Having written 157 blogs for Inside Housing over the past four years you might have noticed that I’ve been silent since mid-August. This is because, for the past seven weeks I have been travelling across North America. I started in Vancouver on the 4th September, travelled by car, boat and train down the west coast to San Francisco, and then, between the 19th September and the 20th October I drove with a friend from San Francisco to Manhattan, via New Orleans. I’ve been through 19 states and dozens of cities. Along the way, we managed to sit in on a murder trial in Texas, to stand on the rostrum where Martin Luther King made his last speech on the night before his assassination, and experience a near-fatal car crash south of Memphis. It was my sixth visit to the USA.

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I took part in a live discussion on the Guardian website yesterday on the role of social housing, which generated quite a debate. One contributor, the CEO of a large London association, said this:

‘Social housing is now a damaged brand. Housing associations need to return to their roots – yes, housing those without work, but housing the low-to-average-waged, too. We need to reclaim our landlord role and control who we let to. For us we would give greater priority to those who work locally. We could house the local school’s teaching assistant and the local hospital’s health staff.’ Continue reading →

In the hot summer of 1858 the Thames stank. Over the past forty years, London’s population had trebled and the capital’s infrastructure was creaking. Sewers had been run by local commissioners and there was little co-ordination between districts. Factories, slaughterhouses and breweries discharged their effluent into the Thames and its tributaries, but new-fangled flush toilets had also been installed in many of London’s smarter homes, and they were now emptying their waste into the capital’s 200,000 cesspits, causing them to overflow into the surface water drains that fed into the river. Day after day London’s temperature reached 90 degrees and no rain fell to flush away the mephitic effluent. Each day, 90 million gallons of sewage poured into the Thames. It was estimated that one fifth of the river’s volume was raw sewage. The smell was unspeakable. In the Houses of Parliament the blinds were coated with chlorine and zinc, and tons of lime were spread upon the Thames foreshore, but MPs and peers were forced to abandon their sessions.

The episode became known as The Great Stink. Continue reading →

The true scale of London’s housing crisis was revealed by last week’s “social cleansing” story. Inside Housing’s Jules Birch and Steve Hilditch’s Red Brick covered the topic admirably, and I don’t intend to rehearse the issues here, but it’s important to note that the story was not just about Newham. Most London boroughs are looking to export people from the capital because of the shortage of affordable homes and the expense or non-availabilty of private lettings. Continue reading →