In the week leading up to my 30th birthday I had some strange dreams. One stood out above all the rest. It was twilight and I was leaning over the gate to my granddad’s old garden. In the dream, the garden was just as it used to be – an acre of so planted with vegetables, with waist-length nettles in one corner, a little hillock in another, and a sparse line of trees on the long side adjacent to a paddock where a dun pony lived. Even while I was dreaming, I knew that the garden – and indeed the paddock – were no longer like this. I knew I was looking at something that, like just about every ‘vacant’ green space around here, now has houses built on top of it.During my lifetime, there have been houses upon houses built at each extremity of the village. The last couple of years have been particularly busy: it has been like a perpetual building site. The horses no longer spook at the skips and cement bags: they are a fact of life.
I have mixed feelings about all of this building work. I detest the disappearance of places I knew, places I played; yet I know that villages must grow. But the thing that annoys me about all of this building is that most of those new homes are not affordable housing for local people; they’re too expensive for that. Rather they’re retirement and holiday homes for the better off.
I read recently that locally, a house costs ten times most people’s annual salary. Am I the only one that thinks there is something fundamentally wrong about that?
