BETWEEN THE HOUSES · PART 2 OF 2
By Maisie Mullins, Urban Designer, Muller Property Group
A new neighbourhood is usually judged on the day it is finished. The real test comes years later, in how people actually use the spaces between their homes, and it is a test the industry rarely goes back to mark.
I’m Maisie, an urban designer at Muller Property Group. In Part 1 of Between the Houses, I looked at what happens when new estates arrive without the spaces that turn homes into a neighbourhood. This time I want to look at how designers can get those spaces right: by listening to the people who live there, going back to see what works, and making the right decisions early.
Going Back to Look
Life after handover
As an urban designer, the question I keep coming back to is what happens after the architects and developers move out. In the first year of my master’s, I designed a housing scheme with a community kitchen on every floor and allotments for residents: places to meet that would keep working long after handover. Designing those spaces is the easy part. Knowing whether they work means going back to look.
That is not a new idea. Ernő Goldfinger and his wife, Ursula, lived in his Balfron Tower for two months, hosting champagne parties so residents could tell them what they did and did not like about the flats. He used that feedback when designing Trellick Tower.
That kind of listening is rare now. One of the biggest gaps in architecture at the moment, I think, is post-occupancy research. Where it happens at all, it tends to measure how buildings perform — energy, heating, ventilation — rather than how residents and the wider community actually use the spaces between them. The Building Performance Network describes the UK’s evaluation sector as “disjointed”, with data that is “inaccessible”. So the industry rarely analyses its mistakes, and too often carries them into the next scheme.
Going back is not just about judging a finished scheme. It is how the next one gets better: which spaces people actually use, which routes they avoid, and what the next masterplan needs to protect.
Starting with who is already there
The same gap exists before a scheme begins. Design processes rarely start with the community that is already there, and that is how a new estate and the town beside it end up as “us” and “them”. Some practices are starting the other way round: Manchester’s Architecture Unknown, for example, treats the public and residents as “partners in construction”.
Listening also means asking whose needs are being overlooked. Make Space for Girls has shown how public space can quietly shut people out: its Parkwatch survey found that 88% of the teenagers using the facilities it surveyed were boys.
These examples point to a simple principle: before asking what should be built, ask who is already there, and who the place needs to work for.
The Everyday Life Test — And Who Is Designing for It
From aspiration to expectation
The idea behind “15-minute neighbourhoods” is simpler than the politics around it: most of what people need for daily life should be reachable on foot, by a route that feels safe, sociable and worth taking. Plan on that basis, and the small connections that help protect against loneliness — a chat at the school gate, a wave across the park — can happen almost by accident. Plan without it, and most of those interactions need a car journey. Many of them never happen.
National policy is catching up. The government’s January 2026 draft Design and Placemaking guidance makes liveability — “homes close to amenities, designed for all stages of life, with communal and private space” — one of its seven features of well-designed places, and the August 2026 National Planning Policy Framework expects public spaces to “facilitate and encourage social interaction, play and healthy lifestyles”.
Liveability is no longer a line in a marketing brochure. The more interesting question is who is planning to that standard, and what it looks like when someone does.
What it looks like in practice
For me, it starts with the order of decisions. Establish the neighbourhood framework first: its shared spaces, everyday destinations and connections. Then shape the housing layout around it.
Some of the most admired housing in the country shows different ways of making shared life part of the design. Goldsmith Street in Norwich, 105 homes for social rent that won the 2019 RIBA Stirling Prize and the Neave Brown Award for affordable housing, gives every home car-free access to play. Marmalade Lane in Cambridge gives its 42 cohousing homes a shared common house and a car-free lane where children play. Appleby Blue in Southwark, the almshouse that won the 2025 Stirling Prize, opens its community kitchen and garden room to residents and neighbours alike.
These are different models of housing. What they have in common is not budget or tenure, but the place they give to shared space: it is part of how the homes relate to one another, not simply an amenity alongside them.
Designed in from the start
At the scale of an urban extension, that framework has to be set even earlier, when land is chosen and promoted. That is how we try to work at Muller Property Group: deciding what kind of place a site could become before anyone draws a single house.
At Maylands Park in Nantwich, Phase 1B centres on a 1.5-acre public open space that serves residents and the wider community. Phase 2 proposes around 400 homes arranged around a local centre with everyday shops and services, beside a play area and a mix of formal and informal green space, connected by walking and cycling routes back into town. These elements sit at the heart of the proposals. Together, they give people places to go, reasons to meet and connections beyond the development itself.
The principle applies at very different scales. At Cressage in Shropshire, outline plans for 60 homes include 1.61 acres of public open space — more than policy requires — with improved footways, a new crossing and traffic calming to knit the development into the village. At Crewe Northern Gateway Phase 3, plans for up to 520 homes include a local centre, allotments, play space and more than 10 acres of public open space.
The size of the scheme changes. The question stays the same: how will people move through this place, spend time in it and connect with one another?
Build With Ambition — Then Go Back
A masterplan can show the opportunities a neighbourhood is meant to offer. It cannot tell us whether people will use them as we expect. That only becomes clear as households move in, routines settle and residents make the place their own.
We can judge the ambition behind a plan much earlier: whether shared spaces and everyday connections shape the neighbourhood, or are fitted into whatever space remains.
Housing numbers matter. But homes alone do not make a community. The chance to create one begins with the sites we promote, the connections we protect and the spaces we put at the centre of the plan.
In Part 1, I wrote that planning is the moment where community life is either designed in or designed out. Getting those early decisions right gives people reasons to meet, linger and stay, instead of quietly designing isolation in from day one. Going back tells us whether it worked, and what to do differently next time.
It takes ambition before a single brick is laid, and a willingness to keep learning long after we move out.
This is the second and final part of Between the Houses. Part 1, A Home Is Not a Neighbourhood, looks at what happens when new estates arrive without the spaces that make a neighbourhood.
