Stephen Blundell (00:01.475)
Well, hello and welcome to Closer to Home. I'm Stephen Blundell and I'm delighted to introduce my co-host, Dr. Hannah Absalom.

Hannah (00:09.672)
Hello, hello, very happy to be here. I'm really excited for this.

Stephen Blundell (00:14.553)
So, well, should we just start really by explaining what is Closer to Home and why are we doing it and how has this come about?

Hannah (00:22.526)
Well sure, yeah, I think you reached out to me after I'd published the Home Encounters report, which was a study looking at how social housing tenants encounter staff from the social landlord in the home. But what really resonated was that idea of understanding home as an emotional place. And I think we've really, really riffed on that. So, I mean, over to you.

What was it about that report and that idea of an emotional home that interested you?

Stephen Blundell (00:53.55)
Well, yeah, it came along at just the perfect time for me because I'd started to get a little bit agitated really about some of the things that were going on, not because I felt that the intentions were wrong, but because I wasn't convinced that they were necessarily changes that were as comprehensive as they could have been. So for example, there was a lot of pressure within social housing to change the language that was being used. So people were more or less instructed.

use the word home instead of unit which is clearly a good thing because unit is not a very human word and is very very unpopular understandably with residents but I started to worry that it's one of those things you see quite often these days. Changing the language might be necessary but it might also not be enough if you're not interrogating what you really mean you know what's motivating your actions, what's motivating your thinking, what are you taking into account.

in the formation of policy. And that's more than just swapping one word for another. And my experiences in practice within housing were that tenants often got a very mixed experience in terms of landlords' understanding of home from the tenant's perspective.

Hannah (02:13.194)
Yeah, was this of strange finding I found when I was doing my research as well, is that you have a sector that claims to have a social purpose. And I think for our listeners who maybe are not familiar with social housing, it's just helpful to understand that social housing is basically funded by the government. It's at a below market rental rate. And so it differs to the private rented sector and the owner occupier sector.

And I think it's fair to say both me and you very much felt at home in the social housing sector. But when we started thinking about the issue of home more broadly, it really becomes quite a challenging and expansive topic. And yeah, I really felt what you saying there about issues around language. And I think sometimes when we start talking about changing minds as much as changing language, people can get a bit of the fear.

like we're going to be checking them for bias correction. And that's not what we're doing today at all. Cause I think through our conversations, we've realized, wow, actually this concept of home, it's vast. It can't really be pinned down too easily. So this idea we're going to sit there and tell you what you're doing wrong is actually the thing that's wrong. We want to have this conversation and unpack the meaning of home and collectively.

get closer to an understanding of home together.

Stephen Blundell (03:45.452)
And it does definitely seem to echo wider trends in society, doesn't it? So certainly in the 30 odd years that I've worked in housing, there's been a real shift away from, I think, at the start of my career was really quite a laissez-faire relationship with tenants to one where the landlord is much more present in

in both the space and the kind of conception of home as far as the residents concerned. Some of that, you know, and we'll come on to talk about this, I'm sure, but some of that is about safety. Some of it is about taking a much, much keener interest in the condition and standard of the property. But those interventions, as you point out in home encounters, are not without their complications from a tenant's point of view, because that's...

very intimate space that the landlord is operating in there and there's all kinds of things that need to be brought in mind when doing that effectively.

Hannah (04:45.234)
Yeah, it's that, I think as well, taking that slightly longer view, you know, we had that cultural shift away from sort of seeing home in that post-war era as a location of like renewal and stability into seeing it as a means to sort of create money and investments and, you know, your home is something you make a profit from or it indicates status. And I'd say it's really...

very, very recently since Labour have come in that there's been the shift back to the material condition of the home. And rightly so. I've certainly delivered lectures to students about the condition of housing in the UK compared to Europe. And that is related to the issue of home, but it's only one small perspective of it.

And I share that concern if there's too much of a focus on just the condition of the home, it's going to clash against that emotional understanding, that more fluid understanding of what home means. And there is that tension in housing renewal and understanding a home. I hope we can unpack some of that today and just humanise this idea of habitation.

Stephen Blundell (06:06.508)
So one of the things that we've talked about, we've amused on I think, and I'm not sure that either of us is quite sure whether this is fair or not, but you know we are, we do find ourselves in the UK constantly talking about a housing crisis and I think it's well understood and everybody will acknowledge that there is a problem with supply to an extent that's certainly a problem with access.

in people's ability to access the kind of housing they need on terms that are sustainable for them. But of course, just providing people with the buildings is not answering the question of home creation or home formation or just a stable sense of home as opposed to a house. So one of the questions we've posited is, is it as much a home crisis as a housing crisis? And I don't know what you think about that.

