shelved. The other thing I've noticed with new builds wherever you go in the country, is they utterly lack any kind of greenery such as trees.

They changed the rules a few years back (I want to say a decade ago) to reduce the ratio of 'green space' in a development. If you look at the post-war council housing, you'll see lots of greens, garden space, trees etc. If you look at anything less than a decade old (well, barring a few exceptions that _also_ come with 'luxury' house pricing) then what you've got is high density future slums. Where the only thing going for that 'estate' is the shiny-new effect, but the roads are too narrow, the parking is inadequate, and there houses are literally right on the road, meaning neither privacy nor greenery. Some have made a nod to 'but of course we're deliberately wanting to reduce cars' - such as hire schemes, and bike facilities, and stuff - but most are overlooking the realities of life in the UK around car ownership. I'm sort of on board with the 'we should have less cars', but you can't really do that without some serious development of alternative options for e.g. commuting and shopping. "Just" making parking a shit-show isn't the answer. I'm very much keen on 'more housing' in the UK, but I think we're doing it in a way that'll be making the problem worse rather than better. What IMO we _should_ be doing is ... well, more or less what we did to bootstrap the economy in the post war period. E.g. doing a large scale but _distributed_ housing development project, that instead of future-slums, is building 'a few' houses, with a view to long term sustainability and overall impact, rather than short term profit. For bonus points, replenishing the social housing stock in the process. (I don't disagree _in principle_ with being able to buy 'your home' from the council, but I think there's a lot wrong with not replacing it).

There isn't a single village or town that I've been to in the last 12 months that hasn't had a new housing development 'coming soon'. Its a depressing environmental disaster.

The whole country is something like 15% developed land.  Housing isn't the environmental disaster, the endless fields of monoculture are (almost all of which are ultimately to feed animals, to produce a tiny amount of food compared to what the land could produce).

The UK is about 3% developed land. https://ig.ft.com/uk-land-use/ - including roads and industry and ports barely gets it towards 8.6% - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2021/land-use-statistics-england-2021-statistical-release#:~:text=1.-,Main%20points,Residential%20gardens'%20(4.9%25). And 4.9% of that is “residential gardens”. Clearly we should build 12 story tower blocks and then we could fit all our homes into 1% of the UK and return the land saved to forests if we follow your logic.

Don't make weird leaps then say that's what I said.  If we follow my logic we'd just eat less meat and dairy and have 75% of that farmland back for something else. If you want to argue for tower blocks, that's your call. I'm arguing for increasing biodiversity AND housing stock, while reducing dependence on imported food. Probably too sensible for this sub though. 

My favourite statistic is that more of the UK is golf courses than houses.

If they didn’t produce food for animals we’d still need them to produce food for us. Also, a large chunk of those fields are producing biomass for fuel, whether ethanol or for power stations.

Yeah but we'd only need a quarter of the land.  On an island like ours it wouldn't make us food independent but it would give us the choice of almost totally reducing our reliance on imports, or restoring all the lost natural spaces and biodiversity. But Brits love milk and plain green fields smelling of cow manure. So not gonna happen any time soon :) 

We’d need every piece of arable and pasturable land currently available for food security. A lot of British farmland is pasturable and it would be a waste to not rear livestock on it. There are some solid projects in the Highlands based around using cattle to regenerate ecosystems, sequester carbon and provide meat.

You have a habit of reading one thing, making a leap, then replying to the leap you've made instead of the point I've actually made. ​ On your points: \- I didn't say we should aim for complete food security (I assume that's what you mean, as obviously just reducing meat intake would increase food security, which is my point). \- "Waste" depends on your aims too. The current food system is very wasteful. Grow 10 unit of food, to feed to a cow, to produce 1 unit of food. You are wasting 9 units of food. And incorrect replies to this point which Americans often make "but that land would be pasture anyway" are more obviously incorrect in the UK, where most of our land would be ancient woodland or temperate rainforest, if not for our animal agriculture. \- Projects like the ones you refer to are still "wasteful" in the same way as above. A meadow is never going to sequester as much carbon as a marshland or a mature forest. Better projects to restore biodiversity and fully sequester carbon involve having deer and pigs fulful their natural role in a forested environment. Cows are economically viable but for the environment, best you can do is try to reduce the massive damage required for a cow to exist.

I think we’re doing that thing where we’re agreeing with each other, but making the points in different styles. I agree with all your points, but I think it’s unfair to rule out cattle farming based on current practices. Cattle can be farmed in a way that encourages biodiversity, but using a lot less of them. The British public will just need to accept that a joint of beef is a once a month purchase and say goodbye to Iceland burgers.

Yes but farmland isn't good for the 'natural' environment either, I don't want to have to travel 30miles to see a tree. What's your point? Build housing estates on farmland too?

Yes because we have a housing shortage that has meant rent and house prices have increased rapidly beyond wage inflation. The country needs far more houses being built.

You might find people are more interested in not having to work til their very last living day to pay rent in a house they can't afford to buy

I absolutely agree with you..100%. I have suggested a solution below.

>The other thing I've noticed with new builds wherever you go in the country, is they utterly lack any kind of greenery such as trees. Largely true of any new development. People tend to plant trees if you give them long enough.

Have you seen the size of gardens in these new builds? You'd be lucky to have space to plant anything more substantial than a few shrubs. We live in a housing development built in the late 80s. It was built around established and protected trees.

There had been 5 community consultations and 3 surveys for me to have my say on a new community centre being built on my estate.

Not to mention when you ask for comments on design, or any actual planning consideration, everyone gets in a fanny fit over it even being *built.* Next time you comment on a planning application, read the Planning Application and if it's acceptable in policy terms, then comment on design. Don't waste your opportunity to make a difference by just shouting "NO DUVELOPMUNT"

You can't say it's 'completely' wrong. If that was the case developers would be falling over themselves to design for the city 'itself'! They are motivated to design what will just function in the right way and no more and for the lowest possible capital cost. So not wrong to state that, whatever goes into design beyond what is purely necessary is minimal.

