Most new housing developments are poor with cheaply built ugly houses, little greenery and few civic spaces. We used to do better. Hampstead Garden Suburb shows a better way. I wrote an essay @createstreets createstreets.com/projects/build… and here’s a thread summarizing my visit🧵 2/ Building better, healthier and more beautiful new places should be the minimum bar we set for ourselves. We need communities with a heart where you can happily walk or cycle without using your car daily. We’ve built places like this before, and not too long ago.

It’s been 14 years since I first visited Accordia, the 2008 Sterling Prize winning housing development which raised the standard for modern developments of the time. Thread ⬇️ Accordia has aged well, I was pleasantly surprised to see. The materials have held up and greenery grown up but still well maintained. These narrow lanes at the fronts of houses were always one of the highlights.

A beautiful new tower of a hotel in the resort town of Las Catalinas, Costa Rica, by the architect Michael Imber. It has echoes of Spanish Colonial architecture but also reflects architecture found throughout the world. You see similar projecting timber balconies in Cartagena, Colombia, for example.

I admire many of the buildings by architect Peter Barber and occasionally go out of my way to see them. In a sea of banality they stand out. Yesterday I visited two and here are some thoughts and photos. Cont... 2) McGrath Road was built for Newham Council as shared equity houses. It's a short bus ride east of Stratford in East London. Here's the context, set amidst a not particularly nice council estate. It certainly doesn't aim to blend in (a good thing in this case).

Strand-on-the-Green, a pedestrian path along the Thames in Chiswick, West London. One of the most picturesque walks in London?
Especially beautiful during golden hour, the shrubs and wildflowers simply grow out of cracks in the paving and, crucially, no one trims them! The path has been there for over two centuries, and is accessible mainly by narrow alleyways like this one (date says 1752):

This is Mermaid Street in Rye, East Sussex. Have you ever seen a more perfect street composition? I am so grateful to live in one of the world's most beautiful countries. Beauty really does feed the soul. 2) This little town is full of magic corners. They understand that greenery, in both large and small doses, makes every place more beautiful.

The Georgian terraces we love so much, and the streets themselves, were far from a natural occurrence, but rather a result of various Acts, mainly the Building Act of 1774. It sorted houses into four rates and specified the street width according to the height of the houses. It was meant to prevent poor quality construction and reduce the risk of fire, but it was criticized for stifling creativity. Benjamin Disraeli blamed the Act for "all those flat, dull spiritless streets all resembling each other, like a large family of plain children."

1) We Westerners are not too familiar with traditional cities in Asia, being more focused on our own, but also because so many have been destroyed (by wars or by choice). Lijiang, in China, is one of the few to survive, and it is easily equal in beauty to the best of the West. 2) The Old Town of Lijiang is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and despite being largely a tourist town now, thousands of people still live in the traditional "Naxi" homes. This 5 minute video is well made and worth a watch: