Housing

We walk up Main Street and turn left up Old Smithy Lane. The first cottage has a sign outside, “An old rooster lives here with a young chick”. We climb up past the old smithy and the [...]

In the past, Ann and I lived just outside the Lake District. Even by the early 1980’s, the area was full of dead villages. The cottages still stood, but the owners dwelt in Newcastle and [...]

Buying a new house in the Peak District is pretty difficult. The few new houses are built on brownfield sites because planning approval is impossible elsewhere. So, when new houses were [...]

The derelict cottage in the Peak reads rather like an old poem. Indeed, it even sounds like an old poem as the moping owl calls in the dead of night. The photograph shows the building exactly as [...]

I have moved house sixteen times in my life. Is that sufficient to give me the right to talk about building quality? And what, precisely, is building quality? Why did I wake up one morning with [...]

Is it odd to draw a parallel between housing in 2200BC and today? Perhaps, but let’s give it a try.