Bare minimum is not enough: why where we live matters

The look and feel of where we live matters for people, and for our health.

Over the past year, campaigning to be a councillor, I’ve knocked on hundreds of doors in Lewisham, where I live. Behind every one is a story. And too many of those stories are the same story. Peeling, mouldy walls. Children in and out of A&E with respiratory problems. Damp bedrooms. Cold homes. Busy roads. Housing and public realm that are quietly making people ill. I hear the same thing in the public consultations I sit through as an architect, and as a director of Bell Phillips.

Poor housing costs the NHS £1.4 billion a year. £857 million of that comes from cold homes alone (BRE, 2023). The wider cost to society is £18.5 billion every year. Up to 45% of our health outcomes are shaped by where we live, work and move (Marmot, Institute of Health Equity). Access to green space is linked to better mental and physical health, and the most deprived communities have the least of it.

Solving this of course means building more homes. Investing in our infrastructure. Reducing car use. Investing in our places. But we mustn’t settle for the bare minimum.

How our buildings feel matters. How they look matters too. That’s the point the Humanise campaign keeps making, and they’re right.

In 2024 I cycled in a hurry to the Housing Design Awards, held inside Appleby Blue in Southwark, the almshouse for the elderly in Bermondsey by Witherford Watson Mann (pictured above). I stepped inside and felt my shoulders drop. Timber everywhere. Warm light. Good acoustics. No off-gassing chemicals.

But even from the outside Appleby Blue makes a statement: it signals from the pavement that the people inside matter. Appleby Blue won the ultimate award that night, and rightly so. It has since won the 2025 RIBA Stirling Prize. The scheme cost around 20% more than a “standard” project. I told the Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook, who was also there, that 20% is the wrong number to focus on. The right number is the improved physical and mental health of the residents and the forged community and the friendships. One resident of Appleby Blue, who used to be admitted to the Maudsley several times a year, has not been admitted once since moving in.

Above: Albion Street by Bell Phillips (photo: Killian O'Sullivan)

There are other great examples of social housing with character. Mikhail Riches’ Goldsmith Street in Norwich is Passivhaus and beautiful. Peter Barber’s London schemes give back arches, thresholds, a human scale. Bell Phillips’ Albion Street in Rotherhithe is 26 council homes that sit knowingly between two listed churches, open a new public square back onto the high street, and exceed London Housing Design Guide standards. Interesting from the street. Healing on the inside.

Gil Peñalosa, the urban designer and founder of 8 80 Cities, says that if a place works for an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old, it works for everyone. That is the standard we should hold ourselves to. The homes, streets and towns we design and maintain are public health decisions. Spatial inequality is health inequality. Architecture and urban design are among the most powerful and undervalued levers we have to create places for society to thrive, live, love and enjoy.

As we build the homes and infrastructure we need, the roads, the places, let us stop and think about how we want to live, and how we create places where we do not just exist, but live happy, healthy, joyful lives. “Job done”, bare minimum, is not enough.

Jay Morton is an architect, and Director at Bell Phillips Architects. She founded the Architects For Change podcast.

Images

Above: Albion Street by Bell Phillips (photo: Killian O'Sullivan)

Top: Appleby Blue by Witherford Watson Mann (photo: Philip Vile)