Quality housing in Hounslow: A vision

The London Borough of Hounslow is committed to delivering high quality housing that our residents deserve. Our ambition is to lead the way in providing affordable homes of the highest possible standards, ensuring that our towns and neighbourhoods have liveability at their heart. We believe this goes hand in hand with building vibrant, thriving communities.

As part of this commitment, we embarked on a mission to develop a unified vision of quality housing design in Hounslow. This involved undertaking a series of workshops with groups of key Hounslow stakeholders in order to identify what makes a quality home for Hounslow. The document before you is the result of this truly collaborative process. It takes a rounded view of housing design quality specific to Hounslow and it is the output of conversations with residents, officers, Councillors, and other key groups.

The vision put forward in this document will help us create an outstanding architectural legacy for Hounslow. It will help ensure that the homes we are building are of exemplary quality, designed to enrich the lives of residents for generations to come. To that end, I strongly encourage everyone involved in the process of housing delivery in Hounslow to utilise this document from scheme inception through to completion and use.

I am pleased to present Hounslow Council's Vision for quality housing design in the Borough.

In October of 2021, the London Borough of Hounslow joined three other partner organisations as part of the Greater London Authority’s Delivering Quality Homes pilot. The programme saw us undertaking a review of our housing delivery processes and setting out an action plan for improving the quality of homes we deliver as an organisation.

The Vision document before you is one of the key actions we have undertaken in our efforts to improve the quality of Hounslow homes and to help ensure that we are building a legacy of extraordinary places for generations to come.

It expands our Corporate Plan (2022-2026) commitment to create ‘A Liveable Hounslow where people can live in homes that work for them and in neighbourhoods where they can belong’ by setting out an ambitious but realistically deliverable quality framework that can be used to guide developments towards the high quality built outcomes we want.

It is written in a way that is accessible and user- friendly and can be picked up by anyone involved in the process of designing, developing or managing housing.

My hope is that everyone embarking on the journey of delivering housing in Hounslow can pick up this document and utilise it to guide their work towards the highest-possible quality outcome, resulting in outstanding homes for an outstanding Borough.

Hounslow Council wants all housing in the Borough to be of outstanding quality, and this document is a crucial step towards ensuring that we achieve this goal. It sets out an ambitious, but deliverable quality framework that identifies how we should measure what a high-quality home is. It goes beyond physical appearance and assesses a home in terms of health, sustainability, comfort, identity and well-being. In addition to being a simple and practical tool that can be used to assess the quality of a home, it can also be used to prompt conversations about housing quality, both within and beyond the Borough.

The document begins with an overarching Vision that sets out our ambition in clear terms. We then set out five Themes, which are seen as ways in which the Vision can be achieved, and a series of Principles under each of these. Under each Principle, a list of prompts is provided to help the user evaluate emerging development projects.

The Vision, Themes and Principles all align with, and support the delivery of, the Council’s Corporate Plan and priorities. They have emerged from conversations during ten workshops with Hounslow residents, national experts, local professionals, and other stakeholders.

The document can be used by anyone involved in developing housing proposals (whether new-build, retrofit, refurbishment or adaptive reuse) within the London Borough of Hounslow, as a guide to our collective aspirations for housing in the Borough and as a prompt or vehicle for design conversation. It is structured so that the user can find prompts to consider during the early stages of a project, including in the project feasibility and brief stages, as well as prompts to support quality during the later stages of design development. Taken as a full set, the prompts add up to a Vision for outstanding housing in the Borough. Every development should consider every prompt during its development to ensure that it is meeting Hounslow’s Vision of Quality Housing. Whilst intended primarily for use during the design stages, the document has also been written so that it can be used in support of evaluating completed schemes.

While not a planning or policy document, this document will be used to assess the quality of homes that are built by Hounslow or by partner organisations on our land and will be reviewed and updated regularly by Hounslow Council.

This Vision document has been produced as part of the Delivering Quality Homes Pilot, supported by the Mayor of London’s Good Growth by Design programme. Hounslow Council is one of four partner organisations participating in this Pilot, and the only local authority to do so.