The Perfect Estate
Announcing The Perfect Estate: a potential new YouTube and podcast series about how London could build better housing
We’re exploring the development of a new long-form media project called The Perfect Estate — a potential YouTube and podcast series focused on one of the biggest questions facing London:
How should the city build better housing?
At a time when housing dominates public debate but is often discussed in narrow or reactive terms, The Perfect Estate is intended to create a more thoughtful and more public conversation about what good development should actually look like.
The project is currently being developed as a concept for a 25-episode series combining long-form video, podcast conversations, expert perspectives, and short-form social content. The aim is to create something that sits between design, policy, culture, and public debate — a series that takes housing seriously, but makes it accessible and compelling to a wider audience.
Why this matters now
Housing is one of the defining issues in London. It affects who can afford to stay in the city, how neighbourhoods change, the quality of daily life, and whether new development actually improves the places people live.
That urgency is reflected in the numbers. In 2025, London had the highest housing affordability ratio in England and Wales, with average homes selling for 10.6 times average earnings.
The pressure is just as visible in the rental market. The average monthly private rent in London reached £2,273 in February 2026, while annual rent inflation in London was 1.7% in the year to February 2026. Even where rent growth has slowed, the baseline cost of living in the capital remains extremely high.
Housing delivery is also under intense pressure. In May 2025, London’s affordable housing programme target for 2021–26 was reduced to 17,800–19,000 starts, and in 2024–25 only 3,991 affordable homes were started in London.
So this is not just a design conversation. It is a city-making conversation.
What is The Perfect Estate?
The Perfect Estate is designed as a YouTube series and podcast that explores housing through the lens of development itself.
Rather than treating housing as one abstract issue, the series would look at the forces that shape what gets built: land, planning, design, money, infrastructure, public space, and long-term quality. The purpose is not simply to comment on the housing debate, but to create a clearer, more engaging public understanding of how development actually works — and how it could work better.
The project is intended to bring together:
25 episodes
long-form YouTube content
podcast conversations
expert guests
short-form social content
a serious design-led point of view
What matters most is the ambition behind it: to make the conversation around housing more intelligent, more visual, and more open to the public.
What the series would explore?
Without revealing the full structure, the series would cover the real forces that shape housing outcomes in London: where development happens, who controls it, how planning influences it, why some places work better than others, what good design adds, and why long-term quality is so often lost under short-term pressure.
It would also bring together a wide mix of voices, including people working across architecture, planning, development, engineering, delivery, and housing. That breadth matters because housing is never created by one discipline alone. It is the result of many overlapping decisions, priorities, and constraints.
Why we’re interested in making it?
There is no shortage of opinion about housing, but there is far less content that makes the process of shaping a development visible, understandable, and worth following over time.
That is what makes this idea exciting.
The Perfect Estate is not just about housing targets or planning arguments. It is about how cities imagine their future. It is about whether development can be more thoughtful, more liveable, and more widely understood. And it is about opening up a conversation that is usually trapped between technical language and political shorthand.
In that sense, the project sits at the intersection of housing, design, cities, public imagination, real-world constraints, and better development.
Looking ahead
This is still a project in development, but the early response has been very encouraging.
If it moves forward, The Perfect Estate would become a substantial multi-format series: a YouTube project, a podcast, and a wider body of content built around one of the most important questions London faces.