My wife is from upstate New York and every home is made from wood, I don’t think I’ve seen a wooden house in the UK. Maybe one or two grade 1 listed pubs.
I get the proximity to cheaper materials, the availability of brick, local resources etc.. But I also see it reflected in the price £400k, for a 4 bed in East Greenbush (outside Albany), vs £700k for a 4-bedroom brick house outside Chester (I thought roughly equivalent, if not weighted in favor of NY).
Surely there’s a market for cheaper wooden houses in the UK? What’s the deal?
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Wooden houses in the UK aren’t cheap because the has UK cut down all of it’s trees. A lot of the reason the UK was one of the first nations to extensively use coal was because by the 1700s, there weren’t any more trees to burn.
I cannot speak for the rest of the continental US, but brick buildings in California have long gone out of style because they are generally unreinforced. Basically, the only thing holding a brick building up is the masonry (“glue”) between the bricks, compared with a wood building that has all sorts of connections that keeps it intact. An unreinforced masonry building will basically crumble in the face of rapid, violent shaking.
There used to be more wooden structures in the UK but they stopped after London burned to the ground. We’re much better at treating wood for fire resistance now than we were 400 years ago, but everyone got used to other materials in the UK. The US on the other hand had all that convenient cheap wood useful for mass-producing new houses as the country grew.
During the years after WW2 cheap and fast to make houses were needed. Added that US households move more often than others most people do not care if their home is going to need work in ten years since they are more than likely to have already moved.
TLDR: Fast & cheap houses after WW2 vets returned and then short shortsightedness.
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A lot of houses in the southeastern US are built with concrete block. Something, something hurricanes
It’s all due to building regulations. If I remember rightly ever since the great fire of London wooden buildings in urban areas have been restricted.. Buildings have to be made in stone, brick etc
It’s hard to overstate how rare wood was in great Britain and Ireland for the past few hundred years. In 1600 Ireland had 20% Forest cover (which was significantly more than Britain), its natural resources are one of the main reasons the British colonised it.
The rebuilding of London after the great fire, barrels for goods and a huge portion of the ships that crossed the Atlantic were built using Irish wood, and by the end of the 19th century Ireland had less than 1% forest cover by area.
This didn’t start to go back up until after Irish independence 100 years ago when the state invested in reforestation both to increase self-sufficiency and create jobs, and forest cover now stands at 11% with an aim of 18% by 2030.
[source: Irish agricultural development agency ](https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-topics/history-of-forestry-in-ireland/)
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