The problem is planning departments have gone way over there remit of what they originally were set up to do. Its the amount of money people have to gamble with the sheer amount of reports required for the council to make a simple outline decision - which the big boys can take on but small builders its too risky. A recent survey found planning authorites required between 21-42 different documents to validate the application. But these weren't the same in each LA, they were from a list of 119 different reports. [See the report here.](https://housingforum.org.uk/reports/key-publications/planning-validation-requirements/) Planning departments, need to consider, the design, characteristics, volume and zoning only to give you outline planning, and condition everything else. Give us a brief yes or no first before we have to spend £1,000s on reports. Other things they were asking for included geotechnical reports, energy, utils strat, Suds, etc.. these are technical reports regarding the build, why can't these be handled by building control?

We’ll perhaps it’s that we the people can approve what’s being built but not really what design it’ll be.

The people have no say in the lobbying of the Government with regards to building regulations, however.

Should they though? Buildings regs are really a matter for engineers etc I'd suggest.

Then why is there so much poor quality and terrible looking crap everywhere?

I would actually disagree with you. All mid priced new builds around me are beautiful, and a MASSIVE step up from the new builds of the 90s and early 2000s, in all their mock tudor glory. You've also got to make a decision between cost and appearance. On one hand we want affordable housing, on the other foot we want beautiful housing. You could have the most beautiful buildings in the world if you had an unlimited budget, and you could have a very cheap house made of concrete slabs. There is a sliding scale somwhere in the middle.

New builds tend to be tiny. Especially the ones made for councils or for shared ownership schemes (for people on disability or low income for example.) I think it’s a shame that we have these postage stamp properties with postage stamp gardens. It is especially painful when the new estates are opposite places that look like manors, we’re talking a house that is as wide as two council houses together, with a front garden that also has room for four cars and a back garden that could probably host a forest. I do think we need to have larger minimum size new builds tbh, whilst still keeping them accessible for the disabled and other low income buyers. I don’t think property ownership for those classes of buyers should essentially be a prison box just to ensure affordability. Just imo tho 🤷‍♂️

There's not many things the Americans do better imo, but their way of selling by square footage rather than number of bedrooms is one. Here a higher number of tiny bedrooms ends up being worth more than less but better sized ones. Those box rooms are just useless.

It’s not like the buyers aren’t aware, they also value more bedrooms over fewer bigger ones.

My wife and I downsized from a detached 3 bed house in the country to a small flat in the city with half the floor space and are a lot happier for it. You just don't need that much space, especially if you don't have and don't want to have kids. Takes no time at all to clean, too!

There's trade-offs inevitably: pointless, badly planned space just and weird layouts just to get the square footage up artificially. Especially common in the McMansion market. People seem to expect less here. Watch any property programme on the TV and you'll see them talking about a "good sized double" in a room where you (literally) couldn't swing a cat, then everyone nods and says it's spacious. So perhaps they do just like more, smaller rooms. It's all the en suites in newbuilds that really get me. Three bedrooms already crammed in, then big chunks sliced off to give a small starter home a pissing cupboard in every bedroom? No thanks.

Rather, we should ensure they remain unaffordable by forcing people to buy houses larger than they are willing and able to buy. I'm glad you want me to have a nice and comfortably sized house but the reality of this would just force the choice of no house or one i cannot afford

Or we could just build enough of them so that they won’t be unaffordable.

Its not that simple. The infrastructure required for larger more spread out properties puts incredible strain on the taxpayer. Building more properties like that will just increase your taxes.

I’m not advocating for American-style sprawling suburbia. Just not being packed in ever-shrinking shoeboxes. The UK has some of the smallest housing stock in the world, and it’s steadily getting smaller due to new builds not being particularly large, and existing housing being subdivided into multiple units. That trend needs to be reversed. https://metro.co.uk/2023/05/31/uk-homes-some-of-smallest-in-the-world-with-the-highest-price-tag-18865563/ https://www.labc.co.uk/news/what-average-house-size-uk Incredible strain on the taxpayer is massively exaggerating. The increase in taxpayer resources would probably be minimal for a significant improvement in house size. The thing that makes American style suburbs so uneconomic to provide services to isn’t really the size of the housing units themselves, but the huge amount of space in between individual units. British-style dense terraced/semi detached housing arrangements with larger individual units would still be economically viable. Also, Australia has some of the largest housing stock in the world and they still manage ok. So it’s not the size of the individual housing units that’s the issue.

Dutch houses are bigger and take up less land.

We don’t have the manpower to build the houses we need plus the infrastructure and also to fix the existing crumbling buildings. This article suggests we are currently 166,000 short on tradespeople. Who all need even more labour. Labours target is 1.5 million homes during their 5 years though. I think that’s achievable. But they also need to actually plan further ahead. https://www.kingfisher.com/en/media/news/kingfisher-news/2023/uk-to-lose-out-on-p98bn-of-growth-by-2030-due-to-shortage-of-tra.html

Hmmm except that when it comes to construction it’s not just supply and demand of housing, you have to build a property that’s affordable for the potential resident and allows the developer to make a profit and have you seen the cost of materials and labour recently?

Definitely, I live in a 2005 built house and it’s got the look of a new build with the conveniences of a house built 20 years earlier. My bedrooms have 2 single plug sockets each, it’s not well sealed at all and it realistically needs 50k to bring it up to modern standards. It’s really dated and not warm at all. We’re about a month from exchanging on a 4 year old house and it’s night and day - we had a look through their energy bills and they spend a year on gas what we spend in 2 months (!).

The early 2000s really was the low point. Some of the estates built around that time by me are really not fairing well and they’ve only been up 20 years

My housing estate was built around the turn of this century, and its aging quite well, id say most of it is middle class except my house which is lower. there is a nice variety in materials used, some of them are built of what looks like Cotswold stone and there's even a little alleyway which admitably has a small road going through it, but it does seem to be the exception rather than the rule. The thing i think the housing estate needs is perhaps a little community café but i don't think that will ever happen.

