It was not uncommon for architectural practice in the 60’s to include “one off” houses for clients at quite modest levels of income. Given a site, a budget of £12,000-£15,000, in the 1960’s was one that would build you a modest house, architect designed and tailor-made.  

Likewise, local builders, such as E. A. Lake at Lingwood, or Ernest Burrell at East Carleton would have a small speculative housing development on the go which would provide them with activity, when other contract work fell short.  

Examples of such modest groups of houses that concerned me, included places like Loddon, Lingwood, Brooke and on Bracondale:  which all came about through limited instructions from local builders.  Limited, because they primarily wanted the architect to produce a design and to sort out ‘planning’ and saw little point in his being much on site, unless they hit a ‘snag’!  The builders that found their way to me wanted ‘character’ though, and would accept the odd special detail to make a difference – generally wanting traditional techniques for their modest cost.  At its best, this could result in a reasonable harmony in the quest for some local particularity.

Layout and arrangement was the area of most opportunity for the architect. Ubiquitous housing estates were, and still are, creeping over the countryside, around towns and villages as a consequence of the lazy-minded or cynical exploitation of ‘housing demand’ and these small housing groups had something to contribute towards a greater sense of ‘place’.  

20 yrs on and this kind of work for local architects had dropped to a trickle: the small/medium sized older building firms disappeared.  Housing moved to a larger scale and has become the creature of large-scale specialist developers and builders who, with some exceptions, have a product to be sold nationwide.  That the product became abused and one of diminished quality during the boom, and currently has problems arising from its cynical abuse during the bubble that grew to bust in 2007, is another story.

The same market phenomena, coupled with an poorly conceived planning system, has meant that modest ‘one-off’ small houses became a much less frequent brief. Perhaps for lack of sites as a result of planning as much as any thing else: taboos for building them, even when infilling have been uncompromising outside places specified for growth.

After the 70’s, Architects, like myself, were on the whole grazing in new pastures!