Overheating, homelessness, municipal build to rent and why London is broken
A collection of thoughts after a couple of days at a big housing conference
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Here I am checking the football scores while I’m supposed to be chairing an event
Over the last couple of days I’ve been in Manchester at the Housing 2026 conference, chairing sessions about a range of topics closely related to my regular content in this Substack. So here is a little bonus piece of thoughts inspired by some of those discussions, plus some remarks from me on where London finds itself in relation to housing and where it goes next.
Overheating by design
Unsurprisingly, given what it felt like outside, the question of overheating came up in a panel on the construction and management of tall buildings.
Richard Cook, chief development officer at Clarion Housing Group, pointed out that buildings around the world - including countries much hotter than this one - cope with the heat better, without total reliance on air conditioning.
This is a point worth emphasising. Statutory guidance on overheating (Approved Document O) was only introduced in 2022. Before then, we didn’t have any official standards on overheating and, as Craig Sheach of PRP architects pointed out on the same panel, many other regulatory requirements worked directly against it (window sizes, insulation etc).
The result is that we have a generation of high rise buildings which have not been built with hot summers in mind. Huge windows which only open a fraction cook the flats, and enclosed internal corridors can become dangerously hot. The fear is - as one academic report put it - that we have spent the first quarter of the 21st Century building a generation of tall buildings which will be uninhabitable by mid-century during the summer.
Dealing with this isn’t rocket science, and isn’t impossible. Designs which focus on shading and ventilation can make a massive difference to the comfort of buildings when temperatures peak.
Despite the increasing discomfort of those stuck in maladapted high rises in our increasingly fierce heatwaves, there are those who would unwind the new regulations and force total reliance on air conditioning on flat dwellers.
This, however, would bake in a new, future fuel poverty question about who can afford cooling. Cook predicted that this would be a major debate in UK housing in 30 years time. I’d suggest it may come round much quicker.
Does selling flats in tall buildings actually work?
