East Anglian Dreams

Norwich was the UK’s second city until the 18th century, booming from its textiles industries and close connection to Europe given its proximity to the Norfolk coast, which was only a short distance by sailing to the Netherlands. As the industrial revolution took off, however, the city was bypassed in favour of the Midlands and Manchester, with their greater access to canals and suitability for dense production. As a result, Norwich lost its position as the UK's second city, cementing its position as an outlier city on the outskirts of Norfolk.

Still, Norwich’s slower, gentler development allowed the city to maintain its medieval layout and, with that, a deep connection to its history.

While high rises dominate the skylines of more industrialised cities, the tallest building in Norwich is still its Cathedral.

Despite this gentler pace of development, the inequalities that harm highly developed cities are also found here. The city’s Marl Pit housing estate has some of the city’s highest levels of deprivation, inter-generational poverty and the lowest educational levels. In stark contrast, just a stone’s throw away million-pound homes and some of the UK’s top research institutions can be found.

A third of children now live in poverty in Norwich, and a recent Guardian report published in 2023 found schoolchildren with legs that were bowed as a result of malnourishment. The austerity of the last fifteen years has meant housing estates on the periphery of the city become more isolated from services.

While deprivation levels are on par with many bigger cities in the UK, the tight boundaries of the city council’s remit and its geographical isolation mean that services and resources are perhaps more squeezed as poverty in the city "gets glossed over", says Daniel Childerhouse, who has lived in Norwich all his life and is Chief Executive Officer of Future Projects, a project set up to tackle deprivation and disadvantage in the city.

Although, the city has a strong history of social housing: the UK’s first major council housing estate was built here in the 1920s, marking the beginning of a proud commitment by the council to quality social housing.

A hundred years later, however, with demand outstripping supply, house building has become a numbers game.

While walking through Norwich, the higgledy-piggledy nature of the city’s development becomes evident. A mile from the cobbled Norwich Lanes, past the Catholic cathedral, and outside the original Medieval walls of the city is an area known as the Golden Triangle. Here, streets of Victorian terraces are home to the city’s middle classes, providing spacious family homes. The Victorian extension of Norwich was interrupted when the city was heavily bombed during World War II. This has shaped the city’s urbanism today, its suburbs dominated by Victorian housing and infill redevelopment.

Beyond the Golden Triangle in the ward of Mancroft, these desirable terraces give way to a series of 1960s and 1970s low-rise council flats. While well-maintained, they carry the stigma faced by many other council housing blocks of this era across the country.

On the edge of this development is a scheme called Goldsmith Street, where elegant rows of terraced housing have ‘back alleys’ running behind them, providing space for community and play. A mix of houses and flats creates a dense yet private block, with each terrace ending with gently curved corners and playful asymmetric roofs. The streetscape and communal areas are designed with care and consideration for the resident’s use, with bins neatly tucked away in stores.

Goldsmith Street opened its doors to residents and became the first social housing project to win the RIBA’s Stirling Prize in 2019.

The architect Mikhail Riches—then Riches Hawley Mikhail—took inspiration from nearby Victorian streets to create an equivalent development for social housing tenants. Their design delivers a dense housing scheme to the highest sustainable standards, minimising car use and maximising community integration and children’s play.

Norwich, is ‘the city of stories’, a title it derives from being England’s first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) city of literature, and the story of the development of Goldsmith Street is still being told by the residents who now inhabit those homes, as well as by the councils around the UK who are learning from the project. It is a story of proactive leadership, strong partnership and a willingness to challenge convention.

Norwich Council identified the 1.2-hectare site known as Greyhound Opening as a new development opportunity in 2007. The site was then home to a 1970s sheltered housing complex of 25 small bungalows which provided special needs housing. However, these buildings became unsuitable and were decommissioned.

Norwich Council had high aspirations for this site and initially sought a partnership between the council and three registered housing providers. The design brief invited proposals for a scheme that combined quality, sustainability, density and community. Andrew Turnbull, development strategy manager at Norwich City Council, became the project manager for the site’s development on his first day in post.

From that moment forward, the ambition was set from the start when the council and its partners agreed to run a RIBA competition to select the architects for the project.

David Mikhail, a partner at Mikhail Riches the architectural practice that was eventually appointed–remembers a focus on quality from the inception.

“The brief was really well written”, he remembers, “and came from the planning department, which is unusual. Planning is usually reactive, but, in this case, it was proactive and set the agenda and the themes.”

The brief invited design proposals for around 100 affordable homes on the site, tripling its original density. The goal was for the site to be linked to local amenities, create a sense of community, draw on Norwich’s local distinctiveness and set the standard for future sustainable and affordable housing developments.