Hannah (07:01.418)
I think it's a really pertinent question because there is that idea of space that's really relevant to this. So I think of the growth of houses of multiple occupation, which may be something some of our listeners not in the social housing sector can relate to. Because we have people who are performing the good citizen role, working full time, maybe have got a degree, and they're finding themselves in these

non-homely housing contexts where there's a lot of negotiation in that space and you don't really feel like you're belonging. And there's this desire to create a home in the future, to buy a home, to get out of this very unstable house of multiple occupation situation. But I think there's something deeper that's going on here in that there's been a general shift towards a normalization.

of instability. So we see that in zero hour contracts, we see that in short term approaches to work. And that does sit in tension still with even owning a property, know, a 25 year mortgage. How are you going to make that realistic if you're on short term contracts, if your pay isn't, if you've got more months left than money at the end of the month? So this concept of home, think,

intersects quite a lot with our cultural imaginary. There's a challenge here. And I think that there's actually something quite radical about encouraging conversations about home and saying, yeah, we know we've got a housing crisis. But yeah, that question, do we have a home crisis? And how would we define that, what a home crisis is and how that differs from a housing crisis? And I do think that bleeds into like notions of

belonging, like you have a right to take up some space, like you have a right to community. I feel a lot of that's been cut off in this move towards instability and treating housing as a profit vehicle basically. So I'm hoping we can unpack some of that today. So what are your thoughts on this idea of a home crisis versus a housing crisis?

Stephen Blundell (09:29.032)
Well, I think you've just touched on something really important for me, which is, which is that home is not a concept that's bounded to the geographical location of the place in which you live. It contains lots of other elements to it, which are, as you say, about belonging and about community. And that might be neighborhood level community, but it could also be work community. And it might even be an online community. But as you say, if you're thinking about,

more precarious forms of employment, those are not conducive to the formation of a stable work community and it could be argued that they directly militate against it and perhaps are designed to do that. And equally if people's social community is increasingly online, that is not undertaken on a neutral platform either. There is somebody in between.

Hannah (10:09.994)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Blundell (10:21.905)
individual actors and the formation of any kind of community who are directing that in particular way and seeking to obtain profit from that interaction. it's quite, even that's quite precarious, isn't it? Because the algorithms change, what's valued, what's not valued changes all the time. And that's not something that people have any control over. And that's an effect, I think, that's seen increasingly a lot across different domains of life, which destabilizes.

the idea that there is predictable, somewhere safe and a place of comfort, even if that place is as much a mental space as it is a physical one.

Hannah (10:59.182)
There's some notions in there about rootlessness, I think, and like, you know, who's giving you permission to like plant yourself in a particular space, I guess. And I think you make some really valid points there about, you know, I think, you know, the early days of the internet in the late 90s, it really did feel like this new frontier of freedom. And now I think, you know, I'm not the only person here who's backing off from...

you know, social media spaces, who is choosing to strategically withdraw actually from quite a lot of the digitally mediated world. Because I do feel I'm not the architect of those spaces, those spaces, if anything, are the architect of me. And I'm not liking having that authorship on myself. And it does feed into that notion of like, you know, how I'm creating a home, how I'm...

creating the space where I feel like I can belong in the world and what I'm strategically allowing into my home space and what I'm strategically choosing to push out. And there's fundamental tensions here as well, because in one of our conversations we've had that conversation about, you know, a house is essential for survival. You you need something, you need some shelter.

that puts a roof over your head to protect you from the rain. You need a place where you can retreat from the world and have that emotional space. But there's more than that as well. It's like, do we want to be thriving as a culture or just surviving? And I feel exploring and unpacking those notions of home collectively without inning it down. That to me is what thriving is about.

about an openness, about an exploration, about being okay with challenge and not having those terms where we meet with each other negotiated and authored by others. If I feel at home in myself and if I feel rooted in a place, I feel more confident to thrive and then be stable enough to think about how I can contribute to help others thrive.

Hannah (13:15.688)
and have others also influence me so I can continue thriving. it's that reciprocity that I feel maybe is a concept that's in home that isn't so much captured in this notion of a housing crisis.

Stephen Blundell (13:29.157)
Hmm. And that's almost to do with a sense of self, isn't it? And a willingness and an ability to engage in self-expression and exchange and growth, which requires safety, that, because it's not something that can be done.

when instructive, I don't think it's something that happens when people feel that the necessary preconditions are in place. So your, your kind of thoughts on social media are very interesting, aren't they? Because that has a real element of performance to it. That there's a set of rules which apply about engagement and discourse on those platforms. It's never fully disclosed, which, which creates certainly for me, exactly the form of discomfort that you mentioned, which is I'm kind of being manipulated here. I

I can both be myself, but also not because I'm having to abide by a whole set of rules that have never been disclosed to me that limit my willingness to feel that kind of integrity and that wholeness. And that is true in all kinds of different arenas that we can explore a little bit more. But that means you don't have that sort of dependable kind of

a place that enables you to kind of to understand what's motivating you and where you want to go with it.

