A Much-Needed Vindication of Social Housing 🔗 🇬🇧 🏡 🏠 🏘

Both environmentally and socially sustainable, Goldsmith Street is a bright spot amidst the UK’s ongoing housing crisis

The scheme comprises seven terraces of two-storey houses flanked by three-storey flats, in creamy brick with striking black pantiled roofs. The streets themselves are narrower than usual and the presence of traffic less intrusive, more controlled. More importantly, fully one-quarter of the site is communal space: a small landscaped space in the centre of the terraces and ‘ginnels’, semi-private alleyways to the rear of back gardens, which, in the words of architect Annalie Riches, are a way for residents to ‘meet neighbours, for their kids to get to know each other, making friends’. The whole is a nod to the Victorian and Edwardian terraces nearby, but something richer and more communal.