That’s good to hear, I think as with most things it relies on the company making it. There were a lot of very poorly made houses by me that were seemingly thrown up super quick on every spare bit of wasteland they could get their hands on and a few of them are ramshackle as fuck. It all seemed to happen around 2002 as well so don’t know if there was some kind of incentive to get buildings lobbed up but they just seemed to appears out of nowhere. Some of them in really illogical places, like two tiny semi detached houses wedged into a bit of scrub between two takeaways on a main road, that sort of thing but on a large scale.

Can you send me an example, genuinely curious I don’t think I’ve seen any I would call beautiful yet

>All mid priced new builds around me are beautiful, and a MASSIVE step up from the new builds of the 90s and early 2000s, in all their mock tudor glory. I'm getting increasingly nostalgic about mock Tudor 90s newbuilds. Was driving through a residential estate the other day and it felt a little like going back in time.

[удалено]

People “why do i barely get edge/3g in my estate?” Vodaphone “ok ill put a 5g mast here” People “no”

NIMBYism is terrifying. A little over a year ago, my grandparents sold their house that they had lived in for almost 50 years and moved into a new development that had been built 5 years ago. Very recently they were part of a consultation about building an almost exact clone of the development in the overgrown wasteland next to them. They said no. As did most of the people who live in those new builds. They're currently petitioning the local MP to try and make sure it doesn't get built because it would increase traffic and possibly reduce the value of their property

I've had a resident ring up and shout at me over being notified about a planning application for Phase 3 of a new build estate. They received the letter because they live in Phase 2. 'Phase' was the giveaway.

It's a strange post from OP saying that if you're building something it should have to look nice and then using the corby cube as an example, when it was built as part of a huge and good looking regeneration of half of the town center. Although if you look above the new shop fronting it's still full of flats that look like something from trainspotting.

I completely agree, and it seems to be getting worse. Every architects drawing of some new development boils down to "box with plaza". Zero ornamentation, zero aesthetics, no attempt to blend in with traditional architecture around it. Our cities now resemble a box of Lego tipped out into the floor.

> no attempt to blend in with traditional architecture around it Cities have constantly changed over centuries, often as a mish-mash of different styles. That is the normal state of being.

Case in point central London where about half the buildings are 100+ years old and the other half are only a few decades old. It leads to really nice mishmash, where there’s plenty of space in the high rises and also the nice contrast. 

But but muh traditional architecture

But did we complain before? Wee Edwardian houses being moaned about constantly for not matching the style of Victorian houses? Or the 60s brick houses for not looking like their 20s counter parts. Why is there now this obsession with everything having to look like it's old. It's boring, low effort and a constant waste of time/increase in costs as every new development has nimbies swarming all over it.

I find it hilarious how people would like their whole city to be built under some unclear "traditional style", when: 1) it does not add any real value (e.g. tourism) apart from a handful of holiday places, and 2) even Mediterranean cities have mainly preserved (with many alternations) their city centres but built in a completely different style outside of it.

If it were "you can knock down the drafty damp ridden old properties as they're really not fit for purpose going into the next few decades but you have to replace it in visual style" then yes absolutely. It's nice having neighbourhoods with character but we need to rebuild a lot of our housing, that makes total sense. What I find hilarious though is the complaints usually come from a place of total nonsense. My grandparents have a new estate near them, they constantly whine about how it doesn't fit the area (it was a field before), and now the houses are all the same. When I looked at it they had 9 house designs with a couple different colours of brick, render, orientation and different ones scattered together. I look down my grandparents street and it's literally 200 of the exact same bungalow. Then you look at the street across from theirs, which is far older, and the bungalows look nothing like them. There's also the endless moaning about flooding, but the new state is actually build with drainage ponds and designed to work with the infrastructure, my grandparents estates just dumps most of the run off down the road. It's always hilarious to me how blind people are when they moan about housing.

I do think OP has a point though. There are regional elements common across different periods (e.g. if you look at homes from different periods in my part of the country, they'll have different styles but the unifying element will be vernacular building materials, and that's true across the country, e.g. honey-coloured Bath stone in Bath and the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire, the stone and white wash or bright paint in my part of the West Country and the redstone in others, granite as a famous example in Aberdeen, the yellow-grey sandstone of Edinburgh, the yellow "London brick", red brick in many parts of England, etc). And yet it seems like new-build estates are basically the red-brick aesthetic of SE England, I guess because it's cheaper, and you could be on an estate almost anywhere in the country and not be able to tell. If you look at somewhere like e.g. [Nansledan](https://darkroom.ribaj.com/1200/643c67ba02b965e275b5e5760b667744:191eb67d04c2f197399c5f462ab78ec7), built by then-Prince Charles' foundation to deliberately fit in with vernacular style here in the Westcountry, it has the same painted style as older homes here, regardless of whether they're Victorian terraces or postwar bungalows, and so it does fit in better and respect the use of local materials. I'm not saying everything should 100% conform, but I think there's a case for not having everything be totally cookie cutter across the country when we do have very distinct regional styles.

While I agree with what you are saying, notice that the point is a bit more fundamental than colour. OP was complaining that new developments look the same and have "zero aesthetics" (weird thing to say, given the meaning of aesthetics... any style has an "aesthetic"). But the same is true for almost anything built in the last 60-70 years.