Hannah (14:55.72)
Yeah, there's something in there about how, you know, like the digital world, the online world is a very categorical way of looking at the world. You know, it can feel like it's safe. I'm going to put myself in this bucket and then I know who I am and I can stop doing that investigative self work. No, you've just trapped yourself. It's a weird form of like...

inhibiting oneself in order to feel safe and I think actually I want space to bloom. I don't want to be put in a box so much and I do keep coming back to those notions of yeah home is more than this material environment but I still need to feel rooted and so think for me the concept of home yeah I do need a space where I can feel safe where I can feel I've got authorship over this space.

And I can choose who's in the space physically and virtually. But also home to me is as much about feeling I can take up space. I am inhabiting my body and myself and I have that dialogue with myself. Shapes my relationship with space, shapes my relationship with others. And yeah, there's so many different tensions that are going on and I can understand how people are like...

feeling that maybe the online world is offering more safety than the material world. But I think maybe we need to have claimed some territory back and home, thinking in terms of our own crisis is challenging. It's demanding material space, but it's also, I think, got more complex demands on there that we need to articulate ourselves.

Stephen Blundell (16:41.829)
Mmm

I'm very interested in the idea of the kind of the fixedness or the false certainty that might be created, for example, in social media environments where a particular individual is this thing or that thing. Whereas I would argue that the narrative of home is one that's constantly being written and rewritten in response to things that happen to us all, you know, good or bad.

that story is never finished, that story is always being elaborated and always being refined, which means there is no fully fixed nature to it because it isn't just about where you live, it's about all the things that give you that sense of rootedness and give you that sense of, I suppose, identity in terms of who you are, what your values are, how those things manifest themselves. And people do continually grow and develop. if we are

inadvertently imposing conditions on people that stifle that, that feels as something that's likely to have both individual psychological consequences potentially, but societal consequences that are relevant to the kinds of work that we've both been involved in and how that would need to respond. I mean, I know that you explored the emotions that are associated with home as part of the home encounter study. And I'm really curious about some of the

of key observations that came back from the researchers in that project.

Hannah (18:13.564)
I well, just to give a bit of context for people on that, Home Encounters was a Research Council funded project where I worked together with social housing tenants initially just to explore how emotions could be brought more into social housing practice. So there was actually a stage before Home Encounters which resulted in my first report, I think it was called Rethinking Regulated Housing.

And that's where I started really unpacking some more of these ideas about home as an emotional place. And I think what surprised me actually was we have this common sense understanding, know, home is where the heart is, closer to home, home is an emotional place. Yet it just does not find its way into policy and practice. And I would find myself having these bizarre conversations where I'm talking to like,

regular members of the public, social housing tenants, and people get it. I'm not having to explain anything in extra involved. I'm then speaking to policymakers and senior decision makers and it's like they're really, really confused. I'm like, how can you be confused about this? And I think it must be some sort of like location. If you're in an institutional space, then that space shapes how you see the world.

and you see the world through metrics and measures and there's this desire to sort of control and have authorship. That emotions are not something you can easily, well ideally you don't really want to control them, not really yours to control. But that was the strange thing that left me about that was like how can we have this emotional understanding of home? Yeah, organisations that are supposedly experts on creating homes.

just didn't seem to get the concept. And I'm like, you do get the concept. Because if I was to ask you as a member of the public, you'd know exactly what I'm talking about. But now I'm asking you as a policymaker, like, okay, okay. I'm so confused. How does that fit into my quarterly report? Bloody doesn't. Your quarterly report needs to be rethinking that basically. So I was really surprised at how much of a challenge there was in what I thought was

Hannah (20:42.152)
you know, just trying to create these like channels of communication and spaces for, for just listening to start with, like, how can we have this dialogue? I wasn't calling for anything particularly, you know, radical. I'm like, at this point, I just want to flag home has emotional meaning. How can we surface these things that, that matter to, to social housing tenants? Cause that's what that study focused on.

and why are institutions so deaf to this? And I'm just, I'm still sort of in that space. And it's been so interesting how much pushback I've had on different domains from academic sides where they tend to focus on the socioeconomic supply and demand side of housing, policymakers, practitioners. Yeah, it's...

it's so obvious to a certain level what we mean by home is an emotional place. But yeah, and I think this idea, I'm so pleased we've decided to explore the notion of home a bit more broadly. Yes, there's that emotional dimension to home. But yeah, that resistance that was revealed when trying to take these ideas out there.

There's more to this. Let's have this conversation. I keep trying to get people to have that. It seems to be weirdly threatening and I'm not quite sure why it is.