“The level of interest was really surprising to Norwich”, says Turnbull about the number of submissions received. Five practices were shortlisted through a process that included the council, registered housing providers, a contractor and a tenant living on the site.

Of the shortlisted five, the one proposal that stood out, according to Turnbull, was that from Riches Hawley Mikhail, which dealt with the challenge of increased density by looking at one of the most desirable forms of housing in the city: the Victorian terrace.

Cathy Hawley, then a partner at the practice, presented the team’s proposals. She understood and wanted to maintain the character and grain of one of the dominant housing forms in the city. During the presentation, she shared a copy of The English Terraced House by Stefan Muthesius, which relates the history of the terraced housing form in Britain —its diversity, popularity and democratic history and legacy as homes for both high and low income residents.

“Housing growth in Britain has been through terraces”, says Hawley.

“There is a conception in Britain of needing to live in a house, and culturally, that is what people want. There is a stigma around social housing. I knew that if people could buy a house in Norwich, they would want a terraced house. The question was how to make a quality construction and development that had an equivalence to that type of housing by nature of its character.”

Since Victorian times, notions of privacy and daylight have become more dominant. Today conventional overlooking distances set out in planning guidance require a minimum of 18 metres front-to-front and back-to-back, while most Victorian terraced blocks are set at 14 metres. But Mikhail says that the presumptions around overlooking distances are no longer appropriate “given that we now need to build to density and minimise car use.” In their proposal, they planned 45 terraced houses and 60 flats on the site with alleyways–or ginnels as they are known in Norwich–behind the back-to-back housing to allow for community gatherings and children’s play. Car allocation is unusually low at seven per ten households.

A ten-minute walk from the city centre, the site for the new development at Goldsmith Street was a perfect testing ground for a development with less car dependency than was normally accepted in the city.

Riches Hawley Mikhail emerged as the winner of the competition, but it would take another four years before the project began.

Two years had passed since the RIBA competition in 2008 to the appointment of an architect in 2010. During that time, Britain had a new government and was facing the impact of the 2008 financial crash. The new Conservative government introduced wide-ranging changes to the Housing Revenue Account subsidy, meaning that local authorities that had retained their housing stock–as Norwich had–became self-financing.

The subsidy changes also affected the partnership’s housing providers, two of which pulled out of the project. The remaining provider wanted to change the design and bring in their own architect. With ambitions to deliver new council homes in the city, the council took a radical approach: it decided to deliver the Goldsmith Street project itself rather than in partnership with the remaining registered housing provider.

The council was also keen to exceed sustainability targets, not only for ecological reasons but also driven by pressing financial concerns of its housing tenants because, at the time, 13% of homes in the city were in fuel poverty.

Although the Code for Sustainable Building Homes code was little more than a box-ticking exercise for Turnbull, the results from a recent evaluation of a local Passivhaus scheme delivered by a housing provider impressed him.

These decisions meant that future residents living on Goldsmith Street would save a minimum of 70% on their fuel While the costs for incorporating Passivhaus were up to 10% more than traditional construction standards, the consequential social and environmental impacts meant savings further down the line. Turnbull investigated having a mix of private and social homes on the site to improve viability. However, there were doubts about whether the homes could be sold at high enough profit margins. With these factors considered, the main decisions were in place: for the council to deliver the scheme itself; to build 100% social housing, and to build to Passivhaus standard.

The practice did not have a history of designing to Passivhaus standards, but its winning competition proposal had embedded lessons learnt from a recently completed housing project in Suffolk. Also won through an RIBA competition, Clay Field provided 26 homes for social rent with a ‘deep green’ agenda for the Orwell Housing Association. While not to Passivhaus standard, it had used passive solar gain to help reduce fuel bills. Riches Hawley Mikhail ultimately decided to collaborate with Warm Homes, a specialist in Passivhaus, who were confident that, because the homes in Goldsmith Street were already planned to be south-facing, they could be adapted to meet Passivhaus standards. Thus began a partnership between the two organisations that continues to this day.

Mikhail commends the bravery of the council for insisting on Passivhaus and for championing its financial and social arguments, as well as the ecological ones. He and Turnbull also cite the success of the scheme to the decision made by the council to use a traditional building contract, rather than the more conventional design and build procurement route.

Design and build contracts are now the most common form of contracting in the public sector, where the contractor takes on most of the risk and controls the costs. Norwich Council went against the grain, choosing a traditional contract. It did this in order to achieve the highest quality in this scheme while keeping a handle on costs and to ensure that the highly technical Passivhaus standard was implemented without it being value-engineered by contractors.

