LoginSubscribe to Alerts

How the creation of homes has changed over the last 100 years... -  #NHW17

Posted 18 May 2017 by Keith Osborne

As part of New Homes Week this year (#NHW17) we look at how the creation of new homes has changed over the last 100 years...

Today is the fourth day of New Homes Week (#NHW17) and to mark ‘Throwback Thursday’ the WhatHouse? team, with help from the National House Building Council (NHBC), takes a look at how the building of new homes in Britain has changed dramatically over the last century.

The quality of new homes has improved so dramatically over the last 100 years that it may be difficult to comprehend the typical picture of housing in the cities, towns and villages of a nation that had won the First World War. Poor sanitation and overcrowded housing had led to a low life expectancy and widespread, long-term poverty among many of those who had signed up to serve in the forces during that conflict. There was a determination to make considerable improvements to new housing, public health and wellbeing, an ambition for ‘Homes for Heroes’, which was made government policy via the Tudor Walters Proposals to the Addison Act of 1919.

This act of parliament made councils responsible for building social housing with government subsidies, with minimum standards for the density of homes and the number and size of rooms, daylight access and sanitation. Small-scale terracing and semi-detached properties were to take over from the back-to-backs and tenements of the 19th century, with indoor toilets, basic kitchens and separate dining/living rooms the norm. Cheap land saw generous plot sizes and a low density of construction that still appeals to many buyers of these period homes today.

Houses in Letchworth Welwyn Garden City, England’s second garden city, was started in the 1920s, following pioneering Letchworth around 20 years earlier. The Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE, now named the Campaign to Protect Rural England) was founded in 1926 to campaign against uncontrolled urban sprawl, a result of people moving out of cities to suburbs and satellite towns. A registration scheme for housebuilders was set up in the mid-1930s to provide buyers with some security about the quality of new homes they might expect.

By 1939, one in ten homes were council properties while in the private homes market, the proportion of those who owned or were financing their property rose from around 10% before the outbreak of WWI to around 25% before the start of WW2, when housebuilding more or less ground to a halt. Over six years, half-a-million homes in Britain were destroyed or became uninhabitable.

Despite the financial cost of winning WW2, there was consensus across political parties in the post-war period to ‘win the peace’ through considerable reconstruction. New standards for homes were released in 1944, then again in 1949. A wave of New Towns was approved, such as Stevenage, Basildon, East Kilbride, Bracknell and Corby, and by 1954, housebuilding had soared to 354,000 new homes annually, including a significant proportion of ‘pre-fabs’, many of which were lived in well beyond their initial short-term expectations.

​Following a few years of declining numbers, 1968 saw the highest-ever construction level of new homes, with 425,830 registered. This year also saw homeownership cross the 50% threshold for the first time. This was a decade that saw the start of high-rise building – something of a false start, as many were quickly recognised as being poorly planned and of dubious quality – as well as the introduction of new building regulations in Scotland then England and another collection of New Towns approved, including Milton Keynes, Telford and Warrington.

The various economic and political crises of the 1970s experienced in the UK led to a steady demise of new homes building throughout this decade, falling below 200,000 for the first time in many years in the early 1980s.

‘Right to buy’ was hard to ignore in this period, as a key part of Margaret Thatcher’s policies, and it saw thousands of council-owned properties sold at discounted prices to their tenants and the councils prevented by law from funding replacements. By the end of the 1990s, some 1.9m council homes had been sold through this scheme.

House price inflationHouse price inflation took off in the 1980s, reaching 32% in 1988, shortly before another recession that saw thousands of homeowners in ‘negative equity’, with mortgage debts greater than the decreased value of their home. High interest rates on these debts saw many homes repossessed over the next few years, with 75,000 relinquished to lenders in 1992 alone.

By 1995, homeownership had reach 67% nationally and new homes were being built to yet higher standards, with the faults of many homes built in the previous 20 or 30 years leading to marked improvements to aspects such as fire resistance and safety in glass specification and gas supply, among others.

Price inflation has reduced the proportion of the population that could afford to buy a home from 47% in the late 1980s to 37% in 2002. In the first ten years of this century, ambitions and standards in housebuilding rose once again, with energy performance and environmental impact in focus in particular, but 2010 saw the lowest number of new homes built since 1945 (102,830), fewer than were built 135 years previously.

In 2012, the National Planning Policy Framework was launched to plan the delivery of ‘sustainable homes’ that focused strongly on the environmental impact of construction and the energy levels required to run, and by 2016, the energy spend on new homes was calculated by the Zero Carbon Hub as being a fraction of that on a comparable Victorian home – for example, a three-bedroom semi-detached home from 2016 might cost £450 per year to run, compared to £1,670 for its peer from the 19th century.

This year, the NHBC announced that the number of new-build homes being registered in the first quarter was the highest for a decade – 42,470 being a 17% increase on the same period in 2016 and indicating that the widely shared belief that Britain needs to build significantly more homes is starting to see some results.

Stewart Baseley, executive chairman of the Home Builders Federation, says: “For various reasons we have been undersupplying new homes in this country for decades. The planning system has been a constraint and has simply not provided enough land for the number of homes required. The financial crash of 2008 saw house building levels fall further but in recent years output has increased significantly. Over the years builders have incorporated new designs and building techniques to ensure new homes today compare to those built anywhere in the world. Today’s new home are built to ever-more exacting standards, are much more energy efficient, and thus cheaper to run, than those built in previous decades.”


Read the full NHBC report on the modern history of new homes here

Click here to search for some of the UK’s best new homes for sale right now.


Sign up for email alertsGet the latest properties and updates sent directly to your inbox daily, weekly or immediately you are in control.
Subscribe to Alerts
Search news and advice

Click here to see your activities