Stephen Blundell (22:10.579)
One of the things I really picked up from the report was just a deeply unsettling nature of the inconsistency that was observed. And again, I absolutely recognise this from practice and I'm sure lots of other people would too. Because some interactions between landlords and tenants are very emotionally informed and they are very much about

that individual's needs, that individual's welfare, that individual's thriving and how the landlord to the extent that it's able to can act in a way that's conducive to those objectives. But at the same time, some of the interactions are much more process driven, much more quantifiable and feel disconnected from the integrity of that emotional experience. And this is something that people debate quite a lot. And again, we can expand it more.

later on. But there's a real tension, ultimately, between the things that the landlord needs to achieve for its own purposes or for regulatory compliance or for safety reasons, all legitimate considerations, and the tenants need for their conception of home to be treated with a degree of consistency and seen as a kind of integrated thing. And we've talked a little bit about how

housing differs from most other public services in that the kind of locus of the provision of that service is not a space that's controlled solely by the agency that's delivering the service. So in a hospital there are very clear rules, protocols, very clear roles for people to fulfill including the patients, but you're flipping that completely on its head when you're entering somebody's home.

and attempting to achieve objectives that are connected with an organisation as opposed to that individual and that's a very delicate thing.

Hannah (24:11.05)
You're making a really good point there. I think broadly, you know, a home is in the real world. It's in an open system, if you want to use an academic term, basically. And it's about flow. It's about freedom. It's about thriving. So I use the notion a lot of like tending a garden when I'm trying to communicate, you know, what's different about working with the concept.

home as it is working with the concept of housing. And there are things that do require some rigidity. You you have gas safety inspections that need to happen. There needs to be a rigid process in place there. But if you take that logic too far, and I think you can get this delusion of control.

And that's a big thing that's sort of like happening. I've got my spreadsheet and I'm going to approach this world through this spreadsheet because that enables me to feel safe. you know, things are going to happen in an open system that are well out of your control, that you have no authorship over. Terrible things are going to happen sometimes in home spaces, domestic abuse, child abuse, you know, people having accidents and dying alone.

You know, it's not just a place of retreat and safety. Sometimes it's a place of horror, but we need to sort of be open to that. And our first thought, I think, needs to be more understanding and what is in our sphere of responsibility, what isn't. And it gets complicated because we are in quite a litigious culture. seem to...

negative effects of shifting away from a bit more of a collective notion of being a citizen to being a consumer is it has opened up this more litigious you've not fulfilled your responsibilities so I'm going to sue you combined with also a weird hollowing out of services as well so people who might have been competent in making sure that a service is being delivered you know where you need rigidity where you need a good electrician or a good

Hannah (26:31.43)
or a really good architect to be a real good expertise and professional. Well, that costs money. So that's been hollowed out. But then that opens up a space for just loads of mistakes to happen and suing to happen. And I think it has created this noisy fear that sits between this need for rigidity and this understanding that we can't have control over everything.

and the house is a real location for that. you combine, know, thinking across 10 years as well, I think that tension is particularly played out in the social housing sector because you have public resources that have gone into shaping what is essentially a private space. So there is this perpetual tension, I think, between where's the public ownership? Where does this public ownership and interest?

in this private space begin and end.

Stephen Blundell (27:34.43)
Yeah, and you could probably make quite a cogent argument to say that that was perhaps more clearly understood at times in the past and has perhaps been weakened as an idea by changes in the way housing is done in our society over time and perhaps that becoming

something that's viewed in slightly more proprietorial terms. I'm thinking about the rise of the private rented sector, for example, and the very much simpler nature of the relationship in many ways between private landlords and their tenants. But I'm interested in this notion of a quest for certainty and the anxiety that comes from not knowing what conditions prevail.

in a particular location what might be happening and the boundaries of the landlord's responsibility for that because clearly maintaining safety in terms of the function of the building is really very important. But that's become quite bound up now, hasn't it, with the not particularly well defined concept of vulnerability and the danger is that we're looking for hard data points. So has the gas installation been tested?

Yes or no, that's very easy to explain. It's either been done or it hasn't. But to what extent is the tenant being disadvantaged because of some form of vulnerability or other? That's much more difficult and blending those two things feels really uncomfortable to me and feels likely perhaps to end up in a place where those things are measured in using a kind of quantified proxy, which...

appears to create a sense of safety or a sense of risk management, I suppose, for the landlord, but in reality is not doing that at all.

