Stephen (00:00)
Well hello Hannah, how are you?

Hannah (00:01)
Hello!

I'm doing alright! I'm trying to get into a bit of a September vibe. Not sure whether to paint my nails orange or rent out Halloween films, so you know, I'm that sort of energy at the moment. And yeah! How are things with you, Stephen? You good?

Stephen (00:19)
Yeah, not too bad at all, thank you. It's been quite a busy week in many ways, but that's another story. But anyway, I wanted to tell you we've got some correspondence. Yes, we've got some We've had some correspondence.

Hannah (00:23)
Oh, fantastic!

Stephen (00:26)
It's

from Letsby Avenue in Newtown. It doesn't say whether it's Newtown in Powys or Newtown in the Isle of Wight, so I assume it's Newtown in an as yet undisclosed location.

Hannah (00:32)
Yeah.

I'm going with Isle of Wight

and it feels like the place where we would get some some readers letters straight off the bat.

Stephen (00:45)
Yeah, so dear closer to home, I'm not sure I understand what your project is about. I'm looking for answers, but I'm very busy turning myself into a new kind of citizen and I don't have time for mucking about. Are you able to explain the concept to me in a clear and accessible way? Yours faithfully, Gareth Flowchart

Hannah (01:05)
Well then Gareth Flowchart, you know when you get home, you pull your car up into your driveway, you open your front door and you wonder what it is that makes it different when you step across that threshold of home. That's what this podcast is about. So I think he's asking us to do a bit of a Prince thing and explaining a symbol.

So maybe, maybe what we need is a symbol to communicate that feeling of coming home.

Stephen (01:38)
See when you said the Prince thing I thought you meant because he's called Gareth Flowchart I thought you meant he's asking us to explain it in project management terms using the methodology formerly known as Prince but you would

Hannah (01:44)
Prince too.

Well,

it was formerly known as Prince, now God knows what it's formerly formerly known as. And I don't know if I could explain the concept of home in a flowchart. I think the challenge with this podcast is home.

Stephen (01:57)
You

Hannah (02:08)
It's so simple yet it's so complicated at the same time and you get it wrong in its simplicity, you start making it complicated in the wrong places, it stops being home. You try and make it too simple so somebody who might want to flow chat how you move around the home so you can be more efficient in how you clean the home is also undermining or misunderstanding where the complexity lies and that's...

That's why we want to have conversations with people so we can get closer to understanding what home means together.

Stephen (02:46)
We definitely found that, we? Because we started excavating this topic and just found this incredibly rich seam of kind of information. What we discovered quite quickly is that we all understand what we mean by home, but there really isn't a very hard and fast definition of that. There isn't a common set of...

principles that we have to explain what it contains. partly about how you feel, what you experience, your relationships, the psychological effect of having the safety of somewhere you can call home. But it isn't just within that dwelling, it extends beyond that in all kinds of different ways.

We've spread that out in the initial run into a series of topics that try to explore and unpack that a little bit. So we're talking about things like urban design and architecture. We're talking about the relationship between home and tenure and wellbeing. What it means, for example, if we find, as perhaps we have done, that we've turned home into a market commodity.

Hannah (03:55)
Well, this is it. I think I'm incredibly grateful to our Series 1 guests for taking a chance on the podcast because I know when we were approaching people, I think our approach changed halfway through when we realised what the golden thread was and the golden thread is that question we're asking ourselves, are we in a home crisis as much as we are a housing crisis?

But I think there's a powerful question in asking if we've got a home crisis going on, because it's hitting at some of the fundamental assumptions we have about how we operate our society, what we value in our culture.

the idea of home as an asset versus home as a place of stability and healing. And it's important to have these conversations.

if we want to make a difference on some of the big long-standing social issues. know, homelessness has just risen and risen and risen.

