A Home of Our Own
BBC Radio 4

This timely ten-part examination of our national housing crisis (4-15 October began in the Cornish fishing village of St Mawes. Here, long-time resident Phil Salter was contemplating the spectacle of his cottage, bought via part-exchange back in 1989, when it was valued at £155,000, and now being worth something in the region of £1 million. St Mawes, meanwhile, had gone the way of other Cornish villages, repeatedly harvested by the small-scale developers known as “house farmers” and crammed full of second homes, and had seen its young people depart inland.

There was one relatively unusual gloss to this catalogue of blight, dereliction and booming property prices, and this was the guilt expressed by Phil’s locally born partner Judith. It was all the original inhabitants’ fault, she maintained, after confessing to not having wanted to live in her mother’s old house. After all, wallet-waving Londoners would have had to keep their distance, had not “greedy” locals beckoned them in.