Council Housing Can Work: Lessons from East Barnwell John Mason, Associate, Carter Jonas Image Credits: BPTW Not since the 1970s has Britain delivered more than 350,000 new homes a year – the level of housebuilding now targeted by government. What is sometimes forgotten is not only how that figure was achieved, but what kind of places were created in the process. Around 200,000 homes were delivered annually by the private sector, broadly consistent with what the market continues to produce today. The remaining 150,000 were built by councils. Many of these programmes were ambitious but didn’t always understand the lives of the people who were to inhabit and use them. Today, as cities such as Cambridge grapple with acute housing pressures, the question is not simply whether councils can once again build at scale, but whether they can do so in a way that delivers high-quality places. A major council-led regeneration project in the Barnwell area of east Cambridge suggests that they can: provided housing delivery is conceived as an exercise in placemaking rather than numbers alone. Barnwell’s local centre has been earmarked for regeneration since the 2006 Local Plan. For many years, however, progress was limited. While the issues … Continue reading East Barnwell: A New Civic Blueprint