A Walk Around Waterside Grange, a New Housing Development Near the Canal

 

 

 

Waterside Grange is a new housing development built on a strip of land directly adjacent to the canal. Signs near the entrance trump that government‘s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is available and that the scheme includes ‘affordable homes’ as well as shared ownership schemes.

 

 

The development is quite densely built, with much of the housing having three to five storeys, and not much area other than car parking space in between them. This small patch of green (above) with a few trees planted on it is the closest thing to a communal space, although in reality it is simply the leftover ground in between two sides of car park spaces. There are no benches or seats anywhere, but if the trees grow to a respectable height and are allowed to mature, then it might become something of a focal point in the future; if they don’t then, well, there’s somewhere for the dog to go.

 

 

 

(Above) Bad habits creep into the architectural design of this new housing development: a surfeit of red brick, tired vernacular references and hints of the unsubtle, defensive design of council estates. Here, a cheerless red-brick stretcher-bond wall replaces what would have been a wooden garden fence or verdant hedge in a more aspirational design. Contrary to popular speculation, brick walls don’t make for better security; ironically, thanks to their sturdiness they can be scaled much more easily in a way that a flimsy wooden garden fence can’t. The two-tone colour scheme of white weatherboarding and blue panelling on red brick, repeated across much of the development, seems lazy and uninspired in what is ostensibly a step-up from the ‘affordable’ developments of the past, referencing a boring, overused vernacular that would best left in the sixties where it belongs; it’s a shame that the development should wear its ‘affordability’ so clearly on it sleeve.

 

 

Overuse of tired vernacular clichés betray a kind of disinterested cheapness in the design of this affordable housing development: a forest of gables assaults the resident at every angle, from every angle. While the bad habits of rigid rectilinear planning have been avoided, the high density of the development gives it a slightly clustered, cluttered feel, with the sight of so many gables and similar features repeated so often in a small space seeming absurd at first, then boring, then annoying. It feels like British domestic house design simply gave up some time ago, and all we are left with is lacklustre photocopies of yesterday’s textbooks.

 

 

Tall buildings, narrow streets and a lack of front garden/buffer areas give the streets here a slight canyon-feel, a close-packed intimacy between neighbours that is unlikely to blossom into much of a community identity without communal or focal areas and that has been derived from the desire to put in as much housing as possible. Like all modern housing developments there are no corner shops, benches or real public garden space to commune in, and barely even anywhere leftover to park an ice-cream van.

 

 

This row of mostly detached houses does not face into the centre of the development as most of the rest of the buildings here do, instead they look outwards and onto the scenic canal that Waterside Grange is built next to. Differing brick-stock, inset upper-level and balcony, a smidgen of front garden and brown wood panelling channelling Scandinavian design lend them a chic smartness not found in the rest of the estate, and even the predictable gables seem fresher with the wide eaves, the panelling extending all the way up and a warmer tile style for the roof.

But squeezed in like sardines, the sides of the houses are lost to each other and to the sunlight, which sadly approaches from the wrong angle to help the North-facing fronts of these houses; perhaps the agreeable view of the canal makes up for this.

That said, these are still the pick of the bunch in this development. There is a definite step up in design (even if this row continues the maximum-density mantra by packing in as many as possible without breathing space) which makes me wonder if these are included as ‘affordable homes’ in the development, or has the bettered design been reserved for full market-rate sales only? Why do none of the neighbouring boring, generic red-brick ’n’ white weatherboarding (and almost certainly ‘affordable’) houses face the canal as these do, are they not worthy of the view too?

 

 

The red-brick neo-Georgian townhouse style reaches its most reduced and minimalist form. Usually associated with 30s council houses, the style is basic, familiar, competent and of course dull; it’s the digestive biscuit of domestic architecture (no, not the chocolate ones). With a desire for a communal area but no actual space devoted as such the neighbourhood kids play on the street, reclaiming the road from the cars (made possible by not having any ‘through’ traffic and by the development having enough corners to make fast-moving vehicles unlikely).

 

 

So all in all a fairly decent development, but with a few let-downs--on one hand some interesting housing at one edge and a cosy street arrangement, but a lack of communal space, over-density and a majority of disappointingly-designed buildings on the other. The development does well to combine family houses with apartments to bring some social diversity to the neighbourhood, but with so much of it being clearly limited in design to conform to the dismissive, stingy attitude to affordable housing the development as a whole struggles to escape its imposed mediocrity.

 

There are several building types on offer here and some are smart and competent, but many regurgitate lazy habits from the past, echoing decades of architecture reflecting social limitation. Traditionally, at the bottom we have the punitively-designed and visually grim social housing, at the top the optimistically-designed and considerately-approached private/speculative housing; Waterside Grange falls awkwardly in between, in that large middle band of aesthetically-capped better-than-social-but-still-not-great ‘affordable home/help to buy’ class. If people in social housing are supposed to deserve nothing, and people at the top everything, then those in the middle are deemed to deserve… a bit, but not too much; the inhabitants are enticed and cherished as buyers but disdained as those who still need economic assistance, and as always the architecture reflects this.