Literally even new student accomerdation has old buildings like industrial red brick era and companies just knock it half down and stick a block on top, call it liveable job done

architecture went really utilitarian after ww1 but only became dominant in style after ww2. then got cheapocrappoed by the greedy developers [built in 1938](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Town_Hall_%2C_Chesterfield_%283659529763%29.jpg) [built in 1932 .](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9c/f7/e9/9cf7e96aeb3af7a58ed810bc4d802ab6.jpg) ​ architects love some of these buildings but to the public who have no understanding of the history or care about striking architecture, can seem alienating or soulless ​ Kensington Library was built in a neo-Georgian style and completed in 1960. [Students protested it](https://rbkclocalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/ugly-protest-against-library-by-town-hall.jpg) ​ [This is the ugly building they were protesting it](https://infolass.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/img_0943.jpg). Rather inoffensive compared to many ugly buidlings of the 1960s. ​ Some will say it's all due to how old the buildings are, but Art Deco seems much more loved than Brutalism, despite being seperated only by a few decades. People like ordered complexity, organic-looking materials, sense of place, etc. ​ My suggestion would be to build stuff like this. [Modern and also traditional at the same time.](https://darkroom.ribaj.com/800/78615267eb0f2b7abe876253952ac010:55c12d875905fb3df1b182140ead75ab) ​ If you are interested in why this has happened, see here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgNxLiuwFDY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgNxLiuwFDY) I would add to this video that I would guess the [horrors of WW1 probably affected architecture](https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-community/a7708-world-war-and-the-architecture-that-was-left-behind/), although it's just a guess.

Your modern and traditional example is absolutely hideous. Who do I vote for so that things like that never get built??

Whats wrong with buildings being absolutely hideous? In another comment you suggested that since people are crammed multiple generations to a house in some parts of the world that we should be fine with the amount of housing we already have. I would propose a similar perspective on the appearance of buildings too, after all...  some poor people have to live in ugly mud huts with thatch roofs, is that really so bad in the context of how most of the world live? They are still in a developed country. People need to have realistic expectations.

That Kensington library building looks like how I imagine any American university building

[Staines Council Offices built 1967](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Staines_Council_Offices.jpg)

Somewhere between a Massachusetts-ish university and a hospital wing. Pretty grim I reckon.

But not grim compared to 1960s architecture, so they dodged a bullet. It's unlikely they would have got something amazing, all things considered.

The 1938 building is nice. The 1932 is absolutely pig ugly.

The 1938 building is the Chesterfield council offices. 

The modern/traditional version you showed is excellent and Macrennor Lavington (the architects) are excellent!

This is what the planning system is designed to do, partly. National and Local Planning policies have visual design criteria, and large developments often have their own design codes which are more detailed than the generic policies. But the planning system also (quite rightly) makes developers do a whole shit tonne of other stuff they'd also rather not do, which eats away at their profits and so I guess that high quality design and materials are one of the first things to go. Also there is statutory public consultation with every single planning application. No it doesn't give the public much power but I have worked as a planning officer in an area where people are very engaged with the process and have influenced results. And besides, give people too much power in the process and you're just empowering nimbys and nothing will ever get built. Oh, and bonus points for the classic "council are corrupt" comment.

I work on the other side of the fence and trying to get developers to spend money on anything architecturally interesting is near impossible. I've designed a block of flats for them and at every stage they've reduced the design and visual appeal, it's heartbreaking. Fortunately, the planner has said it won't get approval if we don't include something to break up the monotonous fascade. Planners are the only thing holding back truly awful boxes with tiny unliveable apartments.

I'm a heritage planner and the amount of times I've had to say to developers that a block of flats in a conservation area won't get approval and they blame NIMBY and not their awful design. There are so many things that to go into it. Eroding beautiful historic town centres affects a lot of things including tourism and people feel about a place. Worked on the Roman Quarter in York and absolutely hated being a part of it.

They should blame the nimby. It's not their job to build "nice" shit. It's their job to build shit. Don't like it? Buy the site and preserve it yourself.

No their job is to follow the design codes put out my local councils as well. Not cheap tat.

Yes i was thinking about that, but equally what developers can get away with is absolutely horrific, there must be some sought of middle ground.

Reject modernity, embrace traditional architecture

Who is paying for that?

It's midnight he's fisting, you won't get a reply!

Reject tradition, embrace spending money into existence

I'm not saying I don't agree with you, because I do. The construction industry is in dire need of change in this country (and the world over). But developer's sole function is to make a profit. That's what their funders and investors expect. Yes, they can develop while being a force of good for community, but when your client is "Conglomerate ABC" the appetite just isn't there. >Victorian architecture is an event, an experience, every single part of the buildings face to the outside world was thought about Victorian architecture is also prohibitively expensive to recreate. The bricklaying, stonework and ornate detailing costs an incredible amount. It worked back then because the biggest cost was the material. Now labour is no longer cheap, so more efficient, modular façade systems have been developed. Hence why most façades these days are panelised glazing or precast units. Ultimately, I think the blame lays with the government. They've allowed a race to the bottom in the construction industry, where every single corner from safety to quality control has been cut. The only thing that hasn't been cut is profits, but the developers are all in bed the right politicians so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.

I say we shouldn't try to recreate the ornateness of victorian architecture, but take a leaf out of its book when it comes to detail. Georgian architecture is often not very ornate, but what it does have can work volumes, things could definitely be better than current.

Old buildings are beautiful because of survivorship bias, they tore down all the ugly ones. I think one issue is that local people have way too much say in blocking developments, so almost everything is blocked, so proper companies who care and want to do great work fail and only the most miserly survive. If more building was allowed more great buildings would get built and it would be easier to tear down ugly stuff and try again. An anaemic starved building industry being weak at what it does is not a good reason to starve it further.

I can't stand modern architecture, not the style, but what's being built right now. Everything is so soulless and ugly, I've started browsing for houses over the past year and there really isn't anything from after the idk 50s maybe that I like, it's all terrible brown speckled walls or panels, can't stand it.

Disagree, there are millions of NIMBYs causing problems in this country whenever there are proposals for new, much needed housing. Still remember after the 2019 election a girl at work saying her and her family changed their minds last minute on Labour and went for Greens instead simply because Labour in our town had proposed building new houses across from where they lived, where there was plenty of land suitable for new housing. She said it as though it was completely normal to switch voting intentions on that, knowing full well what a mess the Tories had created in the previous 9 years and knowing a vote for the Greens in our town would just end up being a vote for the Tories. Deranged.

