G

Head of Faculty | Exploring AI in education | Championing formative assessment | Working on increasing challenge for all

[G @self_regulated]

@JonKenna0000000 Thanks!!

[G @self_regulated]

@oldpicposter Love Laurel’s chippy in this photo

[G @self_regulated]

@Kwik_Fit @ContiUK Table tennis is my favourite game but the kids would love the air hockey! ❤️

[G @self_regulated]

@ai_gezgini It’s mostly ok but some geographical inaccuracies

[G @self_regulated]

@ai_gezgini What it made for Liverpool

[Resolution Foundation @resfoundation]

How many pints of Guinness does an hour’s work buy you?

Well, it depends where you live.

Check out our Chart of the week ⤵️ https://t.co/jDCi9VrYC1

[Despotic Inroad @DespoticInroad]

One reason why Liverpool's urban core (pictured in Ant's diagram) isn't very dense is because of the Militant Tendency's housebuilding programme in the 1980s.

Unlike the municipal socialist New Left in other local authorities, Merseyside's old-fashioned factory-floor Trotskyists adopted a "mono-maniacal" housebuilding obsession, pursuing what they thought were the working class's more conservative tastes in architecture.

Brutalism, or high-concept design inspired by Soviet/continental modernism, was ditched in favour of semi-detached houses & bungalows with private driveways/front & back gardens, and no communal spaces. Denser inner-city tenements & high rises were demolished to make way for ultra-traditional "Hatton Houses", with very suburban-looking sprawling estates built right in the shadow of towering city-centre landmarks like the Anglican Cathedral (see below) & near the waterfront North & South of town.

As a result, many of the prime commercial/tourist districts border residential areas built by the local authority that feel incongrous so close to the centre – a doughnut ring of municipal conservative-socialist suburbia boxing in the real metropole.
https://t.co/sAwRetIloT

[Chris Lesiter @chrislesiter]

@AntBreach Are the very high public housing requirements in London counterproductive? And if all proposals meet or exceed the threshold, why aren't they all assessed in the order of submission? I think a nationally consistent threshold would be worth considering.

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

P.S. By contrast, smaller cities like Bristol sometimes have a higher density than the biggest cities like Manchester because they lack this post-war collar.

They kept their pre-war Victorian/Edwardian neighbourhoods which are by British standards relatively high density:

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

(for our Croydon rec see our report in February) https://t.co/caJ3ZjmAmD

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

Metro Mayors should:

Copy best bits of London's framework (allow density in specific neighbourhoods, especially near stations)

Make use of new powers in English Devo Bill

Push councils to implement Croydon-style suburban densification policies

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

National Government should:

Prioritise urban core postwar neighbourhoods for densification

Rewrite planning policy to recognise urban cores

Reform regs to improve viability of brownfield development

Continue to make planning more rules-based + spatial in journey to zoning

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

So how do we solve this? The report goes into more detail on how policy is currently grappling with these problems and what some of the specific issues are, for those who are interested. But in terms of policy recs:

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

Here's what it looks like in practice. Places close to city centres often have suburban-style built forms, while people who live in places further away have less space *and* longer commutes.

This damages the public transport networks and means big cities punch below their weight

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

We can plot these post-war low density neighbourhoods on maps of Liverpool and Manchester in blue.

The number of people who can benefit from great accessibility to these booming city centres is fundamentally capped by these collars of low density post-war housing stock.

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

The answer is the postwar neighbourhoods in the big cities have much lower densities than pre-war housing stock in similar locations. These are a very large share of neighbourhoods 1-3km from city centres.

This is most stark in the biggest cities e.g. Manchester, Birmingham

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

This presents a problem as 20th Century housebuilding in urban cores was lower density than Victorian and modern stuff.

This was perhaps fine in the 1930s when the cities were growing outwards - but what does this imply for the postwar slum clearances deep in the inner city?

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

If we break this down, we can see that 2/3 of all British urban neighbourhoods have near-zero buildings from after 1995 - most of every city is "frozen".

Outer suburbs have more postwar and 1930s stuff, but there's lots of postwar stuff in urban cores (inner cities) too.

[Ant Breach @AntBreach]

If we use our residential data data from our Flat Britain report last year and combine it with data on the age of building stock, we can identify the density of different types of built form (e.g. Victorian terraces vs modern flats) https://t.co/HiSMIga49x