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.

 

 

 

 

 

New Apartment Building, Buckingham Gardens

 

 

 

New apartment building, Buckingham Gardens

 

The sun shines on a new development: this multi-storey residential apartment block was recently completed and replaces a forgettable four-storey office building. The colour scheme is bronze, beige and grey (according to the planning application specs the horizontal stripes are of ‘zinc or anodised metal’) and comprises six storeys. Nearly everybody gets a balcony, constructed of slightly ill-fitting-looking panels and with the underside left exposed; also, the sides of the balconies don’t quite reach the walls, being about six inches removed. Perhaps this was another lazy attempt at the deconstructed structural expressionist style that’s oh-so-vogue at the moment, but it comes across as simply shoddy and cynical– the building looks jerry-built and unfinished. It was with a surprised expression that friendly-bombs first walked past and saw lights on and people inside, and thought “Really? That’s it? That’s finished?”.

 

Another annoying quirk that is cropping up on modern architects’ ticksheets is the irregular arrangement of windows, or in this case balconies. Perhaps the original thinking was that it would look cute or naughty to have a random positioning of what are usually regular, symmetrical features, but it certainly doesn’t look great here, with an undecided, half-hearted deployment of strict spacing and alignment on the sides but baffling irregularity in the centre; the fact that there appears to be two balconies missing just makes it worse, giving it a kind of amateurish, dodgy third world bodge-job appearance, the kind of thing you see in dire buildings in Russia or China built by the constructively challenged, complete with lampposts in front of windows, stairs that don’t align with entrances, doors that open out on the third floor etc, like these hilarious examples I found online:

 

 

We must locate these geniuses. A job in modern British architecture awaits!

 

 

 

 

Another shot of the new apartment building on the corner of Church Street and Herschel Street. Overall it has a half-finished, temporary feel to it, like a kind of modern pre-fab that hasn’t been built to last.

 

Here the humble fire escape has been turned into a major structural feature of the building– another modern cliché that fails to fool anyone as original anymore. Bafflingly, it is enclosed in a kind of metal mesh, that surely fails as shelter and has presumably been used to make the feature knowingly bland and utilitarian– the same design conceit that deliberately seeks out ugly clothing and thick-framed ‘nerd’ glasses as a kind of sophomoric statement against the mainstream. Fun fact: half the people who wear ‘nerd’ glasses don’t even need them.

 

 Additional: It is at least good to see some of Slough’s interminable office buildings being redeveloped for residential use, even if it is for the predictable ‘luxury flats’ (the luxury’s on the inside, presumably)– there’s a 2-bed currently listed for a paltry £289k, if you’re interested. For a long time it was considered sacrilege for Slough to lose an office even when they were cropping up on every corner; even the planning application for this building wailed that “whilst the loss of relatively modern office accommodation in a central location is regrettable the prospect of it being reused for that use is unlikely in the near future. As the location and immediate surroundings are reasonable for flatted residential accommodation the principle of the loss of the office to residential use is acceptable.” Gee, there might be a housing crisis at the moment, but won’t somebody please think about the offices?!

 

 

Derelict Victorian house in foreground, new multi-storey apartment block in background, taken from Mill Street

 

Grey is never a good colour for buildings in Slough, and this picture shows why. So many modern architects assume bright blue skies will forever illuminate their works as it does in their CGI brochures, but reality rarely obliges, at least in Slough. Also, it’s another consequence of developers not fully considering the surrounding environment of their projects, either meteorologically or architecturally, with the 15-storey ‘Lexington’ building in the background being about as sympathetic as an abattoir to the local skyline.

 

We also get an apt visual juxtaposition of the two Sloughs that are emerging (as discussed in the last few posts): the grounded, low-rise low-class population in urgent need of a new set of clothes and a makeover, and the affluent outsiders, invited in to occupy tall buildings full of luxury apartments at night, commuting to the capital from the nearby station by day, and never threatening to actually become a part of Slough’s reality.

 

 

PS: That house looks like it’s actually been hit by a friendly bomb or two!

 

New 'West Central' Apartments, Stoke Gardens

 

 

‘West Central’ development, seen from Stoke Gardens

 

Remember the scaffolded development in this post? Well, this is what hatched: a pair of joined six-storey cuboids containing apartments of varying size and  going under the suitably generic name ‘West Central’. The building was erected by Barratt Homes, who in the past earned a reputation for bland, uninspired, low-quality housing; this development clearly seeks to be a more modern, chic approach to er, bland, uninspired housing.