Hannah (29:27.496)
No, there's some confusion, I think, as well, because I would argue actually that a lot of a certain type of vulnerability is located in the private rented sector, actually, because you've got a lot more insecurity with Section 21 notices. And I've certainly noticed here when dealing with a rogue landlord in my block of flats.

you know, he just didn't invest in the property. So you have this gradual decline in tenants who would contribute by, you know, tending the garden, being quite good neighbors to people who genuinely did have complex needs all the way through to a criminal labor exploitation gang being the last residents of that property. So, you know, is there some sort of cultural shift that's going on where

you know, we delegate the responsibility, this imagined responsibility to social landlords saying, it's just vulnerable people who end up in below market rental sector. Turn a blind eye to how many people who genuinely are do have these situational vulnerabilities rather than embodied vulnerabilities. So by situational vulnerabilities, I'm talking about how, you know, you might have a mental health condition that

be embodied or a physical condition that's embodied. But your situation that you find yourself in contributes more to that vulnerability. So if you're a wheelchair user and your doors aren't big enough and you can't get around the house, that creates, it compounds the vulnerability that's there. And at least in the social rented sector, there's more conversations about, know, do we build homes that are more

enabling of wheelchair access. Those conversations aren't happening with your small scale mom and pop style landlords. Even the good ones who are investing in the properties, they're not thinking in that dynamic way. They want the best tenants. Ideally you want the young couple who've just left university who are being quite professional. And then...

Hannah (31:45.608)
you know, as, as the investments in the property become less and less and it becomes more extractive, then you get that weird interplay between the situation, this person's housing circumstances, the condition of the home and how it's generating that vulnerability. And I do get a bit annoyed in social housing where, there's just seems to be, that's where the conversation about vulnerability happens. And it tends to be one that assumes an embodied notion of vulnerability.

in that you're somehow flawed because you've been given this property that is what we call residualised. There's more people who are waiting for this property than there are properties that are available. You've kind of won it based on going through a system that assesses you based on need. So you qualify for a social home.

by being deemed to be in housing need. And that process produces somebody whose vulnerabilities are at the forefront. Yet that's not, that's as much produced by the system. And so I can kind of understand in the social housing sector how we do have this strange focus on labeling tenants as vulnerable, but I would argue culturally as well, it allows us to.

look away from the consequences of having shifted away from seeing home as a place of stability to seeing it as a place to extract profit.

Stephen Blundell (33:23.477)
And that raises some really interesting questions for me because I've, you know, nobody could fail to have been troubled by some of the examples that we've all seen within social housing in recent years as evidence of something that somehow is not working properly or is not delivering the outcomes it should be delivering. And at the same time, I think we know, don't we, that

there are very similar scenarios playing out in the private rented sector all the time, but with a lower level of public and media interest in that question. And this I absolutely must stress is not a kind of what about. I'm not interested in raising examples from the private rented sector in a defensive way. I think it's because the narrative is different.

around both of those forms of tenure. So there would appear perhaps to be an embedded expectation that private renting doesn't offer security, it doesn't offer the conditions for home formation and it doesn't make promises about social outcomes and therefore it kind of is what it is. Whereas there's clearly a shared sense that the social housing sector is designed to achieve something more than purely providing

an internal space for somebody, but that may be so unclear, the shared definition of that, that nobody is able to fully explain the boundaries of it, the limits of that. And then we get into that whole discussion about whether the implication is that social housing is in itself a form of insurance and protection against any form of poverty or deprivation, which is clearly not part of its original remit.

Hannah (35:08.394)
Well, it's always been a strange location, of the public policy world in relation to housing. So, you you go back to the Beverage Report, which was the post-World War II, an attempt to sort of build a vision for the future and created a lot of the roles we see nowadays in sort of education, policing, schooling. And that was really about tackling squalor.

So you have underpinning a very uncomfortable cultural challenge when you start talking about housing in the home of how much is our individual responsibility to create a home, but how much is our collective responsibility to create a home there as well? Because, you know, if you're talking about squalor, then your conversations...

shift a little bit there but also there's uncomfortable questions when you do start talking about where squalor is lying and if we take you know the idea of squalor as being tied to sort of material condition of home it's the private rented sector that consistently has higher ratings of squalor it's also owner occupiers who are of retirement age who just can't afford to invest in in their home anymore and these are uncomfortable failures of

of a policy, collectively we've chosen to let happen, which is a home is a place where you make money, basically. And I just keep circling back to that uncomfortable question. And part of me does want to like pop that bubble, because I speak to a lot of like people in their early 20s who are nicknamed Thatcher's grandchildren.

Stephen Blundell (36:48.923)
Mmm.

Hannah (36:59.498)
Because I consider myself ideologically a child of Thatcher. I'm a child of the eighties. I had the whole mindset of I've been inculturated into that profiteering mindset. And it takes quite a bit of education and thinking to move away from that. But Thatcher's grandchildren just seem to have this untethered sense of this collective notion that was there in the beverage report.

Because people might not be familiar, but this government report, this really boring, dry government report, sold out. It had people queuing up in the street to get a copy of this report. There was this different collective notion. And now when I speak to young people, they all aspire to be rich so they can then invest in the charities they want to invest in.

Stephen Blundell (37:33.379)
Mm-hmm.

Hannah (37:52.154)
What constantly comes up is wanting to be rich so they can buy homes for themselves and for their friends. And I think that's a missing thing in this conversation about home as well is like, how is it produced collectively, individually? I'd argue it's both, it requires both. But where's our collective imagination in this?

