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Professor Jeremy Till, University of Sheffield
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Professor Sarah Wigglesworth
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Dr Tatjana Schneider, Research Assistant
The project, based in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, received an AHRC Research Grant of £122,992 for a two year period from 2004 to 2006.
Housing is a British national obsession. How are we going to accommodate the changing needs of the population, as higher divorce rates, more single-person headed households and an ageing community all impact on the need to adjust national housing stock?
The AHRC Flexible Housing award worked on accommodating new technologies as they emerge, adapting to changes in people’s lives. It is
possible to design flexible housing in the following ways:
- addition to an existing property either upwards or outwards;
- adapting to the layout within units;
- joining units together;
- through the use of shared rooms, and;
- designing the units so they can be easily divided.
Such is the potential of this research; the project received additional funding of £16,610 from the Housing Corporation to produce a manual containing guidelines to be distributed to all Registered Social Landlords. This manual sets out the principles and benefits relating to flexibility in housing design. The project team has also been approached by English Partnerships, the national regeneration agency, who are proposing to run a competition to develop Europe’s largest flexible housing scheme.
Future outcomes
To illustrate potential impacts from this project, PricewaterhouseCoopers developed a series of scenarios to model the impact of flexible housing on increasing the annual rental income and in reducing maintenance costs for the Registered Social Landlord (RSL) sector. These scenarios suggest that, if flexible housing was adopted by all new RSL homes and maintenance costs for flexible homes subsequently fell by 40%, annual domestic maintenance costs would have fallen by over £4.2 millions for 2004-05 in England. In addition, if the adoption of flexible housing led to vacancy rates for flexible homes to fall by 75%, annual domestic rental income would have increased by over £1.2 millions for 2004-05 in England.
The project, based in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, received an AHRC Research Grant of £122,992 for a two year period from 2004 to 2006.
Housing is a British national obsession. How are we going to accommodate the changing needs of the population, as higher divorce rates, more single-person headed households and an ageing community all impact on the need to adjust national housing stock?
Image: Adelaid Road Housing, London, 1979. Architects: Nabeel Hamdi and Nicholas Wilkinson for GLC. One of the UK's pioneering flexible housing schemes, This is the model used for tenants to lay out their individual dwellings. Image courtesy of Nabeel Hamdi.