A chance conversation with a friend triggered me off into thinking about housing. We were both expressing our concern about the fact that assuring yourself of secure living accommodation today is far harder than it was when we first stepped onto 'the housing ladder'. Young people today find it impossible to believe that when I bought Hey Farm in 1959 I got a good four bedroom house with seven acres of land for £2,200. Even on the small wages we had then (15p an hour in my case) this was only four and a half years wages. Even better, we didn't have to find a deposit, I borrowed the money off the bank who took a charge on the property and in effect bought it for me and charged me £15 a month rent until the loan was paid off about ten years later. All right, this was half my total monthly income but Vera and I managed on the remaining £15 a month, reared three daughters and Vera was never forced out to work apart from part time jobs for her own little cache of savings. We are told what wonderful progress we are making but I doubt if anyone could do this today.
So I asked myself “What has changed?” and this started me off into thinking about housing in general. You won't be surprised to hear that being Stanley, I reached far into the past to find a place to start!
Apart from food and the need to reproduce all humans need shelter particularly in northern latitudes like Britain where sleeping in the open would result in death from exposure on the majority of nights in the year. Looking far back in time a dry cave was a good solution. If we couldn't find one, some form of rude shelter made from skins and branches could keep off the worst of the weather. As people started to settle in one place with the advent of agriculture, these rude shelters developed into permanent housing with a surrounding wall, a roof, a place for a fire and some way of blocking the hole in the wall where you entered. (I suspect cold draughts were as unwelcome then as they are now!)
2,000 years ago we had got quite good at this housing lark and were building substantial houses using timber, clay and occasionally a stone for a hearth or foundation. It wasn't until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid sixteenth century that stone was used. Prior to that the masons had all been working for the monasteries or the king and his nobles. By the seventeenth century new houses were being built of stone and old timber halls were being rebuilt.
Apart from details of design, these new stone houses were basically the design we still use today. What I want to dig into is how the process of achieving tenancy or ownership of one has changed and as usual I have run out of space simply describing the question. Bear with me.....
An Anglo Saxon hall house.