Last year I spent a week in Manchester filming a property programme. The producers put me up in a ‘luxury’ two bedroom flat on the edge of Manchester. It was absolutely hideous. The flat was tiny – pre buy to let its floor space would have made it more a studio than a 2 bedder. It came with tiny furniture – presumably to make its own tininess less obvious and had no storage space at all. It was a pretty dismal place to be. But worse than the flat itself was its environment. It was in a block in the middle of lots of other blocks. They were all new or a few years old and they were all weathering badly. They offered no outside space to their hoped for owners and they didn’t compensate for this with anything in the way of community spaces. There were no pedestrian squares, no coffee shops, no shops of any other kind and no sign of any patches of green. It was a true buy to let wasteland. And an empty and lonely one at that. I remember saying at the time that how odd it was that private developers seemed to have learnt so few of the lessons taught by the failure of high rise council estates: instead they had repeated them, just with less floor space...
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