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 a 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 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. 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’

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 house 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.

This attitude is so dominant that it leads to a 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.

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Formality and informality	\|	Interiors: the importance of cosiness

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