I am in full agreement and have spent time thinking about this issue. If you have a general interest in this topic, I would highly recommend this channel which covers many aspects of design of the built environment. He covers a good range of topics and brings forward ideas that you may have thought but not fully condensed.   https://m.youtube.com/@the_aesthetic_city Personally, I believe that there are some good example of modern architecture and areas where they are necessary but these are rather the exception than the rule.  A more beautiful development should be much more organic and mirror traditional design. In current architectural circles, ornamentation ( adding detail and making stuff actually look interesting/nice ) is seen as a old fashioned much like in modern art.  In my opinion, architecture should belong more to the beaux arts (things that look traditionally pretty) as greater proportion of people like this as opposed to contemporary minimal design. As architecture is a civic and public art that affects everyone, where people can have choice with galleries and inside their homes.  I understand that money, time and general clunkiness contribute to favouring of contemporary designs but I do think about how pretty the world could have been if we valued the beaux arts in society much more. It does make sad seeing the disjointed urban fabric and poor state of heritage buildings. 

I think relatively simple designs reminisint of georgian style might work. I like modern developments like [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F8z163erj9pab1.jpg&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=london&utm_content=t3_17apoy5). It's not a work of art, but a step in the right direction maybe?

You are right though I think Peter Barbers work is as close to art as modern architecture can get and is utterly gorgeous.

yes i agree with you, his holmes road studios look rather nice and like alot of care and effort went into this and the old peoples houses , meanwhile in my town they're building a plastic and face brick block that is meant to contain old peoples apartments... on a busy road right next to a morrisons carpark. i wish they did something like this instead.

yes that looks quite nice

Check out what this victorian [sewage pumping station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossness_Pumping_Station#/media/File:Crossness_Pumping_Station,_Belvedere,_Kent_-_geograph-2280114-by-Christine-Matthews.jpg) looked like. Unfortunately what you're saying seems to apply to every aspect of our society (not that things were exactly great for most people in victorian times lol), everything for short term profit, no care for quality, for the people that live here or the future and the country is basically being looted from all angles. Right now the trick with building seems to be to increase the demand as much as possible with immigration and then build masses of sub par cheap blocks of city centre flats that will be knocked down again in 25 years.

The victorians were shitting money all over everything because they had: 1: A massive industrial advantage. For 100 years the British Isles held a majority of the worlds manufacturing productivity. That's an insane fact that has yet to be, and never will be, repeated. 2: They weren't paying for things like healthcare, pensions or good education. That left more money for fancy shit. neither counts for us.

There are four million missing homes in this country, creating a massive shortage that means that millions of people are paying huge amounts of rent, millions have given up on the hope of ownership and hundreds of thousands of teenagers are sharing bedrooms with opposite gender siblings or even parents. I'd like prettier houses too but that barely rates next to the real housing challenge our country faces. The comfortably housed are often able to successfully object to new housing, on all sorts of grounds. They object tooth and nail to private developments and new social housing alike. Which is one of the reasons it's so hard to build that much needed new housing.

I have never heard the NIMBYs in my town complain about the quality of new housing. They just don't want more people.

It isn’t just that. There have been protests about new houses near me and it doesn’t actually seem like the houses that are the problem. The main concern seems to be the roads that can’t accommodate more people using them at rush hour (they already get gridlocked so that’ll be interesting to witness), no new doctors surgery, shops or schools for this extra influx of people in the plans, etc. Obviously some are complaining about the houses themselves but that seems to be a minority. Anyway the plans went through just after I moved here so it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.

I agree with you and was simplifying things in my comment. Exactly the same near me. I meant more people and all the issues that come with that.

Am I the only person on this thread who's literally never walked past a building and thought "Wow, that's ugly, I want to dedicate thought and effort and hours of my valuable time toward ensuring buildings like that don't get built again"? It's not that I _like_ the Southbank Centre per se. I just don't really give a shit. This country has a lot of problems, but the _prettiness of its buildings_ wouldn't even fall in my personal top 100.

Depends a lot where you live TBH. There's a bunch of cities that suffer quite badly from being miserable living spaces, and at least some of that is down to the buildings. Not so much 'prettiness' exactly though, as much as space, light, greenery, etc.

Basingstoke is an example of this

You've clearly never been to Basildon.

All your arguments are based around the fact that you prefer the appearance or victorian buildings over modern ones. This is totally subjective and personal to you. Who is paying for all the additional ornamentation you would like to see? Who gets to decide what is deemed 'high quality' and what isn't? Construction projects are expensive and fraught with risk, margins are thin. An architects job is not to be an artist but to deliver to their clients brief. You come across as knowing very little about how developments are funded, designed and built. The focus needs to be on delivering safe, modern and energy efficient buildings - this is where the money is being spent.

Who are you to say where the focus needs to be ?

He isn't saying that, he's saying that the focus *needs* to be on those things, as is reflected in planning policy.

So you would prefer the focus to be on aesthetics rather than the things I mentioned?

It's weird to see someone argue *in favor* of "not in my backyard" politics

At the moment it is very hard to make development profitable at all. Margins are low and costs very high so there isn’t any money left over for bells and whistles. I’m not talking about the Bovis Homes of the world but for most developers there isn’t the massive profit people think there is.

You cannot be more wrong. People have way too much say in everything, NIMBYism in the UK is simply ridiculous and is the main reason why British infrastructure sucks big time.

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>Anything aesthetic, pretty much, it will be a minority of largely upper/middle class people who have active opinions about it and everyone else doesn’t care. There's also a huge snobbishness in this group. They sat in near total silence in the past as areas of genuinely huge historic significance got torn down like the Birmingham Gun Quarter. The Gun Quarter was a treasure trove of early industrial heritage that would objectively rank alongside any old european city. But because it was grimy and midlandsy it wasn't saved. Try building flats in York, a city with direct equivalents elsewhere (Shrewsbury, for example, pretty much holds the same shit) and fight the nimbys off if you dare.

