Britain's Housing Crisis Has Seeds in the 1930s

Take a trip out on the London Underground’s Metropolitan Line and you soon find yourself passing through neighborhoods of semi-detached and detached houses with gardens, giving way on occasion to green fields. In Paris or Tokyo, you’d be far more likely to be looking out on apartment blocks of three to six stories. The preponderance of low-rise single-family homes close to train lines and within cities is what gives Britain’s landscape its distinctive character. It’s also a factor in one of the world’s worst housing crises — but change may finally be coming.

How the UK came to be this way is a historical oddity. In the 1910s, the then-Metropolitan Railway marketed as “Metro-land” the homes it was building in areas opened up by its outward expansion from London — a pioneering example of an integrated transport-property developer. Like many things that the British invented but then failed to follow through on, this model was later adopted successfully by cities such as Tokyo and Hong Kong. A 1930s backlash against urban sprawl sent the UK’s housing model in a different direction. The Metropolitan Railway was folded into London’s subway system and gave up its role as a developer.