bye bye, Nimrud, bye bye

[MrGongGong]

And IS aren't the only Muslims destroying artefacts - look at what's happening at Mecca.

Shhhhhhhhhhh that's not allowed
(neither is an ethical foreign policy :sad face: )

[Flosshilde]

It might be a good idea to keep a few representative examples, but not necessarily whole blocks of poor quality houses.

Depends on what you mean by poor quality. Judging by what you have said further up the thread Bath is stuffed with poor quality housing (although aesthetically I think it's rather good), as are large parts of London, and Glasgow, and the New Town in Edinburgh. Do you suggest replacing these with little boxes with not enough room for the families they're meant to house, and which produce health problems of their own?

[MrGongGong]

Depends on what you mean by poor quality. Judging by what you have said further up the thread Bath is stuffed with poor quality housing (although aesthetically I think it's rather good), as are large parts of London, and Glasgow, and the New Town in Edinburgh.

If you go in the loft of our Victorian terrace you can see that in spite of what some might imagine much of the roof is held up by rather random bits of timber and when we knocked a wall though we found that instead of having courses of solid bricks in the middle they had used a pile of 'overbaked' crumbly ones that didn't have any mortar. The house, however, was here before I was and will outlast me easily.....

I used to know someone who worked for a woodworm control firm in Gloucestershire, according to them the quality of some of the houses in beautiful Cheltenham is a bit iffy to say the least.

[Flosshilde]

But when you see modern speculative housing being built today it's not any better than 18th or 19th century stuff. Thrown up in a couple of days using pre-fabricated wooden panels lined with plastic, & with exterior cladding. No storage space, tiny rooms, no air circulation (the sash window is the best means of ventilating a house) and no play space inside or out.

[MrGongGong]

But when you see modern speculative housing being built today it's not any better than 18th or 19th century stuff. Thrown up in a couple of days using pre-fabricated wooden panels lined with plastic, & with exterior cladding. No storage space, tiny rooms, no air circulation (the sash window is the best means of ventilating a house) and no play space inside or out.

Indeed

It could be so much better (and not in the way that Chas imagines ........ can't wait to see what tosh he really did write)

[ahinton]

Sometimes I think that a sense of humour has passed some people by.

Some people, perhaps! Not guilty, m'lud!

[french frank]

the sash window is the best means of ventilating a house

Not having fitted carpet everywhere, and having gaps of 2-3mm between the boards, is quite good too.

[MrGongGong]

Not having fitted carpet everywhere, and having gaps of 2-3mm between the boards, is quite good too.

Snap

[Dave2002]

Depends on what you mean by poor quality. Judging by what you have said further up the thread Bath is stuffed with poor quality housing (although aesthetically I think it's rather good), as are large parts of London, and Glasgow, and the New Town in Edinburgh. Do you suggest replacing these with little boxes with not enough room for the families they're meant to house, and which produce health problems of their own?

Try another city - Dundee, which in the 19th Century was really thriving. Quite a number of "better" houses were in fact occupied by many people at the time, and attempts to convert many of the tenement buildings are really pathetic, leading to very small living space.
Sometimes it can work, but not always, and also the way properties are owned and managed doesn't always lead to good solutions. If the facades are maintained, then that may perhaps only work if large scale developers buy up the streets, and then renovate internally, otherwise each private owner will almost certainly make a mess of things. That was my observation in Dundee, anyway.

However, Stirling for some reason - not obvious to me seems to have had properties which were slightly easier to adapt to 20th and 21st Century living. I do have experience of properties in both these Scottish towns. The internal walls in some flats in Stirling were basically rubbish, so great care and ingenuity has/had to be taken to put up shelves and curtain rails. Some of the local handy men in that town know how to fix houses which have some very unsound features. Possibly the overall structures are solid (stone plus wood?) but internally they may contain a great quantity of rubble.

Liverpool and Manchester have had a fair share of sub standard houses too - though also some very good ones. In New York there is a Tenement Museum which is very interesting - http://www.tenement.org/ As an example of how people used to live it is fascinating, but there is probably no need to preserve any poor quality building in that area, or in many other cities. Where there are good examples of old buildings of "good quality" - whatever that means, I am in favour of preservation, conservation and adaptation, but where there are masses of frankly grotty buildings, I would probably prefer to see them blown up, and the land used for modern buildings, though you might wonder if I have a vain hope that the new would be any better than the old.

A lot depends, as you have observed, on what is meant by poor quality, and who decides.

[ahinton]

Not having fitted carpet everywhere, and having gaps of 2-3mm between the boards, is quite good too.

What's wrong with heat recovery ventilation systems? (especially useful in homes with good air-tightness / insulation and underfloor heating)...

[french frank]

What's wrong with heat recovery ventilation systems? (especially useful in homes with good air-tightness / insulation and underfloor heating)...

I give up. What is wrong with heat recovery ventilation systems?

[jean]

Liverpool and Manchester have had a fair share of sub standard houses too - though also some very good ones.

The general standard of Victorian housing in Liverpool is far better than comparable housing in London (much better brick, for a start. If only the inhabitants wouldn't paint it...)

[ahinton]

I give up. What is wrong with heat recovery ventilation systems?

Never give up, FF! The answer is nothing; best way to do it, I'd say.

[Dave2002]

The general standard of Victorian housing in Liverpool is far better than comparable housing in London (much better brick, for a start. If only the inhabitants wouldn't paint it...)

Not sure, but there are some very nice houses round Princes Park. OTOH surely some of the houses round Rathbone Road and Picton Road are a bit on not so great side. I don't know too much about London - Parliament Hill houses struck me as reasonable. The houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb look good, but are a real devil to keep warm and dry, and they have conditions on them which ensure that residents are rather less than comfortable in bad weather. Of course Hampstead Garden Suburb is early 20th century, rather than Victorian.

[soileduk]

I am absolutely not a supporter of IS (or of JS either) but, after a brief initial outraged shock, I am surprised to experience a feeling of liberation from the weight of the past in the mass purposeful destruction of all these World Heritage Sites.

Might people in the UK be free to be more creative and responsive to the needs of the present day if less attention were paid to preserving our local heritage?

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