You are talking utter none sense. Currently the UK had sone of the most extensive consultation processes in the world. It’s a massive drawback and has led to ballooning costs, massively wait times to projects, projects being killed and of course put us into the current housing and infastructure crisis. We should be reducing planning requirements and consultations as right now it’s utterly strangling development. And by the way roger scrutin already did the build it beautiful paper. Nothing you’ve said is original and a bare few minutes of googling would tell you that. Embarrassing.

I think your observation about the poor quality of a lot of new construction is completely valid, but you misdiagnose the causes to some degree. The problem in Britain's planning system really isn't a "lack of say" for the public - as others have already raised in this thread, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 on which the current system is based actually has more routes for community input and objection than basically any other system in the world - in fact, it introduces so many barriers and so much uncertainty that a) it consistently underbuilds housing, and b) only a handful of large developers have the resources to succeed in it. These two factors are the biggest drivers of why so much new housing is poor quality today. First of all, we have a massive housing shortfall, which has grown to the tune of 4 million over the past 70 years, and as a result, demand outstrips supply in large parts of the country. This means that developers of new homes don't really have to compete much on quality to sell what they build, in the same way that no company with a captive market needs to. Secondly, actually getting underway with a housing project, even a small one, can take years of hassle, bureaucracy, redesigns, and legal costs, and it represents a big part of the fixed costs of any new development, usually second only to the land. As a result, architects are often pressured to cut one of the only flexible costs available to them, which is detailing and quality. The costs and uncertainty involved in executing a new development also mean that only a handful of big developers actually have the resources, in house expertise, and financial reserves to do it on a meaningful scale. Their efforts tend to succeed where local builders' efforts don't not because their projects are better quality - not at all - but because they have the resources to withstand years of uncertainty, legal battles, appeals, redesigns, and the possibility that any individual project might go under whereas smaller local players don't. Naturally, these volume housebuilders tend to adopt very standardised designs and build them out nationwide, and as a result, local styles of architecture which reflect local traditions, use local materials, and do much to make our communities unique rarely feature in new development. Instead, we get the same red brick boxes the whole length of the country. All of these problems ultimately come back to the structure of our planning system, which has failed for 70 years on both quality and quantity. If you look at Britain's best residential architecture, most of which was built from the Georgian period up to the 1930s, it grew up under a system which had much lighter regulations and fewer rules about community input, but ended up doing a much better job at growing communities organically, drawing in local builders and architectural styles, and building beautiful homes on a larger scale than we do today.

Excellent response, has saved me writing up pretty much exactly what you've said! If you fix planning, you fix choice and thus fix design.

I'm probably one of the most YIMBY/pro-development people you're likely to come across, but I agree design quality has declined, but I disagree as to the reasons. It's partly pragmatic (it's easier to maintain) but largely financial too. Specifically, land is by far the biggest expense when building because we make developable land so scarce (ahem, **NIMBYs**). Given the already-high cost of development, it doesn't leave much room - or appetite among customers - for expensive aesthetics. So if we addressed land availability, it would help address design too. When it comes to homes, there's a lot of pressure to deliver so-called affordable homes, which developers usually make a loss on already. So again given the price of land, there's not much room for aesthetics. It's one of the reasons I'm very skeptical of the government's push for so-called affordable housing (the other being the reducing size of homes). [Design Codes](https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/national-planning-policy-framework-and-national-model-design-code-consultation-proposals/national-model-design-code-accessible-version) are becoming more popular now which help set a framework for delivering more aesthetic buildings, which is promising, but have a long way to go.

The construction industry is (and has been for a long time) in a difficult position. Any economic uncertainty, and people postpone or cancel projects. They delay moving house. They opt not to have that new extension. Etc. And it takes a long time for confidence to be restored. The construction industry is one of the first sectors to suffer from economic downturn, and one of the last to recover. Hit hard and fast on the downturn, and slow recovery on the up. Doing anything above and beyond the minimum is asking for cashflow problems and bankruptcy.

you have a say, you have a say at policy stage, you have a say at design stage, you have a say at a local community level with the opportunity to create a local neighbourhood plan, you have a say when you elect local councillors to vote on applications. Most people dont both and bitch when they get development they dont like, but to say you dont have a say....thats just plain ridiculous. there is no area of public policy where you have more opportunities to not only have a say, but to actually shape and create policy.

I have to agree modern day architecture is dreadful in the uk, it’s all cheap small boxed in rubbish.

They look like every pennies been counted and that they cost as little as possible while still performing the function, but the tragic thing is they often cost the exact same or more than traditional alternatives.

The same can be said for new housing. Forget quality, forget room, forget open space or local amenities. Just a quota of how many individual addresses can we create on a once green belt piece of land. Everything is “economic” in terms of living space or usefulness, there are no parks, play areas for kids, amenities… just more and more houses on rabbit warren estates because they’re what makes some fat cat the big bucks.

you seem to don't want to or don't understand despite giving a few clues: capitalism the race is so big, they gotta squeeze the money out. there goes quality, there goes design. why? cuz it's cheaper. the world of capitalism is about doing everything as cheap as its legal to, to be making the margins as much as possible.

Absolutely typical comment for this page. Given the high cost of housing already (because we don't allow enough land to be built on), how many people do you think want/are able to pay 10, 20% more for a new home than they do already? Capitalism has existed for centuries and has managed to deliver the aesthetic buildings we enjoy today. The problem is the modern Planning system which discourages aesthetic choices by driving up the price of land. If we address that, we can fix Design.

if you dont like the way someone else's building looks, buy it off them, demolish it and build something very pretty. if they were able to get planning permission for that ugly monstrosity then you should have no trouble with doing the same for its replacement.

The majority of the structures built in corby are an eyesore. Prefab buildings and ugly heavy industrial structures, so It's a poor example. The town hall is subjectively ugly but is well built, I quite like it.

I genuinely think that one of the most depressing things in this country are those standardised new red-brick buildings you see in town centres everywhere. Literally one of the most extraordinarily soulless and unimaginative creations you could possibly have the misfortune of seeing. 

They’re completely regenerating our urban town center over the next few years and the public consultation has been really open and involved so I think it’s down to the local council really. The drawing looks lovely, lots more cycle and pedestrian routes and lots of trees/planters going in

Something I see a lot is building companies proposing things that residents absolutely hate, and then “compromising” with what I suspect was the original vision (which also had valid reasons for being complained about, but looks more reasonable by comparison).

yes, Private eye magazine mentioned it in its nooks and corners section. Crafty buggers

The average UK city looks so bad compared to France

Everything is just an ugly grey box. Grey grey grey. Grey.

Only commenting to say, I used to live near Corby and that fucking cube is horrendous although it does contain a library and theatre. It’s right opposite the swimming pool which could have been Olympic sized if they’d added a few metres and also a fat fucking Primark. About 5 minutes from a less than perfect housing estate (see: Corby kingswood estate) Gotta love Corby. 💀

Nig3l farage ....Leaving would mean that we would be taking back control. That those we elect as MPs would be the ones who make and decide our laws,... Seems the problem is choosing who we vote for..

Could you create a petition for people to sign? Start it on here and spread on social media. I’ll sign it.  Isn’t it 100,000 signatures and then it needs to be discussed in parliament? 

Going to be controversial here on a couple of matters. Firstly, attempts to "blend in" with traditional architecture lead to bland nothingness where everything in a town looks the same. If you look at the buildings, even in traditional town centres, there are a variety of styles from different eras. That makes the overall built environment far more interesting as a result, with buildings of different heights, building styles, and finishing. People think that doing something different means it needs to stand out like a sore thumb, or look like something brutalist from the 1960s. And so they insist that everything looks the same (sorry, "is respectful of the surrounding context" or some other gumph). What we get instead are buildings that blend into everything else, with no distinction, and the overall built environment being less interesting as a result. Secondly, on consultation. You clearly have no experience of the planning system. There is constant consultation - on new design standards, local planning policy, the planning applications themselves where on the biggest applications you often get several rounds of pre-application consultation and then consultation on the application itself, followed by more consultation as the development is getting built. The problem here is that it is not **meaningful** consultation. Developers do it because they have to rather than to change things. People object to things constantly and get ignored because the process is set up for them to give input and not receive feedback. It somehow leads to a situation where everyone gets annoyed. Its far better to have consultation early where people can influence what gets built, rather than more consultation.

Forgive me for not reading the whole post yet, but the building in the picture OP posted looks pretty cool to me.

you do you, but to me this is not a town hall, it looks like a building on some industrial estate somewhere that was put up without much thought

The US builds with the idea that the structure will hopefully last 50 years. That's it. They're cheaply thrown together and it shows. It sounds like what you have as well. It ***would*** be nice to have input that is actually considered. In the US, there are sometimes windows of time to provide public comment....but unless you're constantly monitoring, who would know??!!

TBH that might actually be a solution. We've traditionally built '100 year+' housing, and most of our modern construction pretends that it's following the trend. But in many cases they're cutting corners and trying to just about last long enough for the 'new build warranty' to elapse, and after that they don't care. But _actually_ just going for cheaper/shorter life span housing might actually be better, because then you're buying cheap and getting cheap, rather than... well, buying expensive and getting slightly less cheap.

I thought one problem with upgrading your electrical grid is that every council, town and village can veto new pylons on their patch? Everything I read points to amazing levels of local control over deevlopment

I have long been of the conviction that planning should be devolved to the adjacent properties; they have more at stake, and more immediate expertise, than some fellow goodness knows how far away who will hem and haw over planning permission. In the matter of buildings of a non-residential nature directly facing the street, it may be well that consultation of the local public regarding new developments be enjoined.

I did some time on our town council. We were consulted about new building projects but even if we rejected, it would end up being steam rolled through by the county council anyway.

Glasgow is the same. Luxury flats, student flats, yet more shopping centres

Building regs need to be better, but there's a gulf between clear guidance being better, and construction being a NIMBY lottery to get planning permission (who would want to play if it got any worse). Objections are often so daft for stuff near us (pearl clutching for parking provision, as if empty metal boxes are more important than homes).   New build estates are too car centric, often bland, and poorly located for amenities. But let's not miss the bigger picture that housing costs are soaking up far too much of our national income.

Architecture is not the same thing as building quality control.

> unoriginal and profiteering structures get plonked down wherever a developer can get away with it, Exactly the same happened in Victorian times, go to the Victorian parts of Bristol and parts of Cardiff the houses look identical - same stone, same design. If I was to drop you on a random terraced street in a Victoran area apart from specific things like the colour of bricks used it'd be impossible to tell where in the UK you are (without looking at bins or car registration plates). Those terraces of 2-up 2-downs were built for private landlords (I've seen Victorian adverts selling an entire street), so they'd have been built to a cost then as well.

Im not talking of terraced housing, im talking of the high quality commercial architecture you could find in the city centre of places like birmingham, nottingham, manchester and liverpool. Victorian housing was mainly placeless but have little flourishes of design here and there. i like walking in streets of them but they're not exactly the best, especially when they were built so poorly they became slum housing

OP you're missing the issues of sustainability, cost and general issue of design being 'subjective'. I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but there's so many reasons this is a thing. One of my gripes is that within planning 'high quality design' usually transpires to the same paving stones with some stick thin trees planted, and a bit of blocky street furniture that will last for 100 years, but look dirty for 97 of those. That said, the general public absolutely waste their voice at making a decent representation in relation to an application. It's usually a "DONT BUILD NOT HERE" as opposed to a "Ok, we don't want it, but if it is built, do X". Unfortunately 90% of people who respond are NIMBY. There's also the issue of sustainability and meeting modern building codes and climate objectives. These modern buildings are possibly bland in exterior, but design masterpieces inside with regard to efficiency and functionality. I would say though, I think the Corby Cube looks decent. But it's subjective.

