After the 2008 crisis, developers adopted a cookie-cutter design style. You can (partly) thank Boris Johnson, says design journalist India Block
f you’ve walked through redeveloped parts of London recently you may have noticed an eerily similar type of building. Every edge is so crisp and flat that staring at it face-on gives you the weird sensation the world has temporarily turned 2D. This single style has emerged as the hegemonic default for housing developments in London. Dubbed New London Vernacular , it has three key markers: lots of brick, deep-set portrait windows and flat facades.
London’s mayoralty insists that its new homes must look like old homes – just new, and more of them. So the city has ended up with endless variations of a Georgian terrace that looks like it’s been rendered in Minecraft. “It is the perpetuation of the status quo masquerading as sensitivity,” says Nathaniel Furman, who creates colourful architectural interventions for London. To him, the style celebrates an “imaginary shared past that is really only a false nostalgia”.
It also leaves little room for innovation. NLV was partly a reaction to the preceding decades, where every developer was after a landmark. After the 2008 financial crisis developers, worried they might be left with something they would struggle to sell, became increasingly conservative. While the idea of housesselling seems laughable in today’s superheated London property market, the brick-by-numbers nature of NLV has endeared itself to developers by protecting their bottom line.
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