Flicking through the television channels recently and landing on show after show featuring house and garden renovations – Escape to the Chateau; A Place in the Sun; Homes Under the Hammer; Grand Designs; Garden Rescue; Home of the Year; The Great House Revival; Cheap Irish Homes – I found myself thinking of Prospect Cottage, the last home of the film-maker and artist, Derek Jarman. Broke and restless for most of his life, at the age of 44 he bought a rundown fisherman’s cabin on the coast of Kent with a small inheritance left to him by his father. A few months earlier he had received a positive HIV diagnosis and he wanted to spend the time that was left to him living by the sea.
In the six years before his death from Aids in 1994, Jarman turned Prospect Cottage and its surrounds into a hauntingly beautiful home and garden. For me, two things particularly stand out about the space he created: one is the lack of boundaries in the garden – it simply spills out from the clapboard house in all directions onto the shingle beach – and the other is that it sits in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station.
The shared narrative arc of so many property renovation shows on television is markedly different from the story of Jarman’s final years. It is a tale known in comparative mythology as The Hero’s Journey, a monomyth in which a resolute protagonist embarks on a hazardous quest, faces many challenges, gains insights and returns transformed. Or in this case, with their home transformed. Despite the rotten fascia boards, the dodgy load-holding beam or the cracked walls at the outset of the show, there is never really any doubt about how it’s all going to end. At long last the marble counter or stealth shelf will be revealed, the outdoor pizza oven will be installed, the champagne corks will pop, and the people featured in the show – white heterosexual couples, for the most part, who have or intend to have children – will, it is suggested, live happily ever after.
While entertaining in a Disneyesque sort of way, this fairytale creation of a highly desirable home and garden is no more than a distant dream for all those young adults still living with their parents, no more than a galvanising dream for all those older people still scrimping to save for a mortgage deposit while renting expensive accommodation, and no less than an impossible dream for those who are living in hotel or hostel bedrooms, in direct provision. But even distant dreams are seductive and encourage us to hardwire the underlying message here: work hard and one day you too can get a well-heeled foot on the property ladder and start climbing towards an earthly paradise.
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I dream of councils reclaiming all the empty properties in Ireland, renovating them and then renting them to people at affordable fixed rents with long leases
To say something counter to this – that not everyone may want to own a house or apartment, that many might prefer to rent – is to risk being dismissed as insensitive, even subversive, especially in the current housing crisis in Ireland, where one of the highest rates of population growth in Europe collides with one of the more sluggish construction programmes. Renting in Ireland, after all, can be precarious at best, a nightmare at worst: that letter or email or phone call arriving at any time to tell you that your home is going on the market, those small but upsetting violations of space, that song and dance routine required to secure a lease, not to mention the horror stories of extortion, the shocking overcrowding, the serious violations of privacy. Almost everyone I know who rents in Ireland is now desperate to find a way out of it, whether or not they started out with a dream of ownership.
But surely, it doesn’t have to be this way?
In Germany, for instance, where there are stricter laws protecting tenants, 52 per cent of people rent their home. The comparable figure for Ireland, between private landlord and local authority rentals, is less than 30 per cent. There is no direct correlation between “home” and “ownership” in Germany. Renting is not considered second-best, but a viable alternative, with no stigma attached, all quite at variance with the widely held view in Irish culture that renting a home is at best a stopgap, at worst a slightly demeaning necessity for those without the wherewithal to locate the first rung on that mystical ladder to ownership. Is this why there are never any rental properties on Home of the Year? Or never any mobile homes, for that matter, or council flats, or shared houses? Is it the assumption of these shows that only those properties that come with mortgage repayments are real homes?
There is a tyranny to monomyths, even of The Hero’s Journey variety. They narrow our vision and limit our options. Derek Jarman had a particular loathing for the cramped conservatism of Margaret Thatcher and he campaigned strenuously against her government’s 1988 Act banning British councils from “promoting” homosexuality (Section 28). It is surely no coincidence that the current housing crisis in the UK has its roots in two more of Thatcher’s campaigns: to extend home ownership and to transfer responsibility for social housing out of the hands of local authorities and into those of landlords. Somewhere along the way residential property has come to be seen as an investment for profit rather than as a space for simply living each day, as Jarman, who knew that he was dying and made his beautiful home and garden not as an investment either in money or in the future, created at Prospect Cottage.
We need more diverse and more imaginative television shows about housing. And perhaps we should start with the language itself. Wouldn’t it be healthier to find an alternative to “landlord”, a word tainted by historical associations with land grabbing, eviction, deception and violence? Wouldn’t it help to lose the negative connotations of “rent”? Above all, wouldn’t it be more accurate, and more productive, to call our current predicament a “home crisis” rather than a “housing crisis”? It might help to realign our actions with our needs, to show us that a home is not a problem that is permanently in need of fevered renovation, with the hope of increasing its market value.
Our current vision of modern arcadia, where each nuclear family lives in its own perfect house with its own perfect garden, is actually part of a pattern of social disintegration, a distressed understanding of home as a controlled and excluding place. Our gated communities, our locked parks and our ever-expanding surveillance technology are all recipes for isolation and loneliness, symptoms of a solipsistic desire to make beautiful pictures for ourselves without any concern for what lies beyond the frame. I dream instead of councils reclaiming all the empty properties in Ireland, renovating them and then renting them to people at affordable fixed rents with long leases. On the night of the census in 2022, there were over 163,000 such vacant properties in Ireland.
And I dream instead of modest apartment blocks being built in cities and towns all over the Ireland, to be inhabited by a diversity of people living in family units of all shapes and sizes, paying affordable fixed rents with long secure leases, with a shared open green space, a horse chestnut tree in its centre with a bench underneath it, and maybe a swing. Is it so impossible?
Whatever the complex roots of our psychic links between owning a home and having a family – and historical evictions under successive British administrations, the brutal abuse of the tenantry and the dread of the Poor House, where families were broken, all contribute their terrors – it has undoubtedly accelerated in recent years, fuelled by the presentation of ideal homes and ideal families in Home of the Year, The Great House Revival, Cheap Irish Homes, and similar shows.
On New Year’s Day 1989, Jarmon wrote in his journal: “There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” It is this honest wisdom that I love him for. Because we all living beside a nuclear power plant on the same overheating planet, whether we can see it out our windows or not, and all the walls and picket fences in the world can’t change that.
Cathy Sweeney is the author of Modern Times and Breakdown (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
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