A New Kind of Suburbia

There is a ‘perfect storm’ in UK housing: limited supply, high prices and low wages. This exhibition running throughout June, explores how we can do things better by building modern suburbs at a high enough density to create walkable communities, enabling communal amenities and facilities to thrive.

Conventional suburban layouts favoured by volume housebuilders maximise private space within a mix of housing types that are skewed in favour of large detached and semi-detached family homes, often arranged in a confusing and inefficient street pattern. The resulting high parking demand means that a disproportionate amount of the site is covered in hard surfaces, with the common use of rear car courts in addition to on-plot and street parking.

The homestead is Metropolitan Workshop’s response to creating high quality suburban housing developments that can provide considerably greater density than traditional volume housebuilder examples with a strong emphasis on flexibility, recreation, shared amenity, and local identity: embedding the scheme into the existing neighbourhood.

Our ideas for a new suburbia challenge and break the boundaries of the traditional housebuilder approach, to deliver a new housing model that is more efficient and flexible, with a dramatic improvement in the quality of public realm.