We walked in Lloyd Park behind the William Morris Gallery admiring the quality of the adjacent terrace housing on the Warner Estate. As Michael Gove considers what to do about ensuring higher quality housing through design codes, it’s maybe worth remembering that these issues have been faced before. Thomas Courtenay Warner, the Mayor of Walthamstow and a liberal MP, ensured high-quality social housing on his family estate by insisting on good building materials, standardisation, but with a degree of latitude in the decoration, long streets, local parks and plentiful trees. Not difficult, but apparently normally beyond the capacity of cheese-paring volume builders:-