Stephen Blundell (38:14.683)
And that's so crucial to understanding beverage, isn't it? Because I think that the word squalor is a bit loaded nowadays because it feels as though it contains an element of judgment about somebody's personal standards in terms of home hygiene or, you know, the use of the building. But it was never intended to communicate that idea. It was about people's inability.

to access conditions that were free of squalor or dampened mould or whatever you want to call it. And I think the particularly the interwar period and then the immediate post 1945 period, that was a very, very pressing problem, as was this confusion about whether housing was primarily designed to provide a steady income for the people who were lucky enough to own it, or whether it was actually performing some kind of public function, whether it was a public good. And that's been

contested of course ever since then. So yes, I suppose it'd be interesting to explore how housing works in our society in terms of the roles that people are expected to play because I think that is quite closely related to these tensions between whether housing is performing a wider social function or whether it's a kind of individual.

act of consumption or an act of investment. And that does vary between different forms of housing, doesn't it? The way that the society's expectations of how individuals conduct themselves.

Hannah (39:51.026)
Yeah, you hit on a, I think a strong streak that's particularly present in UK welfare policy and American welfare policy. I mean, you can go all the way back to the Victorian times and the start of like the roots of many housing associations and charitable purposes as well. And there's always been this slight tendency towards assessing whether somebody can be trusted with this expensive.

property that you've given them. And I think there is that behavioral blame in notions of squalor. And it came up again very strongly in the 80s. That's where you see a return of behavioral notions and this quite moralistic judgment that then became tied up with a judgment about whether you were involved in the marketplace or not as well. It wasn't just about you as whether you were

cleanliness and godliness enough to be trusted with this resource as to whether you were moral enough but also going to take a role in the marketplace. So if you look at the sort of changing role of the individual in creating the home and you see you saw this a lot under Thatcher in particular, the early days of that sort of pushing of a move towards individual rather than collective provision of

of housing was actually the idea of giving people a stakeholder in democracy. There was some rootedness actually in the first phase of privatizing the home. But then that seems to have run away with itself with profiteering. And we see that with what happened with a lot of council homes that were sold under right to buy. So I the initial notion was part of the, there's lots of reasons why it came about, but.

was this idea that if somebody owns the property they're more likely to invest in it, they're more likely to look after it, they're more likely to be an anchor in their community and that might have been what happened in the first generation of people who bought their house but actually a lot of those people became private landlords and then moved away from the areas because there's this notion of aspiration and status that's also tied up in the home.

Hannah (42:19.72)
which is a very British phenomenon. You go to other countries and there is a lot less status tied up in what tenure? But certainly in the UK, I won't speak for the European countries. If there's other listeners from European countries, tell us how tied status is in tenure. But yeah, we're now well away from that idea of owning a home gives you a stake in democracy. And we've got this crisis of...

we've created this mini exploitative class of people who I don't think they understand they are being quite exploitive actually in taking profit above stability and they can't see that there's anything wrong with that. And one of them, I'm very sympathetic actually because it is an enculturated belief and it's also produced by instability. Why would you invest in a...

Stephen Blundell (43:06.179)
Mm.

Hannah (43:17.028)
pension scheme or in the stock market when you can invest in bricks and mortar but the fact that is even a conversation that we're happening that that's happening this idea of investing rather than living in and inhabiting and creating and putting roots down that shows how moved away we've we've we've become

Stephen Blundell (43:36.152)
And that misses the whole question of what forms of economic activity are ultimately beneficial to a society as opposed to purely beneficial to particular individuals. That whole story, I think, about the privatisation of home, and let's phrase it in that way, that's got quite a long tail, hasn't it? Or quite kind of more distant origins than purely right to buy, because it's almost as though

In the 1970s, the state kind of reneged on its side of the bargain in terms of maintaining that sense of home as part of public infrastructure because, and you see you tell the kids this now and they wouldn't believe you, the state, particularly of communal areas on council states in the 1970s was appalling, which then undermines the...

the kind of coherent sense of home because it is more than the inside of the building, it's more than the activities that happen within that house. It's how coherently that connects with the shared experience with others is also, I think, quite a big part of it. And when that starts to unravel, home is changed into something that is much more privatised, effectively by those social forces. And you see it, you know, not just in rented housing, you'll see it in areas of owner occupation.

in streets where all the front gardens have disappeared, for example, because people have decided that they want to pay over them to put cars on, which is a choice that they can make. But in doing so, you are removing that little bit of space that is somewhere in between the private and the public, for example, the front garden, which is both a private space and an act of generosity, I suppose, to that neighborhood. And that then makes

homes turn into very inward looking, very insular concepts.

