London has a very high ratio of extremely nice houses on a road opposite council houses, or former council houses. There can often be a very large mix of housing in one area.
FWIW ancient Rome was also like this, and for example in Pompeii you can find extremely fancy houses with frescoed dining rooms right next door to single room hovels. They didn't have subways or mobile phones though.
It seems to me to be quite the feature ... well, everywhere except the USA. Certainly all over Europe, one finds this mix. In the USA, you generally only find cheap/low quality/small housing stock adjacent to expensive/high quality/large housing stock where there's some municipal or other border, and the two just can't avoid being where they are.
London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. It just grew over the course of 1600 years and absorbed other areas as it went. There are plenty of areas where a row of £20m+ homes are opposite blocks of 3-bed flats that go for a hundredth of that price.
Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.
Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.
However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.
National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.
As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
zipy124|1 month ago
HarHarVeryFunny|1 month ago
PaulDavisThe1st|1 month ago
ceejayoz|1 month ago
alexfoo|1 month ago
Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.
Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.
However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.
National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.
As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
drnick1|1 month ago