Living on the lawn

摘要

Since the Urban Task Force was set up in 1998 we have had years of focus on densi-fying urban areas on brownfield sites. But there is another extensive source of land: back gardens. We are not talking about the long narrow strips behind city terraces, but the generous 70ft ones behind and around the council housing of the interwar years. This fabled period of house building extended the edges of cities across the UK into a green, garden city suburbia of 25 homes per hectare. There are an estimated 2.75 million of these council houses across the UK.