House-sitting is an interesting experience. You get to leave your own life for a while and inhabit the domestic skin of someone else. Much of modern culture is built around satisfying our desire to take a break from the everyday — from films and holidays to pornography and dating apps. Some means are more morally permissible than others, of course, and chief among them, I believe, is house-sitting.
My sister has two Siberian cats that get a little rowdy if left alone for too long. She went away for a few days, so I was tasked with feline crowd control. She bought her property about a year ago — a new-build on one of the many estates sprouting up across the country. It’s a far cry from my own home. I live in a 19th-century Victorian property in Tutbury, a village in rural Staffordshire with roots stretching back to the earliest days of England. Just behind my house stands Tutbury Castle — once home to Robert de Ferrers, prison to Mary, Queen of Scots, and a stronghold in both the Second Baron’s War and the Great Rebellion.
Today, Tutbury is quieter but still lively. At its centre lies the High Street, a quaint stretch of Medieval, Georgian, and Regency buildings that now house various family-run businesses. Despite turning my street into a car park, market days offer heartening displays of enduring English community spirit. Even on the most grey and wet of weekdays, the village is animated. Why? Because it is rich in what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places” — neither home nor work, but settings where community life flourishes. While modernity accelerates into atomisation, Tutbury refuses to abandon the communal heartbeat around which local life turns. This stubbornness, paired with its protection of history and traditions, gives the village its distinct sense of place — and with it the groundedness of knowing where one is, along with the potential for putting down roots.
Moving into my sister’s house, however briefly, was like entering a different world. Her house is lovely, don’t get me wrong; she has a knack for interiors and for making anywhere feel homely. But where my home belongs to a place, hers feels like a sanctuary adrift in a landscape of nothingness. The area has no centre, no heart. There are no third places — only an endless web of streets, resembling an aerial view of the Underground more than a human settlement. Aside from cars darting into driveways, I saw no one. This, combined with poor construction and the seeming abandonment of aesthetic discernment, is the problem with new-build housing. They feel less like homes than placeholders — storage units between past and future, rather than places to live.
At a 2019 Spectator event, Roger Scruton remarked on our very British resistance to new-builds: “Nobody would object if you built Bath again in the middle of the countryside.” His point was about the need to build beautifully. But despite my instinctual horror at the prospect of paving over the countryside — however beautifully — it helpfully illustrates my own: objections would be far fewer if, like Tutbury or Bath, developments placed communal life at their core. Alas, housebuilding today shows little interest in either community or beauty. With no centres, no history, nothing awe-inspiring in their design, and without even superficial reference to cultural continuity, they give residents no reason to leave their houses except to drive elsewhere.
We rarely hear a word about this. Despite constant lamentations about how divided we are — politically, ideologically, even generationally — we seem entirely unwilling to confront the looming elephant in the room: the anti-social temperament of modern housebuilding. Listen to any news show or podcast and you’ll often hear about increasing loneliness and misery, usually attributed to digitisation or economic hardship. Yet it is seldom mentioned that our experience of real life is being shaped by separation and distance, due in no small part to the inhumane places many of us are expected to allow our lives to unfold in.
A cynical mind might blame silence on elite reluctance to challenge developers’ interests. Cynics may be right, but not entirely. In truth, we are all to blame for prioritising economics over the human and for accepting lives lived in unliveable settings. We all see the housing crisis, and few of us wish to rent forever, so we say nothing. Even the NIMBYs among us, a group to which I proudly belong, tolerate estates being built — so long as they’re elsewhere. And so the erosion of real settlements continues. But this model is unsustainable. Once the shine wears off — the thin stability of owning a house in modern Britain — we’ll face a harder question: how does one live in a graveyard?
In Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation (2023), now Reform UK MP Danny Kruger argues that traditional community depended on living, working, and socialising locally. He proposes a return to this model — where settlements sustain the fullness of life. I agree, yet our current approach makes such a vision not merely difficult but impossible.
So the question is simple: will we keep trading rooted life for cheap accommodation, or dare to demand the building of places worth staying in? If you prefer the latter, write to your MP. Protest new developments. Refuse, if possible, to spend money on new-builds in soulless toy towns. Demand places for life, not mazes of boxes that deny it.
Daniel Kelsall is a practicing psychotherapist based in the Midlands, with a keen interest in culture, philosophy, psychology, and politics.
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(Photograph Northstowe – New Town by Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Very interesting. My own observation is that whenever a ‘stunning’ new development is announced the story is always about the number of houses and/or flats, never a mention of the third places or indeed essential services that new inhabitants will undoubtedly need. I suppose the nearest Mosque always has plenty of room…
Additionally whilst those of a more mature age value and use third places outside the home, do younger people care about virtually anything as long as there is a good mobile signal and fast internet connection available?
Bath could not be built in the countryside, btw, because it would be a revolting pastiche like Poundsbury and those in the know about architecture and conservation would still highly object (then to be accused of elitism, snobbery and white privilege).
‘So the question is simple: will we keep trading rooted life for cheap accommodation, or dare to demand the building of places worth staying in?’ Good luck with that. Writing patronisingly from a middle class or even upper middle class perspective, of course most people with any soul or taste would like to live in your house, with its history and location – if we could afford to run it, never mind buy it in the first place. Even the apparently despised ‘pastiche’ of Poundbury is way, way outside the financial reach of most ordinary people. When you look at the Britain of today, you can certainly think yourself very lucky to live where you do and presumably not have to struggle to afford it. But please don’t preach to the rest of us about ‘writing to our MP’ and ‘demanding’ beauty or ‘third places’. Rest assured that most of us are well aware of what we’re missing, (I’m not sure the young care that much, but I may be misjudging them), and we could do without having what we are lacking rubbed in our faces, thanks. Wondering how to afford the basic weekly shop – yes, done online so that it only takes ten minutes and I don’t get tempted by luxuries I can’t afford – comes before worrying about the fact that I don’t live in a beautiful 19th century Victorian house with a historic castle nearby. As it happens, I feel lucky to live in a rented modern (not a newbuild) house, with a wood at the back – there’s beauty there, even without the castle and the independent shops. We consider ourselves much luckier and therefore more thankful than a good many others. Compared to my childhood in a rural English village where we didn’t even have running water, but had to get it from a pump, this will do quite nicely.
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Great piece thanks – new builds are horrendous prison cells built with cheap Chinese materials.
“cheap” have you been into a builders’ merchant lately?