“I feel like we’re always living with some form of anxiety that something is going to go wrong.”
When Louise Rickman moved into her newly built house, there were issues everywhere she looked: broken tiles, a crack in the roof, a garage door that wouldn’t close, and mould behind the kitchen cabinets. She tells Nosheen Iqbal how the problems with her house only got worse in the four years that followed.
Why does the UK’s construction industry build so many poor-quality homes?
“It’s kind of rotten at every possible stage of the industry,” says the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, Oliver Wainwright. “Whether it’s the physical quality of construction, to what’s actually available on offer in terms of the limited range that customers have to choose from, to the kind of monopoly that the big volume house builders have over the supply of land.”
Oliver explains how issues around recruitment, training, and oversight have left the country with thousands of homes that will only stand for a generation.
Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
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