16th April 2015
Housing
history, policy and practice
Photo Alamy
Our new section of the magazine looks at housing. The kind of homes that people built, the materials they used and the way that houses changed over the course of history has been touched on in many of the article we have already published.
In a series of articles to be published over the next few days, we look at housing and the materials used to construct homes and move on to a discussion about the future of how we live and the kind of buildings we might be calling ‘home’ in the future.
Houses form a key part of our narrative about the history of Leicester. We have argued already that the best way to understand any community – in history as well as in contemporary times – is to look at how people live, cook and entertain themselves. In this context, considering how people live, the kind of homes they build and the materials they use to construct their houses is a key part of any historical account. Water, supply, drainage, sanitation, cooking and waste-disposal are fundamental elements of understanding communities, cities, towns and villages.
In the forthcoming series of articles about bricks and mortar, we begin with a brief look at the basic units of construction, before moving on to the wider policy implications for meeting the supply of housing. This series of articles will deal mainly with the present and the future, whilst placing that focus in a historical perspective.
A debate about housing is very apposite to the current time, as political parties launch their manifestos in the run up to the general election. Housing in a subject that all parties will want to say something about. We hope that our series of features on bricks and mortar will lend something to those debates – as we consider the future of housing and its historical perspectives.
Later in the year, we will place the themes of these article in a Leicester context as look at the history of housing in our city and what might lie ahead for the new political policy-makers.
Trevor Locke
Trevor Locke has a masters degree in Urban Policy
See also:
House bricks part 1
House bricks part 2
House bricks part 3
House bricks part 4