The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday June 16, 2005  In the article below we stated that "the highest proportion of British people now live in single-occupancy units" we should have made it clear that this is a trend and not an absolute figure. At 27% of all households, according to National Statistics, it is historically high and growing - and much higher than the average family with 2.4 children. Households with two adults and either two or three children comprise 16% of the total.  This weekend's Grand Designs Live exhibition at Excel showed us that, after all the hype and hustle, though there is a little new and more not so new technology, there is no new thinking about British domestic architecture. Excel itself is nothing but a blind tin hangar that can make no better use of its stunning site than to surround itself with hectares of crumbling, rutted Tarmac for cars to park on, maximal environmental impact for minimal reward.  The hub of the Grand Designs layout was a wheel of pink fabric from which depended a twinkling verrerie wittily carried out in yellow-handled screwdrivers; to get to it you were supposed to walk through a tunnel of the same gingivitis pink. If you suspected that someone was having a cheap laugh at your expense, you had Dairmuid Gavin's Never-Ending Garden to prove it, silver birches in pots standing in serried ranks within an enclosure lined with stick-on mirror plastic, the pots covered with live turf to make mounds in which were placed stakes holding packets of the kinds of seeds that might grow in such a situation. It was a suggestion, but, like virtually all the ideas in the exhibition, not a new one. Some of us have been using mirror plastic for 30 years.  The star of Grand Designs Live was yet another German kit home, with a steel frame supporting wooden posts and beams and glass curtain walling, under a huge overhanging roof. If there is anything new about Huf Haus homes it's their size. The kit house has achieved grandiosity. Before this edifice can begin its miraculous three-day rise, the ground must be excavated, and a concrete slab laid; what Huf Haus calls wood is actually newly felled spruce, or similar, sawn into wafer thin slices that are glued together to prevent warping. At Grand Designs Live nothing was quite what it seemed. The lady trying to interest me in an amazingly complicated system for recycling grey water didn't know that it needed to be driven by an electric pump.  The intractable obstacle to creativity in British domestic architecture is the identification of home with house. Ask a child to draw you a house and a 100-to-one she'll draw you a square with a triangle on top, three rectangles within the square, and a rhomboid on one side or other of the triangle with a corkscrew coming out of it: facade with door and two windows, pitched roof, chimney. It probably wouldn't matter if she were a Tuareg living in a felt tent, or a Tigrayan crouching in a tukul; the icon of the house/home would be the same. The homepage icon on your laptop is not a teepee or an igloo or the Trump Tower; it is the same pesky house.  Baron Haussmann obviously believed that apartments could be just as much homes as houses, and the result is a beautiful city. Palace is just another name for an apartment block, as Elizabeth II and every Italian have always known. Stacking dwellings on top of each other is the best way of reducing the built footprint; apartment blocks may stand in properly managed common land that provides habitat for the full range of species. They require less footpath, less hardstand; people who live in them in New York or Hong Kong can more easily do without cars.  But this is not what a Briton means by an ideal home. The ideal home is a fantasy environment for a fantasy family that, if it ever comes into being, will hang together for less than 20 years. By far the highest proportion of British people now live in single-occupancy units, but there is no new thinking about how to combine them for maximum benefit to environment or inhabitants.  People who say that they want a home of their own mean that they want a house. They aren't looking for a lean-to on the roof of a factory or a five bedroom flat in a luxury mansion block or a studio in a downtown co-op, but a house. They want to own their pleasure dome from the ground up, and they want it freehold. This demand has condemned us to hundreds of square kilometres of undistinguished suburbia, and will condemn us to hundreds more. Part of the Grand Designs operation is to assist would-be house owners in the search for a plot. Some of the merchants touting their wares at Excel were selling subdivided parcels of land just big enough for people to put too much house on. In Europe such developments insist on provision for car-parking underneath the house, but the young men in suits lounging round the model developments on the stand at Excel thought that parking in the street was fine, even though it meant 200 houses gazing at a landscape populated by more than 400 cars. On another stand young men were trying to sell, for £25,000 or so, hydraulically operated garages that you could stow underground, so you could park another car on top.  The dream home is a monument to the inhabitants' capacity for self-pleasuring, crammed with entertainment centres, luxury bathrooms, jacuzzi, hot tub, swimming pool. Beds, even children's beds, are enormous. Children have rooms, and entertainment centres, of their own. Most of the time this many-windowed barn is empty; adults are at work, children at school or after-school. The tiny family seldom sits down at the vast dining-table to dine together. The table and the room are for entertaining, or showing off the inhabitants' level of consumption.  Kevin McCloud and Channel 4 knew what they were doing when they called their flagship series Grand Designs. Observers of a future age will wonder why, as the British family shrank, the British home grew and grew, until it was catastrophically enormous. Never had so few people required so much illuminated, climate-controlled and upholstered space to knock about in. But this is the generation that has become aware of environmental issues. The acres of glass will be triple glazed, the floors of timber from renewable sources, the megalitres of water used to wash bodies and clean clothes will be recycled for washing the cars.  When Mrs Thatcher conceived the brilliant wheeze of getting council tenants to buy the houses they lived in, she might have known that they would become slaves to their houses, incessantly adding to them, upgrading, remodelling, redecorating, modernising, refitting, rejigging, endlessly tarting up and tarting down again. People waxing passionate about the size and cost of their extensions can be relied upon to leave politics to the politicians. The proletariat having morphed into the property-owning democracy, divine discontent would be replaced by aspirationalism and positive thinking. Life would become lifestyle. People in glass houses with hefty mortgages are not interested in throwing stones.  It would be nice to be able to say that the result of all this house fetishism is that the standard of British domestic architecture is improving, and even more wonderful to be able to announce that the devastating environmental impact of the spread of housing is being significantly mitigated by the adoption of new building techniques, but there is no evidence for any such case. Triple glazing might minimise heat loss and energy consumption, but the expansion in the house size probably more than accounts for it. The house is moreover crammed with rapidly obsolescing objects that are extremely expensive and difficult to recycle. Driveways, roads and sidewalks are all paved, removing hectares of habitat. The up-to-date garden is a conglomerate of decking, patio, and other forms of hard landscaping, a batless, toadless, outdoor room where insects must be zapped.  When the government announces that hundreds of thousands of new homes are to be built, we all know that they will be built in suburban-style developments, bungaloid or semi-detached, all facing streets full of parked cars. To suggest that the houses stand in common land, that they live within the type of natural habitat that existed before the houses were built, that the residents park their cars at the perimeter or keep no cars at all and use buses instead, is to cry for the moon. The very planning regulations are against any such innovations. To wander around the Grand Designs exhibition was to realise that, despite Kevin McCloud and despite individuals building houses out of straw or wooden Meccano from Finland, the British house is still an environmental disaster.
Grand Designs Live proved one thing:  that the British idea of what a house should be is a disaster, says Germaine Greer.