Hannah (45:34.442)
Yeah, this is where I think we start touching upon some of these broader cultural shifts. So we've talked before about how the roaming distance for children from the home, and I'm not getting the figures right here, but in the 60s it was miles. It was expected children to be miles away from home. And I was discussing this with a friend a couple of weekends ago who told me this horrifying story of like...

Her middle kid was supervising the younger kids, I think it was an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, playing at the end of the street. And a passerby called the police that there was these unsupervised children. So she gets a knock at the door from the police, that are these your children? Yes. You know, make sure that you need to keep an eye on them. She's like, they were at the end of the street, what on earth are you on about? So you then get these broader conversations, I think, need to be had about that.

Then we're moving away from the conception of home in yourself, home in that house space, to how at home do I actually feel more broadly in the UK? How safe do I feel to wonder about freely and let my children wonder about freely? And that again is another challenge that's built in there. And also I like the point you make about converting some of the home space to create

a space for a car, which I see. And I am, I will put my hands up, I've grown to be quite anti-car. I've gone from being traditionally English about cars to really not keen on cars. I'll put my hands up and own that. But I see the car as an extension of that private space. It's like I'm keeping myself safe from the world. I'm going to be in here. And I'm like, yeah, but you're cutting yourself off.

Stephen Blundell (47:24.822)
Well, they are. They are. They are. I mean, you you could argue until the cows come home about whether this is intentional or whether it's incidental, but they are a kind of a vector for atomization because they are a form of private space that's mobile. They don't have the social encounters that exist with public transport or with walking or with cycling. And they also create that kind of neighborhood severance effect.

you don't necessarily need a main roads to have that neighborhood severance effect, but you're engineering out those chance encounters between people who reside in the same locale that just create that baseline level of trust. And what you were saying about, you know, people being reported to the police for letting their children play, I wish that surprised me, but unfortunately it doesn't. But that's to do with the erosion of any sense of trust, which is a social thing. It's an economic thing. It's linked to all the incentives that you talked about.

and a presumption of danger and that whole question about what safety means and what role the home plays in it is definitely something we're going to unpack in a little bit more detail. But that means that home is not functioning correctly. If people feel that the level of threat externally is so gray, so out of proportion with reality, that they can't make their home extend beyond their immediate boundaries.

Hannah (48:51.698)
Yeah, and this is I think there's something powerful and we need to collectively have this conversation about home and what it means and reorientate ourselves a bit. I can genuinely say is I've started with the cycling that I do. I don't mean to deviate too much with this, but I think you make a really important point about those chance encounters. So I'm obviously stuck on the pavement a lot of the time because I don't want to die on Birmingham roads.

And I have to negotiate that space. And I've been making an intentional effort to say thank you to people and just have these moments of smiling interaction and do an intentional smile. And the difference that has been, I've been doing this intentionally for months now. And I think people are starting to recognize me and I'm getting quite nice interactions with people. And I'm actually feeling more joyful because I'm being put in a position.

where, I'm creating a bit of an inconvenience, but it's making me smile and be pleasant and have pleasant interactions. And I feel more at home where I'm living through these small chance encounters. So that notion of my feeling of freedom to roam and extend the notion of where I feel I belong is expanded through challenging that notion of space. And I do want my home to come back to, to retreat to.

That to me, I do need somewhere to come and retreat to. But it's like that notion of, there's an extension as well as a contraction, I think, in that notion of home. And that's where it gets complicated. But I do like that idea of having that conversation, know, as much as roaming.

Stephen Blundell (50:35.54)
I think they're quite intimately related, those things. you could argue that, oh, this is a bit of a stretch, but sometimes I feel it's true because I don't generally drive. And I see, and it shouldn't be the case, but I see things like walking and cycling as being sometimes bordering on transgressive activities because it's irregular and people find it a little bit confusing that you might choose to do that.

And I think we all know that I only use this construction on purpose, but people who are traveling by riding bicycles are associated kind of indirectly, at least with all kinds of appalling villainy. And I think you're obviously confounding that by interacting with people in a very positive way and kind of establishing that trust. And that's something that we saw in most communities, I think, really start to bloom again during

the Covid lockdowns because people had so little to do that they found themselves outside, they found themselves interacting more with other people. And it felt like that notion of home was expanding at that point and was perhaps on the way to returning to something resembling how it might have been in the past. But that seemed to get so quickly shut down as an almost kind of reflexive response to the challenge that that posed.

to people's sense of control and safety and agency. So that's another massive topic that we haven't got time for now. But one of the things that underlies this is, and again, we'll have to explore this more in the context of a discussion with some of the guests, but this slightly romanticized notion of the forever home, that's what people talk about. That's what the young couple you're talking about who aspire to own or occupation might have in their minds.

Hannah (52:09.524)
Yeah.

