At a time when everything in the UK looks bleak, an environmentally conscious social housing scheme winning the Stirling Prize is a rare moment of hope, writes Piers Taylor.

Most people inside and outside the United Kingdom will know that it's a pretty rubbish place to live at the moment. The country is in turmoil, and completely divided. The difference between income and housing costs is the greatest it has ever been, and housing design quality and provision are in crisis.
So within this context, it is fitting that this year's Stirling Prize winner isn't an architectural trinket by a starchitect, but instead, good, ordinary, decent, resilient, low-energy housing that we can imagine much more of.
This stands in stark contrast to the state of current housing in the UK. The gap between average income and average house prices has changed between 1985 and 2015 from twice an average salary to up to six times average income. In London, the median house price is now up to 12 times the median London salary. With this, the quality of private rented accommodation is extremely low and the cost extremely high, and the provision of social housing ? until very recently ? at an all time low. Any notion in the UK of a benign welfare state has disappeared completely, and the government's house-building programmes are almost non-existent.
This year's Stirling Prize winner isn't an architectural trinket by a starchitect
Amazingly, it wasn't always thus. After the second world war, until t...