This is the second ‘Barrattification of Britain’ article which set HemingwayDesign off on its now two-decade long urban design and housing adventure. It was the Barratification and Wimpeyfication of Britain tirades that resulted in Wayne Hemingway being asked to appear on Newsnight in a debate with national housebuilders. Immediately after that we were approached by […]

On Covid and the future of cities When I moved to London in 1979 the population was 6.75 million. England’s capital city had experienced a decline from 8.9 million over 4 decades (see graph here). A heady cocktail of air pollution (there was even a song called A Foggy Day (In London Town), by Gershwin […]

A response to Boris Johnson’s “Build Build Build” mantra My (increasingly bushy) eyebrows raised somewhat last week when Boris Johnson stood in front of his podium with his latest three worder “build, build, build” and his promise to cut red tape around infrastructure – and raised even further when the chancellor promised to cut stamp […]

Did you know that twice as much land in the UK is given to golf courses as to housing? Wayne went on Wake Up To Money on BBC Radio 5 Live in July 2019 to talk about the state of housing in Britain, and what we can do to improve communities in the future. You […]

Until now, this would’ve been met with cries of ‘bang goes the neighbourhood’. Charity shops popping up on high streets have long been seen as a sign of a town’s demise – sitting alongside pound shops, greasy takeaways and long-empty units who’s previous owners were victims of austerity, or Brexit, or universal credit, or whatever […]

The UK builds some of the smallest homes in Europe and this greed must be stopped in its tracks. The average house has lost 20% of its space since the 1970s as austerity warps planning processes and greed rules the market. On any given week, if you can bear to look, you’ll see dispiriting news […]

The opportunity to design a housing development in Blackburn was something that energised Gerardine and Wayne. I often get asked for my career highlight and my answer for the past decade or so has been The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead, our first housing development. It was one of those rare projects that, despite the […]

We have always called for the housing industry to not be dominated by the large / mega-scaled housebuilders like Taylor Wimpey, Barratts and Persimmon.  The housing crash of 2008 devastated the small and medium sized housebuilding sector resulting in today just 26% of new homes being built by this part of the housebuilding industry as […]

Improving equality and life chances for the younger generations have always been hugely important to us. Growing up in the 60s and the 70s my guess is that most young people in normal working class communities like the ones Gerardine and I came from in North East Lancashire had the belief that if they rolled […]

Brexit and building the right kind of homes get an airing here. Its 7 am and I have just come back from running with my dog Minnie in my local London park and am feeling conflicted. Over the past few months the numbers of rough sleepers in the park has increased substantially. They are not […]

You don’t make change by taking the easy route. Having been following the furore surrounding the planned Garden Bridge over the Thames and it’s got me wondering. At HemingwayDesign are we suckers for projects that have conjecture surrounding them or is it that the most impactful projects are often immersed in significant difficulties? When I […]

A young Kate Moss and low cost housing all in one blog. A couple of weeks ago we posted the above photo on the HemingwayDesign Facebook page of a housing development, The Bridge Dartford that we led the design and master planning of a decade or so ago. The comment posted by user Paul Read […]

Questioning planning orthodoxy is what we do and have always done.  Most housing developments we work on at HemingwayDesign have a “mixed use” element. “Mixed use”, in simple terms, means “a development that blends a combination of residential and commercial, cultural, leisure services, institutional, or industrial uses”. In terms of good urban design practice, in […]

Our appreciation of the history of council housing and its value to society. In 2014 I was reminded of my first Blackburn home by Sarah Thompson who emailed me with her proposal for an interiors book about ex-council houses. When someone emails you with an idea for a book about how a new generation are […]

We started 2016 campaigning as we always do. The front page headline on the New Year’s Eve edition of the Guardian last week was:“Revealed: house builders sitting on 600,000 plots of land.“ This is part of the sorry UK house building situation that has been a contributing factor to housing un-affordability and shortages for the […]

Crap architects get a mouthful in this blog from 2015. When it comes to working out the value of the creative industries, much to the chagrin of some architects, the value of the work coming out of architectural practices is not included. My hobby is running (often with my dog Minnie) and when I am […]

A decade and a half after we started to bemoan the state of new build housing in the UK, there is still a need to be noisy on this subject matter. It’s over 15 years ago since I coined the phrase the “Wimpeyfication and Barrattification of Britain” and started to publically criticise Britain’s mass housebuilding industry for […]

We’ll take any chance to pop back to one of our favourite projects. I popped into our first housing development The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead in early October 2015, almost 15 years after we first started to design it. Gerardine and I have often wondered if it is the highlight of our careers. Not […]

We are not afraid to speak out and say it like it is Very sad at the moment how decent folk in the public eye are increasingly being vilified in the popular press. I abhor the way Charlotte Church is being treated after she was brave and full of passion for a fairer society on […]

At HemingwayDesign we work in a number of towns and cities that have suffered economically and socially over the past decades and I occasionally attend round table discussions or conferences in these towns that focus on regeneration. There is no fairy dust (as Oliver Wainwright said about what we do, possibly snidely, see here) to be sprinkled, […]

A recurring theme – bravery is one of the most important aspects of regeneration. Last week I was tasked with giving a talk on: “Bravery and a can do attitude” at the Somerset County Council’s Staff Awards. The premise being that with all the cutbacks in central government funding, these are hard times for councils.  […]

Our thoughts on housing and disability  We talk a lot about how many homes there are in the UK. We know we urgently need to build more affordable homes in the right locations because they’re essential for a balanced, productive and happy society. But we talk a lot less about what kind of homes we […]

If you were to look at the housing need numbers compared to what is actually being built the it is easy to argue that the housing industry is still on its backside and there hasn’t been the predicted reversal in the shedding of the housebuilding workforce that took place at an unprecedented rate. It seems […]