A HEADLINE in one of the big Sunday newspapers catches the eye. "Designer bemoans 'rotten' new homes," it reads. That's interesting. I've been bemoaning them for ages.

The designer in question is Wayne Hemingway, who is shown in a picture sporting a designer bald head and designer spectacles (both of which accessories are, or course, perfectly understandable and just so).

Mr Hemingway founded the now defunct fashion company Red Or Dead. Quite what connects clothes and houses escapes me, but let's push on. Mr Hemingway has interesting things to say and his observations should ring a few bells here in York, where flats pop up seemingly in the blink of a property developer's eye.

The 43-year-old designer dismisses modern housing developments as tasteless homes for tasteless people, and says that the bleak architecture and alienating atmosphere of the worst examples makes them "about as welcoming as Colditz".

Mr Hemingway describes most trendy modern housing estates as identikit three-story townhouses in a sea of car parking. This sounds similar to much of the modern housing that is being stacked up all over York.

"The fact is," says the designer, "that most of us given the chance would buy an old home, most people understand the difference between good and bad. New estates are the slums of the future and they are being sold for £200,000".

Walk round York and you will see any number of such developments, either complete or in the process of being built. It's the trend that interests me rather than specific examples (although how those flats on the corner of Huntington Road and Lowther Street ever got planning permission is an enduring mystery).

According to the article, Mr Hemingway's vitriolic views have "impressed many of the industry's influential figures".

Well, I should hope so. One of the problems in this country is that we don't have enough discussion about architecture. Crudely speaking, this is because it is seen as posh, arty or not for us. As a punishment for clinging to such views, we are left with poor and uninteresting buildings, especially all those "luxury" townhouse developments, each one a peel-off copy of the last.

Such estates, with their tastefully crammed apartments, all come, as Mr Hemingway notes, with somewhere to park a shiny new car. How strange that we appear to value design and good looks in a car, but just shrug when it comes to a building.

It is easy to worry about what sort of buildings this generation is leaving for the future. Aside from a few good examples - such as the beautiful Minster Library extension or the lovely, curving sweep of shops which houses Borders - so much of what is built in York these days is dull and intended mainly to make an easy profit. This is particularly so with housing.

Any future architectural historian looking back will surely sigh at the lost opportunities, before quickly coining a telling phrase to sum us up: the apartment people, perhaps.

What's more, many of these bland new builds replace fine and salvageable old buildings that could be saved and modernised, as happened to Park Grove School after the fire of 1997.

Nothing better illustrates the depressing trend in York than house-builder Barratt's wish to demolish Burton Croft, a fine old house in Burton Stone Lane, which was once home to John Bowes Morrell, the visionary known as "York's greatest benefactor".

If it gets its way, the company will send in the bulldozers and destroy an historic house. In its place will be built 24 modern flats.

Without wishing to be rude to Barratt in particular, I fear its proposed flats could not be picked out in an identity parade if lined up with other suspects in this great heritage robbery.

Flattening Burton Croft, or even just wanting to do so, strikes me as nothing short of cultural vandalism. And just the sort of "rottenness" that so annoys Wayne Hemingway.

Updated: 10:29 Thursday, June 24, 2004