Thames Gateway housing must be creative

Companies looking to invest in providing accommodation as part of the Thames Gateway development will need to stop being obsessed about fire regulations and start creating flexible design solutions and more attractive places to live if they want to be successful in winning work.

That is the view of Eric Sorenson, chief executive of the Thames Gateway London Partnership, who told delegates at Civils 2006 that constructors of flatted buildings in the UK were "missing important lessons" on providing the right mix of living accommodation.

He also called on developers to think more about a variation of dwellings rather than making assumptions that non-families want to live in flats and emphasised the need for town centre intensification if they want to be successful in securing work in the area.

"In Northern Europe, the high-rise buildings are much bigger, have larger balconies and better managed communal space around them," he said. "They also tend to be less obsessed with fire regulations, which leads to a lot of partitioning in this country, leading to issues over space.

"This is no less of an issue in these countries, but in their regulations they are less obsessed with partitions in structures, which give a much better feeling of space. Our building form on flats misses an awful lot of important lessons.

"It is crude to suggest that families only want to live in houses and non-families want to live in flats. If we are going to build flatted buildings we need to know what sort of construction suits the families.

"We don't want to be inflexible with small balconies, poor communal spaces and flats that have become pokier than were first anticipated due to departmentalism."

[Contract Journal, 06  December 2006, p 4]