Stephen Blundell (52:31.717)
Certainly in my experience, it's still an aspiration, I think, within social housing. And you particularly see it with new developments. And it may not always be a realistic aspiration because circumstances change, people's needs, people's focus changes as that narrative of home is constantly being rewritten. And we also live in a society that is much more, where things are much more temporary and much more insecure in so many ways than they used to be that it may be irreconcilable with that notion of the forever home, in fact.

Stephen Blundell (00:01.452)
Okay well there's a lot to go out there and we'll have to come back to that another day. But I was just thinking Hannah, when we were talking about this earlier you described the project as a kind of expedition. I was just curious as to what you mean by that.

Stephen Blundell (00:01.23)
Okay so Hannah when we were talking about this earlier you described this project as a kind of exhibition. didn't, wait a minute. Well I'm going start again. Well it is that. It is that. I think it's because I wrote exposition on one those.

Hannah (00:08.821)
Have you got the Covid as well, Stephen? We were imagining... It's alright, extra something. Yeah, thank you.

Stephen Blundell (00:21.772)
Yeah. Right. Let's just get ready.

Stephen Blundell (00:28.63)
Okay so Hannah when we were talking about this earlier you described this project as a kind of expedition. I was curious as to what you what you mean by that.

Hannah (00:38.199)
Well, think it's through our conversations together, we've stumbled upon this notion of home and realize it's actually a vast new territory. think culturally, we've lost contact with some of these fundamental ideas. And it's not for me and you, Stevens, but the world's to write in a traditional podcast for my guess.

Stephen Blundell (01:02.344)
much as I would appreciate the opportunity to do it, yes I agree.

Hannah (01:06.851)
Yeah, we've got to, you know, this has got to be a broader conversation. And I hope our function really is about cracking open the space, the territory for this conversation to happen, to challenge some of the fear and silence. Because I know when we've explored how we might want to take this in different directions, in private, we've had amazing conversations with people and they've shared the most

personal stories of what home means to them. We try and get them on the podcast and they don't want to share those really personal stories and it's understandable but we need to be I think shifting towards the confidence to have that conversation.

Stephen Blundell (01:49.334)
Bye!

Stephen Blundell (01:52.966)
And that's the universal vulnerability that's associated with homelessness, which is something again we can come back to because that's not quite the same thing as the sort of form-filling type of vulnerability, but it is a universal experience, I think.

Hannah (01:58.115)
Thank

Hannah (02:04.643)
Yeah, and that's very much something we're on to here. So I think our narrative thread to reveal some of our planning to listeners is we want to explore this idea of like a home crisis instead of a housing crisis. And some of the ideas we've covered today, I think we've had quite a free roaming conversation about these different dimensions of understanding home.

You know, not just the physical environment or home as an emotional place, but home as the self, homeless, freedom to roam. And if we trigger people having these conversations and re-conceptualizing what action looks like. So returning to the point you make in the introduction about, know, I've introduced more emotional understandings of home and we've seen these ideas run away a bit haphazardly in practice in social housing.

And I'm pleased the ideas are gaining there, but I think we need to pause actually, stop doing stuff for a moment, have the conversations about home, collectively challenge our thinking, and then start imagining together, and that'll shape action. And yeah, it's a longer way around to doing stuff, but I'm sick to death of having other people make me move fast.

I want to sit down and have the conversations first. Let's be a little bit slow and homely before we start rushing away with these ideas.

Stephen Blundell (03:39.425)
Well, it's a big and very important, very deep topic. that's not, there's no conceit in saying that, but I think it is, but it's one that's definitely not been subject to enough inquiry and scrutiny over time. So in some ways, I think that's kind of a way of saying that if this all feels slightly messy, then that's a good thing. Because I think one of the things that hopefully has come across in this conversation is that the idea of home is necessarily quite messy, as well as being essential.

to people's wellbeing and thriving. So this project is all about opening up the space to explore that, to think about it differently and to listen really to people's very varied perspectives on it, which I know we'll get. And we've certainly got some fascinating guests in the wings for future episodes. And we're always open to offers and suggestions from people who would like to talk about some of these things. So just get in touch with us at hello at closerthome.org.uk.

Hannah (04:38.241)
Definitely be at home in our inbox, message us, we definitely want to have those conversations.

Stephen Blundell (04:42.439)
Haha, yeah.

No, that would be amazing. So yeah, thank you everybody for your time. Thank you Hannah as always for a very enlightening conversation. And we will see you, hear you next time.

Hannah (04:53.597)
we're right back at you. Yeah, well, co-host to co-host, I think it's going to be really interesting when we get the guests on and start unpacking our ideas. But there'll be other episodes where it's just me and you unpacking this because we've realised it's quite a big topic and we enjoy talking about this as well. So we hope our enthusiasm gets out there and gets this conversation going.

Stephen Blundell (05:17.718)
That's certainly true.

Stephen Blundell (05:24.681)
Okay then well take care and I'll see you next time.

Hannah (05:27.14)
Indeed, see you later. Take care, Bye.