Cecil Norris House

Richard Bingham continues “Shoreham Unlisted”, his series of articles on the unsung heroes of Shoreham architecture, by taking a close look at Cecil Norris House.

After Three Decades, Our Council Builds Again

Readers may well know it as “the speckled house”.

On its elevation along Ravens Road, Cecil Norris House is decorated with a random pattern of white and red bricks. It is as if the new block of flats has broken out in a nasty little rash.

Coloured bricks are currently the go-to means of updating that most traditional of building materials with a bit of decorative slap and tickle. If you look at most of the buildings going up now, you’ll see much the same kind of thing.

Most of these brick walls, however, are not walls at all: modern steel-framed buildings do not need load-bearing brick. Instead, as at Cecil Norris House, they are sheets of inch-thick brick veneer applied to the outside of the frame as decorative cladding. Here, additional colour is provided by orange cladding panels.

The main elevation of Cecil Norris House ranges along Queen’s Place. Here, red brick cladding is used throughout. The three storey block on the corner reduces to two storeys further down. Full-height porches create deep balconies, meaning every resident has access to an outdoor space. There is extensive glazing including opening doors leading out onto the balconies.

The building is stepped back a little from the road and the boundary softened by planting and a thin strip of grass.

As the aerial view from Google shows, the original site was a difficult triangle. The recession of the new building – each block taking another step back from the road – is a clever way of coping with the tapering of the site east to west.

Cecil Norris House ticks a lot of boxes. It is a high-density, low-rise, brownfield development that packs 15 dwellings of various sizes into one small site. There are five one-bed and eight two-bed flats along with two split-level maisonettes. The £3.4 million block was designed by Brighton-based Liam Russell Architects (LRA) and replaced the existing care home built in 1972.

Back on Ravens Road, meanwhile, the new block of flats is not a noisy neighbour. The building does not disrupt the established building line of semi-detached, middle class housing. On its northern elevation, the windows at Cecil Norris House are small and angled away from these existing houses, which are therefore neither over-looked nor overshadowed. The southern elevation of Cecil Norris House faces trees and the railway line.

Attention has also been paid to sustainability. The flat roof allows for a large number of solar panels as well as a green roof to augment biodiversity. The location close to the town centre and the on-site bike storage are both intended to reduce the residents’ need for cars.

The End of the Housing Crisis?

All these things mean that, whatever one thinks of the speckled brick, Cecil Norris House is a thoroughly contemporary design. Yet the really remarkable thing about it is that Cecil Norris House represents the first Council housing to be built in Adur for more than 30 years. The flats are available to tenants on the Council’s housing waiting list at what is now called “social rent”.

In addition to the sustainability of the development, the quality of design and of the internal finishes is superior to many current private sector developments, let alone the standards of many older buy-to-let properties. As it did for much of the twentieth century, Council-built properties are again leading the way. You can take a look inside the flats here.

In his fine book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, John Boughton notes that by 2021 80% of Councils in the UK were directly involved in house building. This trend has been encouraged by public policy. Before they left office, the Conservative government lifted the restrictions on the Housing Revenue Account (HRA), meaning that Councils can now borrow money to spend on housing. Councils are also now allowed to buy back Right to Buy council housing under the Home Purchase Policy.

Most significantly of all, the new Labour government has recently announced that their new house-building targets for local authorities will include separate targets for Council housing. A sign of things to come is the large development on the former Civic Centre site. Adur’s partnership with Hyde Homes will provide 53 homes for tenants on the Council waiting list.

So will these new homes for social rent reduce the pressure on the private rented sector? Could a boom in Council house building spell the end of the housing crisis?

Well, probably not. Not as long as Right to Buy continues to exist. Because, as John Boughton also notes, in the UK as a whole some 70,000 new social rent homes were built between 2012 and 2021. During the same period, however, a further 210,000 existing homes had fallen victim to Right to Buy. That’s a net loss of 140,000 social rent homes, twice the apparent gain. That means for every Council house built, another two are sold.

In June of this year, Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham promised to build 10,000 social homes. He also called for the suspension of Right to Buy in order to protect them.

Right to Buy has already been ended in Wales and Scotland. To follow suit in England would mean curtailing the aspiration of many to home ownership, and a consequent reduction in social mobility.

But it will also be an important step towards ending the current housing crisis – a crisis that has reduced social mobility for an entire generation.

Richard Bingham