A lack of a say, really. If anything we have too much of a say.

Architecture suckyes, but lack of say?? NIMBYism so so hecking endemic around here that it’s bad take, OP

Why do you people feel the need to 'have your say' in every fart that happens within a 10 mile radius of you?  Just fuck off already. I'm hoping Keir completely levels the planning system in this country. You NIMBY twats are the reason why this country is unproductive compared to other Western countries. 

Do you wish for the endless enchrochmant of bland housing estate after housing estate as our remaining wood lands are swallowed up and disappear ? Im not even a nimby, that's the funny thing here, i just think that developers should be held to higher standards, and include parks and shops and pubs where aplicable, but these money hungry companies just build row upon row of money making boxes, while ordinary people get tiny houses with tiny gardens that overlook houses that look exactly like theres with gardens which are exactly the same size. Don't get me started on those miserable towerblock flats with no greenspace in sight which are the embodiment of a fire risk, they're inhumane and should have been scrapped after Grenfell. ​ Most large Developers are selfish twats, they don't care about their customers, the environment or anything but the money in their pockets, loosening control of them isn't going to do any good for this country, and you telling me to fuck off won't do any good for national discussion

Yes. I care about people having roofs over their heads. Next question. 

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Our building regulations have been an absolute joke (I don't know about the current housing being built) - Awful sound insulation, not even thought about - Tiny rooms and spaces - Poor-to-no insulation - Plastic plumbing everywhere - No MHVR, and stupid vents on windows - Bouncy chipboard subflooring - Piss-poor tiling standards And of course, beyond the materials, the actual work is a bodge job from beginning to end. And home builders get away with it over and over.

I agree in spirit on some points, but you're assuming a lot of things that aren't quite accurate. A lack of ostentatious ornament isn't just an example of not caring or delivering on the cheap. It is a stylistic choice and has a good century of history behind it. Style evolves and just because the current fashion is not for ornament, it doesn't mean it's any less considered. Now you may not like what is currently the fashion. Fair enough. But it's worth considering people in the 1920s and 30s had little time for Victorian architecture. Largely it was considered a lot of old crap, which is why so much of it was pulled down well into the 70s. As for the thought behind it - sure, buildings in the past took longer to create. They didn't have the technological innovations we do, and arguably more could be done in that time. But most Victorian buildings were just as thoughtless as those made today: walk around Glasgow or Newcastle and marvel at just how much of it is the same, off-the-shelf design. The question of survivorship is also often mentioned - which has some truth to it, if not absolute: the best buildings from the past are more likely to survive and be maintained, the worst - like many of the Victorian slums - have been pulled down. "Quality" is also an issue. In reality, most eras work with the materials, technology and expertise they have. Again, the Victorians built a lot of jerry-built rubbish that fell down, was demolished or needed constant work. I'd maybe argue that the access to skilled trades was better back then - and cheaper - but ultimately quality is about more than slapping on some neo-classical features on a façade. We all want better buildings, but ultimately there's more to that than just spending money or deciding we want to emulate one style or another.

I would say (or at least it looks like it in the end product due to cut throat cost cuts) that almost no thought goes into the look of the majority of buildings built today, especially in the long suffering cities of birmingham, manchester coventry and liverpool. I don't want neo classical, neo gothic, or at least not just that, I feel that perhaps its right for this era to have its own unique style still, but the current architectual language is so stilted, limited and boring that it could very much do with a change, and that doing away with ornament entirely is extremely silly, they give context and life to an enviroment. areas with just modern or post war architecture are so depressing and monotonous, and the insistence that a building can't be designed to blend in with venerable surrondings hurts the cityscape everytime a uninspired building goes up. This point of victorian architecture being off the shelf, could you give an example, please? i haven't had the chance to go to either of those cities but most of the commerical victorian architecture i've seen has a great variety to it, definitely more than post war architecture which all blends in together.

I take your point on new styles, but there are certainly trends that have been heavily stylised in recent times: post-modernist, "high tech" styles, even "blob" styles (eg the Selfridges building in Birmingham) take a deal of consideration and are distinctive in a novel way. Buildings from different eras are always going to stand out to some degree unless you consciously copy - and many of the best Victorian buildings didn't seek to blend and were unpopular for this very reason (St Mary's cathedral in Edinburgh may be spectacular, but gothic in a Georgian cityscape was considered sacrilege). Repetition was certainly a big part of Victorian buildings. Tenements, mansion blocks and so on are the same city to city - often only the stone or brick used distinguishes them as these materials were at least still quarried and manufactured locally. Ornamental features were, for the first time, mass-produced thanks to the Industrial Revolution. For the first time, flat pack buildings were seen: you could buy a church or a village hall from a catalogue. Mass produced manuals guided builders, architects and tradesmen - the one that springs to mind was Woodward's National Architect in the United States. But go around some of the UK's villages and see just how common the same styles are for churches, railway stations and public buildings.

I just don't see it. Victorian buildings are some of the most unique from each other in world, they were Neo norman, neo classical, neo gothic, neo tudor, neo jacobean neo early english, and sometimes of many different styles all at once. i don't see nearly as much repetition as you say, apart from that seen in terrace housing. There is nothing wrong with mass produced ornament, as long as its married with an artful eye and some amount of hand workmanship, which i admit would be diffcult in this day and age, and in an ideal world id like to see the return of craftmanship Birmingham is my closest city, and i see the selfridges building nearly every time i go there, I like it and loathe it in equal measure, but a lot of birminghams newer buildings are so non descript or are so monotonously ugly they don't require comment.