BETWEEN THE HOUSES · PART 1 OF 2
By Maisie Mullins, Urban Designer, Muller Property Group
As England pushes to deliver 1.5 million new homes, and falls behind the pace needed to get there, the harder question is no longer whether we build, but what we are building, and what it means for the people who will call it home.
I’m Maisie, an urban designer at Muller Property Group. Between the Houses is a two-part series about the parts of new development that never show up in the house count. Think of the streets, paths, play spaces and meeting places between the homes. This first part asks what happens when they are missing.
Keep Out
When the homes arrive…and the neighbourhood doesn’t
In the summer of 2025, a playground in Essex still sat behind a fence, unfinished. Families had lived around it for three years. The children who should have been playing there were growing up behind their windows, waiting. Signs on the fence read “keep out” and “children are not allowed to play on this site”.
Around it sat the Paddocks, 225 new homes near Braintree. The families had moved in. The playground had not. Vistry Group owns the developer, Countryside Homes. It told the Guardian the playground would open that summer, once the surrounding landscaping was complete and the council had signed off a planning condition.
This is what the housing crisis looks like when it thinks it has been solved.
As an urban designer, I notice the fence, not the front doors. We count the homes, but people live in the spaces between them.
Britain’s new estates have a habit of arriving incomplete. The homes go up. The rest — the shops, the community halls, the places where ordinary life happens — follows later, or not at all.
The council that said stop
At Westvale Park in Horley, Surrey, the council took a drastic step in 2023. It ordered the developers to stop building. “They were supposed to build shops, a community centre and playgrounds once it reached 600 homes,” the council leader, Richard Biggs, told the Guardian. “But we were at over 1,000 homes and there was nothing.”
Developers sell new estates on hoardings of smiling families in sunlit squares. Too often, the squares never make it off the hoarding.
Building resumed under a revised agreement in July 2024, and the place is finally taking shape. All 13 play areas are now open, and work on the shops began in December 2024.
So Westvale will get its neighbourhood in the end. But it took a stop order to put it back on track, and the first families had already waited years. As Biggs put it: “If we hadn’t stepped in, I think we’d still be arguing now with the developers over when we were going to get these playgrounds.”
Volume is not the same as value
These are not one-off failures. They are the predictable output of a system that treats shops, parks and community spaces as promises on paper. They appear in the planning documents and slip quietly once the houses sell. They come back only when residents ask why there is nowhere to buy milk within walking distance.
The pressure behind that system is real. The government has committed to 1.5 million homes in England this Parliament. By September 2026, England had added an estimated 437,900. That is just under 30% of the target, with more than two-fifths of the Parliament gone. Hitting it would now take around 380,000 homes a year, nearly double the pace of 2025–26.
Behind the numbers
The need is not abstract. At the end of March 2026, a record 135,580 households in England were living in temporary accommodation, including 177,530 children. On a median income, private renters could expect to spend more than a third of it on rent. In London, it was more than 40%. Too many people live in homes they cannot afford, or cannot leave homes that are making them ill.
In December 2020, two-year-old Awaab Ishak died in Rochdale. The cause was prolonged exposure to black mould in his family’s social housing flat. Since October 2025, the law that carries his name has required social landlords to investigate significant damp and mould within fixed timescales. They must deal with emergency hazards within 24 hours.
But unsafe housing is not a closed chapter. The latest English Housing Survey estimates that 1.4 million homes in England had a damp problem in 2024. That included one in ten privately rented homes and 7% of social rented homes. Around one million dependent children were living in damp homes in 2024–25, up from 800,000 two years earlier.
The worst-affected tenure is the one Awaab’s Law does not yet cover. The Renters’ Rights Act will extend it to private renting, but the government has not yet set a start date.
The quality of a home, in other words, is a health question, not a finishing detail. People need homes — actual homes, not promises.
But volume is not the same as value, and a home is not a neighbourhood. A development that hits its number while quietly designing out the conditions for community life is not a success. It is a shortcut with a long invoice, and the people who pay it are the ones left living there.
Designed to Be Alone
The invisible blueprint
Picture a young woman moving into her first new-build flat on the edge of town in January. She knows nobody on the street. There is no café to become a regular at, no park where you nod at the same dog walkers on a Sunday, no corner shop where the owner learns your name. The development is complete, technically. But the infrastructure of accidental human contact — the mundane, unremarkable texture of neighbourly life — was never part of the blueprint.
She is hypothetical. Her situation is not.
People tend to think of loneliness in Britain as a problem of old age. The data dismantles that assumption. In 2022, an estimated 3.83 million adults in Great Britain felt lonely often or always. It is young adults, not pensioners, who are most likely to feel it. People aged 16 to 29 were more than twice as likely as over-70s to report chronic loneliness. That is precisely the cohort moving into first flats and new-build homes on the edge of town.
When those homes arrive without everyday meeting points, we make isolation easier and connection harder before anyone has moved in.
What frustrates me, as a designer, is that we already know how to design against this. For older people, the HAPPI principles have offered a blueprint since 2009. They treat shared spaces, “hubs” and sociable circulation as part of the brief. Other housing has little equivalent, and first homes have none. Yet the people moving into them are, on the numbers, the loneliest of all.
What the evidence says
This is not just a designer’s hunch. The wider research points the same way, with the caveats good research carries. A systematic review of 57 studies in Health & Place covered housing, neighbourhood design and green space. It pointed to many ways built environments can help prevent loneliness and called for more research into them.
Government research links greener, more walkable neighbourhoods and a stronger sense of belonging with lower loneliness. It also finds that housing design, green space, local buildings and transport can all make connection easier or harder. Researchers at LSE studied community-led housing, where residents build in shared space and mutual support from the start. They found it associated with reduced loneliness and greater trust between neighbours.
Design does not decide how connected people feel. But it tilts the odds, one way or the other. That, for me, is what urban design is for.
A frontline public health tool
Policy thinkers have reached the same place. The Centre for Social Justice’s 2024 Lonely Nation report argues that design codes and community participation can help create places that foster belonging and social connection. Taken together, the evidence suggests that good design, green space and community-led models are not aesthetic extras. They are frontline public health tools.
When we deliver new estates as dormitories, not neighbourhoods, we are not just missing a chance to build better places. We are building the risk of a chronic health problem into every new street, one planning consent at a time.
But the reverse is equally true. It starts long before any planning application, with the choice to promote only sites that can support a genuine neighbourhood. Promoters can select sites carefully, assess them thoroughly and promote them with a long-term view of how people will live there. When they do, the planning process becomes more than a gateway to consent. It becomes the moment where community life is either designed in — or designed out.
Getting that decision right is the work that matters most.
It is also only the beginning. The harder question is what happens once the homes go up and everyone who designed them moves on. That is where I want to pick up in Part 2.
Next in Between the Houses: Part 2, What Happens After We Move Out.
