Kirstie Allsopp: Why I’m right about detached new-build houses

I have the privilege – and it is an enormous privilege – of looking at people’s homes every single day of my working life on TV shows like Location, Location, Location and Love It or List It. In the last 10 days, I’ve been criss-crossing the country from Wolverhampton, Stoke Newington and Caterham to Maidenhead, Stamford and Stratford-upon-Avon.

While I don’t see the very poorest homes because those aren’t the ones being bought or redecorated, it does mean I see a huge variety of the average homes where people live in this country. And as I travel round, what I see more and more, often at the side of motorways or A roads – are new developments of quite tall, thin, sometimes three-storey detached houses with little tiny gaps between them. Often, they bear no relationship to the vernacular of the area and have to be driven to.

On the same travels, I’ll also go to villages and see houses built in the 1950s and 1960s, often in crescents of 10 or a dozen houses, some terraced, some semi-detached, often they will have large gardens, where neighbours know each other. Most villages in the UK have somewhere like this, built in the post-war years.

Last year I was in one of them in Chepstow, a brick house built in the 1950s, and I remember thinking, “my God, this is so much better built and so much nicer to live in than so many new-build houses”. It was no surprise that the people we were with ended up buying it.

This week I shared some thoughts on this on social media which I often do to kick-start a debate. On my Twitter/X page, I wrote: “Seeing more and more ugly, boxy detached houses being built. Terraced and semi-detached houses often have bigger gardens, more useable space and are cheaper to build. Are (sic) obsessions with detached houses is absurd” and I was immediately attacked for it. “Who wants an old semi-detached when you can live in a new detached?” one person responded. “Someone who wants more space inside and a bigger garden,” I replied.

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That is certainly what I have found in the past 23 years making programmes where Phil Spencer and I help people to find the right home for them. What is startling is that very few people who come on our show end up buying new builds. To be clear, we don’t do anything to make that happen. We take our house hunters to new-builds. But I can honestly count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have bought them.

I am writing this from my detached house in Devon, so I completely understand why people reading this will say, “what the hell does she know about it”? I’m not denying my privilege, but in London where I live some of the time, my home is in a block of flats with a communal garden that we share with six other families. If one of my three immediate next-door neighbours cough, I hear it.

So I do understand the challenges of semi-detached or terraced houses, but what I also see in the modern developments of detached houses is that in order to get enough houses on the plot of land, builders squeeze them in with just the smallest of spaces in between. The “extra” wrap-around garden you think you are getting ends up being mostly at the side and not useful at all.

Instead, if the developers had used that same amount of land for terraced houses, those who live in them would get more internal living space in the house rather than dank, dark pits between each one. They could build bigger houses in the same space, better suited to family life and better insulated because they have fewer outside walls.

In a semi or a terraced house, you can wait to see for your neighbours to turn on their boiler before touching yours because heat passes through the shared walls. And if you worry about also sharing their noise, remember that when houses are joined, it is often just a section – the rear extension on traditional terraced houses for example. It’s not that every room is stuck to every room of next door’s.

Of course, I get that there is a percentage of people who never want to live in a semi or a terraced house because they have experienced difficult neighbours, but it is also a status symbol to have a detached house. You go from a flat to a semi to a detached. That’s your journey and is very much in our national psyche. We are not an apartment culture like Spain or Italy or France.

But the result, I fear, is that as a society we are getting more and more isolated in our detached houses. We all know how many pubs and post offices are closing down. These were once the hubs of our community. Now we shop online, drink at home and live in houses designed to be separate from everyone else.

New-build developments next to main roads are detached from their communities, but if they contained a combination of detached, semi-detached, terraced and flats, then they would attract people of different ages and circumstances and so build a community.

I do see some well-built estates like this and that have a sense of community. And we do have some fantastic examples from the past of high-quality, high-density, community housing in this country – in Scotland in the amazing tenement flats you find in Glasgow and Edinburgh that are full of light. But they are few and far between.

That is why I am speaking up. I want to debate housing because it impacts everything: our health, our education, our relationships, and how we are in the workplace, especially with so many people now working from home. It is a disgrace that the housing minister is not in the cabinet and that we’ve gone through so many people in the role lately. We seem to be in a situation where no one wants to get to grips with housing. We think there is nothing we can do because the market leads. But we can if we start talking about it.