 

Echoes of the 60’s tower blocks we looked at in the last few posts are clear (even if these aren't as tall): flat roofs, geometric design, minimalist colour scheme, rendered finish. Variation in window size and subtle asymmetry prevent it from being too stultifying, although the awkwardly-included, poorly-positioned and stingily-proportioned little oriel windows poking out of the side give the development a rather cold, almost institutional feel– oriel windows are meant to be fun, not sharp, mean and intimidating. Some good weather above works well with the colour scheme in this shot, but the building is not so fortunate when Slough’s usual drab climate takes over.

 

So, nothing to write home about; another dull design and another instance of high-density developments being squeezed into the central ward of Slough. Two-bed flats were advertised online at £236k, with one-bed flats being listed at around £170k in November of last year; even at these eye-watering prices I’m sure every last inch will be snapped up, such is the demand in Slough at the moment– dull homes and desperation get on like a Barratt house on fire.

 

 

‘West Central’ development as seen from Grays Road.

 

Following from the last post, here’s the new West Central block development as it appears as part of the neighbourhood. Here’s a fun game: compare this view with the one in this post. In that picture, Tower House, a minimalist multi-storey cuboid, looms over its low-rise neighbours and is scheduled for demolition, finally erasing the last traces of the unpopular 1960s experiment with high-rise high-density housing; meanwhile, the brand, spanking new West Central, a minimalist multi-storey cuboid, er, looms over its low-rise neighbours and heralds the first chapter of a brave new world that we’ve, er, seen before and rejected. Like a game of whack-a-mole the moment one goes down another pops up somewhere else, identical to the last, and the town’s housing policy seems ever more absurd.

 

Modern energy-efficient housing complex, corner of Spackman’s Way and High St Chalvey.

 

Industrial functionalism is referenced in the sawtooth roof, a feature of old factories that employed the design to stop direct sunlight from skylights overheating products on the factory floor. At first glance this would appear to be just another modern architectural skeuomorph– an archaic design feature that no longer has any practical use but is retained for aesthetic reasons– but in this case, the feature is also used as a way of introducing more daylight and saving energy. A hearty dose of nostalgia goes into the mix too, as such roofs were common in buildings from the first half of the 20th century and form part of our industrial imagination of the past. The complex is arranged in short terraces which continue the reference by repeating the roof as you go along, except in this case each ‘tooth’ of the roof corresponds to a single, separate housing unit.

The complex is arranged in a U-shape around a communal garden space and is fenced around the perimeter (rather over-enthusiastically in the section pictured above, with both hedge and railings). Perhaps this desire for exclusivity stems from the buildings’ proud description as 'Zero carbon homes with a variety of renewable energy solutions’; ironically, the complex is situated yards away from Chalvey dump, sorry 'Chalvey Household Waste Recycling Centre’, which, er, offers 'renewable energy solutions’ of its own. Still, I’m sure it smelt good on the blueprint. 

 

New multi-storey residential housing complex on Windsor Rd, on the corner of Chalvey Rd East– great if you love living by a main road! This was one of the first of a new generation of ‘mountain blocks’ that has been built in Slough in a hurried answer to its housing shortage: massive, looming, multi-storey buildings characterised by minimal variation in unit style, rather hostile looking steel balconies that do not offer much space, unimaginative and unvariating window size and distribution, minimal breathing space for the pedestrian passer-by and a general lack of warmth in design. The accusation of it being a 'tower block’ has been averted by the use of asymmetry, which in the above case saves the building from being too foreboding; however, its sheer bulk, particularly in relation to other buildings nearby, makes it unwelcomingly imposing– certainly it dominates the view looking up Windsor Rd from lower down the hill. Some effort has at least been made to incorporate the shape of the rounded corner, and the retention of trees of varying types provides a bit of a fig-leaf, although with the building’s sheer size they look more like shrubs outside a house. The end result is more mountain range than building, with the effect of dwarfing and barricading the neighbour, whose local skyline it now defines.   

Previously the site was occupied by a fairly stately if rather drab Victorian building called Denmark House, which in later years was used for offices by the District Council. The corner was also likely the location for the Arbour Hill Pond, which was used as a watering-spot for horses on their way through to what was then the sleepy village of Chalvey. As you can see the curved Victorian wall around the perimeter still remains, possibly rebuilt in stretches, but with the original character retained.