HousingAlmost everybody in Britain

Housing
Almost everybody in Britain dreams of living in a detached house; that is, a house which is a separate building. The saying, An English-man’s home is his castle’ is well-known. It illustrates the desire for privacy and the importance attached to ownership which seem to be at the heart of the British attitude to housing.
House, not flats
A large, detached house not only ensures privacy. It is also a status symbol. At the extreme end of the scale there is the aristocratic ‘stately home’ set in acres of garden. Of course, such a house is an unrealistic dream for most people. But even a small detached house, surrounded by garden, give the requited suggestion of rural life which is dear to the hearts of many British people. Most people would be happy to live in a cottage, and if this is a thatched cottage, reminiscent of a pre-industrial age, so much the better.
Most people try to avoid living in blocks of flats (what the Americans call ‘ apartment blocks’). Flats, they feel, provide the least amount of privacy. With a few exceptions, mostly in certain locations in central London, flats are the cheapest kind of home. The people who live in them are those who cannot afford to live anywhere else.
The dislike of living in flats is very strong. In the 1950s millions of poorer people lived in old, cold, uncomfortable nineteenth century houses, often with only an outside toilet and no bathroom. During the next twenty years many of them were given smart new ‘high rise’ blocks of flats to live in which, with central heating and bathrooms, were much more comfortable and were surrounded by grassy open spaces. But people hated their new homes. They said they felt cut off from the world all those floors up. They missed the neigh-bourliness. They couldn’t keep a watchful eye on their children playing down there in those lovely green spaces. The new high-rise blocks quickly deteriorated. The lifts broke down. The lights in the corridors didn’t work. Windows got broken and were not repaired. There was graffiti all over the walls.
In theory (and except for the difficultly with supervising children), there is no objective reason why these high-rise blocks (also known as ‘tower blocks’) could not have been a success. In other countries millions of people live reasonably happily in flats. But in Britain they were a failure because they do not suit Britain attitudes. The failure has been generally recognized for several years now. No more high-rises are being built. At the present time, only 4% of the population live in one. Only 20% of the country’s households live in flats of any kind.
Private property and public property
The image of a home as a castle implies a clear demarcation between private property and the public domain. This is very clear in the case of detached house. Flats, on the other hand, involve uncertainties. You share the corridor outside your front door, but who with? The other residents on the same floor, or all the residents in the building? What about the foyer downstairs? Is this only for the use of the people who live in the block, or for the public in general? These uncertainties perhaps explain why the ‘communal’ living expected of flat-dwellers has been unsuccessful in most of Britain.
Law and custom seem to support a clear separation between what is public and what is public and what is private. For example, people have no general right to reserve the road directly outside their house for their own cars. The castle puts limits on the domain of its owner as well as keeping out others. It also limits responsibility. It is comparatively rare, for example, for people to attempt to keep the bit of pavement outside their house clean and tidy. That is not their job. It is outside their domain.
To emphasize this clear division, people prefer to live in houses a little bit set back from the road. This way, they can have a front garden or yard as a kind of buffer zone between them and the world. These areas are not normally very big. But they allow residents to have low fences, walls or hedges around them. Usually, these barriers do not physically prevent even a two –year old child from entering, but they have psychological force. They announce to the world exactly where the private property begins. Even in the depths of the countryside, where there may be no road immediately outside, the same phenomenon can be seen.
The importance of ‘home’
Despite the reverence they tend to feel for ‘home’, British people have little deep-rooted attachment to their house as an object, or to the land on which it stands. It is the abstract idea of ‘home’ which is important, not the building. This will be sold when the time and price is right and its occupiers will move into some other houses which they will then turn into ‘home’ –a home which they will love just as much as they did the previous one.
But the houses themselves are just investments. An illustration of this lack of attachment to mere houses ( as opposed to homes) is that two-thirds of all inherited houses are immediately sold by the people who inherit them, even if these people have lived there themselves at some time in their lives. Another is the fact that it is extremely rare for people to commissioned either by local government authorities-for poorer people to live in-or, more frequently, by private companies known as ’property developers’ who sell them on the open market.)
This attitude is so dominant that it leads to strange approach towards house prices. Whenever these fall, it is generally regarded as a ‘bad thing’. You might think that it would be a good thing, because people can then find somewhere to live more cheaply. After all, it is rising prices that are usually regarded as bad. But with houses it is the other way around. Falling prices mean that most people cannot afford to sell their house. They have borrowed a lot of money to buy it (sometimes more than its present value). They are stuck! To most British people, such immobility is a terrible misfortune.
Individuality and conformity
Flats are not unpopular just because they do not give enough privacy. It is also because they do not allow enough scope for the expression of individuality. People like to choose the colour of their own front door and window frames, and also to choose what they are going to do with a little bit of outside territory, however small that may be.
The opportunity which it affords for individual self-expression is another advantage of the front garden. In any one street, some are paved, some are full of flowerbeds with paths in between, others are just patches of grass, others are a mixture of these. Some are demarcated by walls, others by fences, others by privet hedges and some have no barrier at all. The possibilities for variety are almost endless!
However, not everything about housing in Britain displays individuality. Because most houses are built by organizations, not individuals, they are not usually built one at a time. Instead, whole streets, even neighbourhoods (often called ‘estates’), are built at the same time. For reasons of economy, all the houses on an estate are usually built to the same design. Viewed from the air, adjacent streets in British towns often seem design. Viewed from the air, adjacent streets in British towns often seem to be full of houses that are identical. Indeed, they are so similar that when a building company advertises a new estate, it often invites people to its ‘show home’. This is just one of the houses. But by looking around it, people can get a fairly accurate impression of any house on the estate.
But if, later, you walked down the same streets that you saw from the air, every single house would seem different. The residents will have made sure of that! In an attempt to achieve extra individuality, some people even give their house a name (although others regard this as pretentious). In suburbs and towns, there is a constant battle going on between the individualistic desires of the householder and the necessity for some element of regimentation in a densely populated area. This contest is illustrated by the fact that anybody who wants to build an extension to their house, or even a garden shed, must (if it over a certain size) first get ‘planning permission’ from the local authorities.
Interiors: the importance of cosiness
British houses have a reputation for being the coldest in Europe. Moreover, to many people from other countries, British people seem to be ridiculously keen on ‘fresh air’. This reputation is exaggerated. It is partly the result of the fact that houses in Britain are, on average, older than they are in other countries and are not so well insulated. In fact , about three-quarters now have central heating. However, there is a grain of truth in it. Windows, for example, are designed so that they can be conveniently opened to a great variety of degrees-instead of, as in many other countries, either being completely shut or fully open. This way , air can be let into the house in winter without freezing its inhabitants.
just as the British idea of home is a mental concept as much as a physical reality, so is their idea of domestic comfort. The important thing is to feel cosy -that is, to create an atmosphere which seems warm even if it isn’t really warm. This desire usually has priority over aesthetic concerns, which is why the British also have a reputation for bad taste. Most people would rather buy several items of cheap, mass-produced furniture, with chairs and sofas covered in synthetic material , than one more beautiful and more physically comfortable item. The same is true with regard to ornaments-if you want to be cosy, you have to fill the room up.
To many, tradition is part of cosiness, and this can be suggested by being surrounded by old items of furniture. And if you cannot have furniture which is old, you can always have other things that suggest