AA Director Ingrid Schroder was published on the Financial Times this month, writing on the UK Government target for 1.5 million new homes. In the article titled Before we build 1.5mn homes, we need to take a long hard look at what we already have Schroder explains the educational draw that this need for new housing has urged in architecture schools, as students are asked to question how, where and who will build this new housing without necessarily having wider discussions on the existing housing stock.

Schroder quotes the Government’s 2024 tables which showed that ‘England alone had more than 700,000 “vacant dwellings” …The character of their vacancy is hugely varied, as is the viability of these properties, either in quality or location. Around 37 per cent – some 265,061 – are empty long-term. And they aren’t all in remote locations; more than 38,000 are in London boroughs; 1,700 in Manchester.’ Meanwhile, ‘1.3mn households were on the social housing wait-list in England’ in March 2024.

In the context of global carbon emissions, Schroder explains the intensive impacts that building this amount of new housing will have, noting ‘while we can’t simply shoehorn households into vacant properties, we can take a hard look at the intelligent reuse of what we already have.’ These observations are tied in with ones that address how we want to live and how we make homes which suit those that live in them. Touching on permitted development and adaptive reuse, Schroder discusses how architects can have a valuable role in ‘careful conversion, adaptation and reuse’ to design places where ‘people actually want to live’, arguing that in a ‘broader enthusiasm for make do and mend we seem to have forgotten what’s worth mending and risk producing a great deal more that isn’t.’

Read the article here.

Image: Screenshot of article by Ingrid Schroder, Before we build 1.5mn homes, we need to take a long hard look at what we already have, in the Financial Times, 16 February 2025.­ Photograph: Millennium Images, UK/Zoe Barker (cropped).