Stocking Up

How Can The London Stock Brick Once Again Provide Housing Stock For London?

Trellick Tower, North Kensington, London

The shortage of London housing has reached a critical point. 65,000 new homes are needed per year to keep up with the demands of an ever increasing urban population. The group that has suffered the most are the young families that can no longer afford to live in London. Prices even on the outskirts are ten times the average yearly salary, with each passing year young families are pushed further away from the bustling heart of London and towards the suburbs. Stocking Up seeks to find a solution to this dispersal and reignite communities being increasingly broken apart and isolated.

Stocking Up explores a new housing typology for London, a typology that builds upon traditional London building vernaculars especially that of the London Stock Brick and questions how it can once again provide a re-stock of housing for the Capital. The project will start today and grow exponentially; Stocking up seeks to utilise the ‘spare room’ of Trellick Tower and create a model to fill the spare room of an entire city. The growth of the scheme relies on the people that will live there to help build their own homes using the very material that sits beneath their feet, London clay. Sourcing as much material as possible from site not only reduces the cost and environmental impact but provides its future residents with the opportunity to become part of the solution to the housing shortage.

Stocking Up is centred around the thing that makes London special, community. It achieves this by encouraging strong communities ties created in ‘Vertical Inhabitation’ a form of communal living, its self-build delivery and its procurement centred around a Community Land Trust.