Back to back to the future

Council housing, you might think, is common enough in London. We see early 20th-century pockets of it in inner London and the expansive post-war, modernist estates of outer boroughs.

But in reality, new accommodation for social rent has not been built for a generation. There is a chronic under-supply (more than 350,000 households are on the waiting list, according to the Mayor), and under investment in the homes still owned by local authorities.

Boris Johnson announced last week that the total public money invested in the capital's social and affordable housing over the next four years will be £1.7 billion, and he is expecting £2.5  billion to come from the private sector to beef up that sum. Labour critics say this is a cut of 87 per cent from the last agreement, and it is clear that the new settlement will mean considerable borrowing by housing associations.

So Anne Mews in Barking town centre, a £4.5 million development of 31 houses, is a real collector's item, the first council housing for 25 years in this borough. The houses are owned and rented out by the local authority to local families who moved in in May this year. It is very good architecture of a plain, ego-free kind that could be a prototype for local authorities London-wide.

Just a few years ago, Barking was a model of how the types of housing built in outer London boroughs in the Sixties had failed. The town centre had a scruffy yet vibrant high street and market but all around were the decaying relics of the old way of making cities. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the Lintons (located near the centre of Barking between the railway tracks and high street), a housing estate consisting of looming, 16-storey blocks that dominated the view of the town from the Northern Relief Road. These slabs were flattened in 2008, and few tears were shed. The Lintons was the classic case of a modernist estate that arrived with great optimism and promises of a better life. My father, who was brought up in Barking in the Sixties, remembers that his schoolfriends from the Lintons had the air of people living in the future. It didn't take long, though, for underinvestment and poor quality construction to turn this utopia into a nightmare.

So what has Barking built on the site of this aberration? Coronation Street, you might well answer, looking at the photographs of it here.

It's an intimate terraced street of modest, brick houses, each with a small garden. There are two types of house, by two different architects, of two and three storeys respectively. There aren't many cars, and children play happily outside. I'm guessing that most readers wouldn't object to having this built in their neighbourhood. It simply feels like a bit more of London, and indeed it is inspired by other London streets, in particular the cosy scale of Roupell Street near Waterloo, where two-storey valley-roofed workers' houses mix comfortably with slightly grander three-storey homes.

There are years of architectural experience and observation behind Anne Mews, in the shape of two of Britain's best architectural firms. Maccreanor Lavington Architects, which jointly won the Stirling Prize in 2008 for the Accordia housing development in Cambridge (I was on the jury that year, and it got my vote), designed the three-storey, four-bedroom houses. Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the architect of Westminster Academy (also Stirling-shortlisted in 2008) and much more, designed the two-storey, three-bed houses with the pitched roofs. AHMM was also the designer behind Barking Central, the dense, brash development of apartments that has transformed the centre of Barking around the town hall. These two practices have put in years of groundwork on the byzantine government regulations that govern the design of housing. While no one would argue with the need to make sustainable homes that are accessible for people of all ages and physical abilities, the ham-fisted interpretation of some of this well-meaning legislation results in the lobotomised housing design that blights all London boroughs.

So what is the difference in Barking? First, the architects decided to focus what budget they had in the simple use of high-quality materials. The houses have rich, almost rusticated London stock-coloured brick façades, with that rich mottle that is familiar to us from Bloomsbury, Islington or any other Georgian neighbourhood. Other moves are simple and economical, while still adding the coherent atmosphere. Both types of house use the same windows, and differ in their proportions and the treatment of front doors. The smaller houses have more colourful surrounds to the doorways. I have been writing about British housing for well over a decade and I know how difficult it is to make something that looks so simple; building a street of terraced houses might seem the bleedin' obvious thing to do in London but hardly anyone has cracked it. Anne Mews is just the first phase of the William Street Quarter masterplan, which will provide a total of 470 houses and flats, with another pair of terraces like these, combined with what the architects describe as "mansion block" style buildings of six storeys, an 11-storey apartment tower at the corner closest to the station, plus play areas for children.

Inside, the houses are well configured but not over-generous. They were designed before the Mayor's Housing Design Guide was published last year, so they do not conform to those space standards. The four-bedroom house, with its convivial, open-plan ground floor oriented around the kitchen (which overlooks the street where the children play), should work well, even if a first-floor living room might feel odd to some. The two-storey units cannot avoid the disruptive influence of having a ground floor wheelchair-accessible bathroom in the middle of the plan but the lounges opening on to the gardens are simple and decent.