“A traditional contract means that instead of a contractor switching out things, the architect signs off changes,” says Turnbull. “It keeps the risk on our side if costs increase. But we knew the site and we thought it was a risk worth taking to maintain the quality.”

Mikhail praises the council’s courage for putting their trust in the architects and delivering the project through traditional procurement.

“When we won the Stirling Prize, the thing that got the biggest cheer on the night was when I said, ‘did you know this was delivered using an RIBA standard form of contract?’”, says Mikhail.

With the project ready to start on site in January 2017, the budget for the scheme was set at £15 million amounting to a construction cost of £1,875 per square metre.

“That price, including all roads and landscaping, even then was a phenomenal price. And for that to achieve certified Passivhaus for every home is unbelievable”, says Mikhail.

“How come it took a local authority to say that what the market is providing is not enough? We can do much better without paying a massive premium for it” asks Mikhail today, reflecting on the project.

However, when the scheme went out to tender, the contract value returned at £1.5 million over budget. As a result, Riches Hawley Mikhail were asked to make savings, but without compromising the Passivhaus standard. Some of these cost savings were delivered by changing the roof tiles and changing the materiality of the back elevations from brick to render. “We took out some architectural fripperies to make the project cheaper, but we did it in an intentional way so that it still looked immaculate”, says Mikhail. Changes were also made to the landscape design.

Although achieving Passivhaus standard added around 5-10% to construction costs, key design considerations like the use of the terraced form meant that only two elevations were open to the elements, creating a more efficient building envelope. Other considerations, like orienting the buildings and roof pitches to ensure both winter sun and shading in summer also improved the effectiveness of the design.

The main costs associated with meeting Passivhaus standards come from the membrane which wraps the building to make it airtight and the mechanical heat recovery system which captures the heat from inside that comes from kitchens, bathrooms and body heat and circulates it around the house, making space heating unnecessary.

Another key element to the design of this scheme was its aspiration to maximise communal and play spaces. The team were inspired by Dinah Bornat’s work, whose paper Making Spaces for Play found that if children are playing outdoors, the social and community interactions between adults are likely to be enhanced. Bornat developed a mapping approach which demonstrated the attributes that led to improved levels of play, including, for example, high levels of dense, good quality, well-connected play areas and car-free spaces. For Bornat, designing for children’s play should not be an afterthought but an integral part of designing places to live. The ginneys that run behind the terraced homes on the Goldsmith Street scheme–and the low number of cars –have created natural spaces for play and community.

In addition to the aspirational sustainability credentials, the project also challenged housing space standards.

Some of the houses are built at 20% above traditional space standards, with large landing areas that have proven useful given the need for extra space has risen since the COVID-19 lockdown, says Turnbull. Ultimately, the high quality housing achieved on the scheme means that the homes would have fetched a healthy margin if some were sold on the private market as was previously assumed.

It has been five years since residents moved into Goldsmith Street. As I write this it is a sunny November morning and the quality of the housing design, spacious green spaces, and landscaping shine in the autumn sun.

As a project that set out to challenge the quality of social housing, both in terms of design and sustainability, it is doing just that. On average, fuel bills here are 70% lower.

While the UK’s increasingly hot summers have led some residents to experience some overheating in their Passivhaus homes, Norwich Council has learned to advise residents to open windows in summer months and for higher levels of maintenance of the heat recovery unit. Still, there has been some frustration from residents with the council’s maintenance of their home, which is increasingly a challenge for local authorities given the ongoing financial pressures they face.

It is also interesting to note the limitations that current government policies have on the council’s ability to retain control of its housing stock. This is not only true at Goldsmiths Street and Norwich Council but a policy that affects all local authorities across the country.

As councils across the UK look to mass housebuilding again to hit new government targets, Norwich Council has shown that good quality council housing is possible, that it can help reduce poverty and deprivation and that it can be built to fit for the next generation.

Goldsmith Street is a revival of the city’s strong tradition in council housing. It demonstrates that high-quality housing can be built within budget and, if stewarded well by the council, can meet social, economic and ecological outcomes.

The council has shared its lessons with other councils around the UK and is beginning to incorporate energy generation into new schemes to meet net zero standards. While there have been teething problems, the social and economic benefits of Goldsmith Street are clear. “Some of my favourite experiences are going there and seeing kids scootering and cycling around those ginnels, seeing families chat and hearing their stories”, says Mikhail. He continues: “the ease with which their children can play and feel safe and the stories I hear from other residents about how their health improved and how much more cash they have to spend.”

Most importantly the council has brought quality back to social housing. As one of the residents said: “someone did care that I liked my home. That means a lot to me.”