How to get a house

UK (SANEPR.com) June 4, 2009 -- Everybody knows we urgently need to build more homes, but how, when and where will this happen? In this report, WORLDbytes interviews Ian Abley, an architect and manager of Audacity at the Plotlands in Dunton, Essex where from the 1920s East End working class couples built their own cheap homes on disused farmland. Could we do this now?

Ian Abley suggests we can, by collectively breaking the Town & Country Planning law of 1947 and building homes en masse on redundant farm land. He explains in the report that there are “6 million people in Britain and 26 million households living in 10% of Britain. There is ample space, there’s also about a third of Britain’s farmland paid to be idle. It’s perfectly possible to build..without going anywhere near the beautiful places in Britain.”

More of us are losing our jobs and the ability to afford our homes or to get on to the property ladder, the government is encouraging house prices to rise while the building of new homes grinds to a halt, this is the back drop to this revealing report. As the report suggests, perhaps now is the time to take matters into our own hands.

The report is available to view at: www.worldbytes.org/programmes/007/007_005.html

The filmed report “How to get a house” was created by WORLDbytes, an alternative on-line channel of programmes created by young volunteers which aims to get behind the headlines and promote a people-first perspective on a wide-range of issues. The programme’s credo is “don’t shout at the telly, change the message on it”.

The WORLDbytes online channel is available at www.worldbytes.org


For more information and interviews contact:

Viv Regan Ceri Dingle
Email: vivregan@btconnect.com Email: ceridingle@btconnect.com
Tel: +44 (0)7939 449 604 or +44 (0)20 8985 5435 Tel: +44 (0)7866 806 918