Professor Ashley Wheaton: ‘The average home needs to last for 1,000 years’
Posted on: 17 June, 2026
By Linda Serck
How long should a house last? According to one striking calculation cited by Professor Ashley Wheaton, the answer could be around a millennium. Here we examine what a thousand-year home would mean for Britain’s housing, neighbourhoods and long-term thinking.
The Victorians did not build houses with the year 2026 in mind. Architects between 1837 and 1901 – when Queen Victoria reigned – were hardly discussing whether their distinctively British red-brick terraces would still be housing families well into the 21st century. Yet here these homes still stand – solid, intact, and among the country’s most sought-after properties.
New builds, by contrast, have struggled to acquire the same reputation, dismissed by some critics as not being built with longevity in mind and little sense of permanence. Yet, according to Professor Ashley Wheaton, Vice Chancellor of the University of the Built Environment, these homes built today will need to survive for 1,000 years.
Housing in the 31st century
On the surface, it seems an absurd proposition: 1,000 years is long enough for languages to evolve and coastlines to shift. But if Britain’s population continues to grow and our housing stock is replenished only gradually, the maths suggests that the homes we build today will need to be able to house families in the 31st century.
It is a statistic, first published in a Building Research Establishment Trust report (BRE), that has largely escaped the public conversation on housing. For Ashley, however, the figure crystallises a fundamental problem in Britain’s housing debate., that has largely escaped the public conversation on housing. For Ashley, however, the figure crystallises a fundamental problem in Britain’s housing debate.
Speaking during a UKREiiF 2026 panel discussion on long-term placemaking, he said: “If you take population growth, the rate at which we build new homes, and the rate at which we replace existing ones, the average home in this country would need to last for around 1,000 years.
“Just think about that, because most of what we’re building today may not last 50.”
He added: “If there’s one thing we should focus on, it’s quality, and raising standards beyond building regulations. That, for me, would be a really worthwhile priority.”
Britain’s housing paradox
What Ashley stated on the panel hosted by The Land Trust alludes to a striking paradox at the heart of Britain’s housing story. Many of Britain’s longest-lasting buildings were constructed without any of the technologies we now regard as essential to good building design. Tudor houses and Victorian terraces have survived for centuries, yet built without the use of digital twins, structural modelling software, BIM, thermal imaging cameras or modern building regulations.
Across the country stand Tudor houses framed in oak beams hewn from mature trees, their naturally durable heartwood and repairable construction helping many of these buildings survive for more than five centuries. Victorian terraces possess a similar resilience. Constructed from solid brick masonry, lime mortars and natural slate, they were assembled from materials intended to weather gradually and to be repaired rather than discarded.
As Historic England has stated, traditional buildings can be “repaired and maintained over very long periods of time”. Their thick walls and comparatively simple construction also made them remarkably adaptable, allowing successive generations to update and alter them without fundamentally compromising their integrity.
Ashley believes those qualities have never been more relevant.
“We not only need more houses,” he said, “we need them to last an increasingly long time. Anything built in the Victorian era, which the majority of people find highly desirable, is barely a fifth of the way into that lifespan that we need.”
In other words, even Britain’s oldest mainstream housing stock has only completed a relatively small proportion of the 1000-year target.
Ashley added: “It’s really important therefore, that we build not just more, but that we also build well for the future. Homes are built to last – that’s really critical.”
This is not to suggest that every new-build home is destined to fail within a few decades, but concerns over build quality, defects and the longevity of some modern construction systems have repeatedly surfaced within the industry, as highlighted in a recent University of the Built Environment podcast featuring snagging inspector John Cooper, founder of New Home Quality Control.
Housing targets dominate political debate, but questions of durability arguably do not command the same attention.
Thinking about durability and placemaking
The arithmetic of the 1,000-year house demands a different kind of thinking altogether. It asks politicians, policy-makers, architects, planners and developers to consider not only how quickly homes can be built, but how well they will serve the people who inherit them, long into the future.
For Ashley, that responsibility extends well beyond the walls of individual homes:
“Equally, to be successful, we need to determinedly integrate green routes, active travel, walkability and cyclability,” he said. “We’ve really got to remove car dependency, and almost everything we’re building today appears to be exactly that.
“We can all see the apparent negative impact the neighbouring town because we build an urban extension with no services, no facilities, no amenities and lacking ‘mixed-use’ principles – consequently all of those residents then have to jump in their car to drive to the existing town. Surely, that isn’t our way forward.”
His comments reflect a growing consensus among planners and placemakers that homes cannot be considered in isolation from the communities that surround them.
That philosophy lies at the heart of the Regional Building Foundation, a collaboration between the University of the Built Environment and The King’s Foundation. The initiative champions regionally distinctive, mixed-use and walkable communities that respond to local character and long-term need, encouraging a form of placemaking that seeks to create settlements capable of enduring, adapting and flourishing long into the future.
If BRE’s remarkable calculation tells us anything, it is that the buildings and neighbourhoods we create today need to outlive us by many generations. The question, then, is not simply whether Britain can build enough homes but whether we are creating places worthy of a 1,000 year lifespan. Seen in that light, housing ceases to be merely a question of numbers and becomes an act of stewardship, one that asks us to build not just for the next generation, but for many generations into the future.
