by Theodores | 2025-11-29 11:05:35+00:00
I am not sure that London is the example needed for the topic, in part due to what happened in 1666, which was when the 'great fire' decimated the city, leading to some reforms such as requiring buildings to be built from anything but wood and for them to have parapets to prevent a burning roof setting fire to an adjacent building. Coupled with this was a height restriction, for the Fire Brigade, not to 'preserve views of St Pauls'.

In America, if the city burns to the ground, they just get on with it, they aren't 'institutionally traumatised' for centuries, but the Great Fire cast a long shadow over history and building codes, which restricted the density of the housing.

Also important but not discussed in the article, is the matter of building materials. When Sir Christopher Wren was redesigning London after the fire, he could not specify glass and steel since that wasn't around back then (well, glass existed but the Pilkington process to make flat glass hadn't been devised yet).

Most British towns can be dated by their building materials, starting with the original buildings built from stone from the local quarry. The type of stone found locally determines what these buildings are like, so you might have limestone, as in Cotswold stone, with a creamy colour, or, you might have nice red stone, for example, in the Welsh Borderlands.

Next came the canals, and with it things like Welsh slate and iron. Then the trains came along, bringing bricks and steel with it. Then there are modern times when you can have marble from Italy and whatever else flaunts wealth (or is cheapest).

Putting it all together, familiarity with the materials and where they are from enables the relative age of parts of a British town to be identified.

Needless to say, all roads lead to somewhere, in the UK it is London, where so much has changed that it is not so easy to see the 'onion layers' of materials used in the city as it has grown, mostly because London is more like hundreds of villages that merged together as they all grew. Plus, London is always under constant redevelopment.

The green belt is a relatively recent development, dating back only a century ago, when the smog situation in London meant that kids had rickets due to lack of sun. Pea-soupers made it necessary for there to be some escape to the countryside. Interestingly, trams were what you needed to get around in that era because smog was like the worst fog imaginable, making it impossible to get from A to B on a vehicle that was not on rails.

Also not in the article is how the railways had a sideline in building towns for their railways to serve. The low density suburbs were once far from London, therefore requiring the train, and the dream was to escape the city with the smog for these new 'garden cities'. Had they built vast sky scrapers in (say) Hemel Hempstead, instead of actual houses then you would not have the same appeal.

If you are in the UK and interested in seeing development patterns, one gem is the Lever estate on the Wirral, built to serve Liverpool's industry on the Mersey River, which was where the Lever Brothers operated. They were Quaker types and, on their worker estates, they built wonderful parks, libraries and art galleries. The Lever estate has this amazing art gallery in the middle of it, with artwork far better than anything you would expect to find anywhere outside the big European capitals.

The whole thing with the Quakers was a 'war on slavery' that was won in 1807 and 1833-1838, with the idea being that machines would replace slaves. They wanted their workers to be anything but slaves. Despite being few in number, they had many sectors of industry sewn up, notably confectionary and soap. Places such as the Lever Estate 'set the standard' for those wanting more than slums.

Finally, we did have the high rises of the 1960s. They didn't work out as they lacked community, leading to crime and a general downward spiral. Glasgow, once the second city of the empire, was notable for these, however, most of them had to come down, for lower density housing estates to be built elsewhere, further up or down the Clyde.

I am not sure the article makes sense in the British context, it reads more like examples picked to suit a hypothesis. I also would have liked it if the author had explained why inflation came in to play from 1914. Note that after WW1, the UK lost all of its skilled tradesmen because someone decided that they were needed for cannon fodder. This was a tragedy, not just for them and their families, but also for the quality of housing and what was possible after WW1.

Mortgages also need to be in the picture, in feudal times there was no market in property, however, the mortgage came into being and that changed how development happened in a big way. This too affected how dense housing would be.