“Homes” or “Units”

I grew up in social housing. Almost every Saturday, before Covid interrupted, I paid a visit to my mother who still lived in the house we moved into almost 45 years ago, until she succumbed to a long illness in summer of 2021.

My earliest memory is of sharing a room with my mother in a women’s hostel in Blackpool, run by the council – high support social housing. I remember the other mums – as I thought of them then – helping each other out: babysitting for each other, going to the shops when someone was ill, or helping work out what yet another interminable form actually meant. I also, very vaguely, remember friendships formed and leading a bold and daring escape of all the other toddlers by raising a child gate and starting off down the stairs when the nursery staff were thin on the ground on their break.

After Blackpool, we returned to the village my mother had been born, closer to the family that my mum, as a single parent, badly needed. We moved into a council flat. I remember the long and tedious negotiations my mum had to go through to get permission for us to keep a dog – something my small but growing new circle of friends found incredible, living as they did in homes owned by their parents. I remember as well-being woken in the early hours of the morning when the tenant of the flat below – an older woman who took offence at imaginary slights and fought battles with demons unseen to the rest of us in the twilight hours – banged on her ceiling (our floor) with a broom handle to express her frustration and anger. I remember the shrugging of shoulders when my mum tried to talk to “the council” about it.

We moved onwards and upwards. As a strapping lad of eight, mum and I were given a house of our own on a relatively newly built housing estate, on the edge of our village. The houses had won a design award, which was very difficult to square with my other memory – of the otherworldly colourful cascade of fungus and mould that grew in the unheated third bedrooms of the three bedroom houses on the estate. I remember the battle waged by some of the tenants of those houses and how long it took for the problem to be taken seriously, despite the not-so-mysterious cluster of asthmatic kids on the estate.

My mother made and lost friends on the estate. I had my first kiss on the second hand sofa in our lounge. I remember the luxury of having my own bedroom – not something every child growing up in social housing has today. I remember it as my refuge and the place I could do my homework uninterrupted by the sound of the TV, or other noises of the house. While I left for the bright lights of the city (although Manchester in the mid 80s was shrouded in grey: the bright lights were yet to come!), my mother stayed on in the house living with her partner. I remember her call to say that he’d had a heart attack in the garden, returning a ball to the neighbours over the fence. The paramedics resuscitated him, for a short extra week of unconscious life, but he had briefly died less than a metre from the garden graves of my mother’s cats, with the crosses he’d lovingly hand painted for them.

My mum’s house was transferred to a housing association, new windows and a boiler were installed. As her health started to fail, it helped her get a stair lift installed so she could still get upstairs. And as it got worse, it helped us sort out a care package for her.

And the moral of the story? Like all of you who also work in and around social housing , I’m sure, I’m proud of the work we do. Our work helps provide homes for almost a fifth of our fellow citizens. It helps keep them safer. People live rich and rewarding or tough and frustrating lives in those houses, flats, or bedsits. They think of them as, and call them, “home”. As our professional world changes and tenants feature once again on the government’s radar (even if we have to call them “consumers”) it becomes ever more important to understand the needs and experiences of the people who live in the houses, flats and bedsits that we build and manage , perhaps we might call the places our sector owns, leases, builds and rents “homes” as well?

Darren Watmough, Principal Consultant, Chisnall House