Calvin Po

Will a new Labour government let architects reshape housing?

With Starmer pledging fresh ‘new towns’, architects are banking on the next government to get back into the centre of the action

Many young architects long to return to an era when someone like Kate Macintosh could be put in charge of designing the vast Dawson’s Heights estate, completed in 1972, when she was only in her twenties. Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images 
issue 24 February 2024
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Calvin Po has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural Association. This was flattery of the highest order, designed to butter up the audience of budding architects and inflate their sense of how much power they had to shape society.

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