LONDON, said Boris Johnson last week, is in the grip of a “housing crisis”: chronic undersupply mixed with vastly inflated prices. Ken Livingstone’s solution is to force housebuilders to make 50 per cent of every new development “affordable”, a catch-all phrase covering discounted homes for “key workers” (teachers, nurses, etc), shared-ownership homes (where a buyer owns a share of a property and rents the rest from the council) and old-fashioned council tenants, now the “social rented sector”, who receive government subsidies via private housing associations. Livingstone claims that 4,686 shared-ownership homes were built in 2006-07, the highest ever figure: “My tougher targets are helping to make more lower-income Londoners homeowners,” he said. Johnson, however, doesn’t like arbitrary quotas: “in the words of one councillor, 50 per cent of bugger-all is still bugger-all.”

An unlikely beacon shining through the gloom of jargon, quotas and mayoral egos is Banstead Court, pictured left, a set of five glass and red-brick curving domes by the Westway, one of London’s most polluted roads. The three-acre site, near East Acton Tube station, was bought from Transport for London in 2002 by the L&Q Group, a housing association. It presented the architects, Gard-ner Stewart, with a problem. “Traditional housing doesn’t work on the Westway,” says Sean Fitzsimons, of L&Q. “People in the houses on the other side of the road can’t open their windows because of the diesel dust. The site is category D-listed by the World Health Organisation: the worst possible and usually impossible for residential.” The solution was to design the buildings in such a way as to create a sound barrier, and to pump in purified air. Energy comes from an “aquifer thermal energy store” system, which extracts water from underground rock using two 80m (262ft) boreholes, cooling or warming the buildings as required.

Work began in 2005 on the 128 one-to four-bedroom flats, arranged around “winter gardens” covered with opaque glass. Swirling ramps obviate the need for costly lifts, and each flat has a large balcony or roof terrace. L&Q spent £30 million on it, just over half of which came from the Government. A hundred flats are rented to social tenants and 28 are shared-ownership, split between key workers and local first-time buyers. The latter took some persuading. “They saw a hole in the ground next to the Westway and weren’t impressed”, says Fitzsimons, “but once the building went up people were competing over it.”

As for the social tenants, Banstead Court cleared Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s internal waiting list. Quite a feat, according to Judith During, of L&Q, when it takes an average of ten years for a family to be upgraded to a larger house “on the council”.

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Aside from cutting-edge design, Banstead Court differs from the average affordable development in two ways. The aquifer system means low energy costs – residents pay between £6 and £13 a week, which equates to a substantial cut in rent. “Everyone also has to sign a good neighbour contract,” says During, “covering things like smoking, cycling and rubbish. We have a caretaker and security systems and no antisocial behaviour at all.”

Banstead Court “ticks all the boxes,” says During: “good, sustainable homes, a design statement and a good mix of different types of people.” L&Q hopes that private developers as well as housing associations will learn from its example. The problem with Livingstone’s quota is that the developer of a luxury apartment block is obliged to fill half of it with council tenants. To the buyer who spends hundreds of thousands, it seems unfair that the bloke next door gets his free. So developers differentiate between residents. “They often make social tenants use separate entrances, or put them in separate blocks next to the road,” says Fitzsimons. “Communities don’t bond like that. We made sure tenants and owners signed the same good neighbour agreements. We also encourage social tenants to buy, to give them aspirations and help them get rid of the stigma.”

In a city where the average house is 61 per cent more expensive than the rest of the country, affordable housing should be free of stigma. www.lqgroup.org.uk

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