Stephen (04:58)
Yeah, you talk about homelessness and you and I both have careers in social housing and in part because of that we both know that just giving somebody a property is not.

solution in and of itself. It's a solution to an immediate need for shelter but it doesn't mean that somebody's able to flourish and I think we've come to the view that home when it functions well is a place of human flourishing which is you know some stages beyond purely shelter but what's interesting is we've got plenty of people in our society who don't have secure housing they don't have access to good quality affordable housing

Hannah (05:13)
.

Stephen (05:37)
and that denies people the ability to form a stable sense of home. But this damage to the idea of home is not limited to people on low incomes or with limited opportunities or people who are excluded. The idea of home and the function of home as a concept, as that place of safety, of that place of self-actualization.

Hannah (05:42)
Mm.

Stephen (06:00)
is damaged across all the different strata of society in various different ways and that's one of the things that's been most interesting about it for me.

Hannah (06:09)
Definitely. I think one of my takeaways unpacking what I've gained from exploring home is a sense of dis-ease when you really start pulling at what home So we've got a fantastic Halloween special episode and I think that one might be my favourite because...

I initially just thought it would be quite a light-hearted one where we're sort of exploring haunted homes, know, a of a jolly one. And it is jolly. We also get onto unpacking, think, understandings implicit within myths and legends about what home means. And so it has got me thinking, you know, exploring when home doesn't go well, exploring the myths and legends.

all the ways of getting a sense of what it means to be closer to home.

Stephen (07:09)
Absolutely. Well we've got to get things sorted to get the episodes out, haven't we, in a week or so's time, so we better finish and I'll better do some editing.

Hannah (07:17)
I don't know, I'm so glad you're doing the editing. I'm just trying to process and not have my brain fall out of my ears after bloody hell. just

Stephen (07:27)
So I'm hoping that we've given enough of a taster there for Mr. Flowchart but were there any other particular highlights of the work we've done so far that stood out for you?

Hannah (07:38)
I think each episode has had its own energy to it. from Richard's council issued underpants, which will stay in my mind for a long time. And Dr. Gregory's

research into wellbeing and really troubling that idea of owner-occupier status, know, owning your own home, is this nirvana that we should all aim to achieve. You know, hidden stresses lie in there. And just some jolly romp conversations that's sort of like podcast equivalent of an Enid Blyton picnic trip with the likes of Robin and the architecture sort of

Stephen (08:15)
Ha!

Hannah (08:19)
You know, I hope our listeners get a sense that don't just listen to one episode and go, ⁓ my God, that's just whatever. We're trying to get into this from different angles. We're giving you our first exploration. We're coming back to you going, hey, what do you think of what we found?

Stephen (08:35)
Yeah, but I mean, think that's fair. think we're still, we're still uncovering it. We're still processing it. Every conversation we have opens up new avenues. Every conversation we have creates links back to previous conversations because there's some really strong threads, I think, emerging that appear in all of these about, I suppose, cultural pressures on people, aspirations that they've inherited or picked up from somewhere that then become very difficult to fulfill in whatever way. It might be economic, it might be

Hannah (08:41)
Mm.

Stephen (09:05)
it might be for all kinds of different reasons, but all of those things make the formation and maintenance of home as an idea more difficult perhaps. And I don't recall ever hearing conversations about this before. So we've either gone down a completely loopy rabbit hole or we've uncovered what we would suggest is a rich and interesting seam.

Hannah (09:29)
in order to feel at home in our culture, we need creative spaces to have these dialogues and conversations. And I would scope that out more broadly to other creative happenings, be it music, art and such like.

You can't capture what home means in a flowchart or a spreadsheet. You just can't. It's an illusion. So how can we? Yeah, sorry Gareth. See how you feel after you've listened to the entire series and write us another letter.

Stephen (09:52)
Sorry Gareth.

Well he may write back, who knows, we'll find out won't we. yeah, so well

I hope people give it a whirl. I say we're launching next week so that's helped.

Hannah (10:10)
Yeah, no worries. Thanks, Stephen.