Dear LPG,

I would like to start my message by telling you that I have no intention of moving soon, but every now and then I get thinking and, if your thoughts don’t get you down, I think it is not a bad thing.  I suppose that whenever I give it a bit of a thought, I like to find a statistic to back up whatever I am thinking about, and I found a few that I would like to tell you about today. 

I don’t think that anyone will disagree when I say you can’t help but notice that our homes are shrinking.    It seems to me that the newer the house the smaller the rooms.

I feel as if the builders are slowly conning us into feeling just as at home as they slowly lower our ceilings and push our walls in just a little more each year.   Houses have shrunk over the years, and you just have to take a walk down any road and look at the newer ones, and then the older ones, to see the difference. 

I remember the house that my family bought in 1956.  It was already old back then and my mum and dad often used to tell us children about how scared they were when committing to a mortgage of a frightening £3000 at that time.   There were two kitchens, four bedrooms upstairs, three reception rooms and seriously high ceilings.  Our bedroom was one of the ground floor rooms that was so big that my parents partitioned it with a wooden wall.  All 4 of us shared two fair sized double bedrooms leaving all the upstairs rooms for lodgers whose rent paid a lot of the costs of running it.   Now it has been converted into flats but when I pass all those old houses in Forest Hill and Brockley, they look seriously big even though I know that most of them have been converted into separate flats.  Now I live in a house that was built in the 1980’s and it is a lot smaller. 

I suppose that there are a lot more people to house these days and there are also more of us living alone.  The ceilings have also shrunk, even though people are generally taller on average, but I suppose that we never really needed ceilings that were at least 1 ½ times as high as we were ever going to be.   But the internet informs us that we 21^st century people don’t have to deal with so much smoke these days (from the smoking coal fires or cigarettes) which was one reason for all that extra vertical space.

I think that as ever we have all adapted to living in smaller spaces and, for those of us who have newer homes, if we didn’t fully appreciate our relatively cosy homes before, a year of lockdown has taught us a lot about being nice and snug.

I found some statistics about average house size which I thought might be worth looking at…

TK, Downham

TK shares her findings on the subject…

(►►►)   (►►►)     (►►►)    (►►►)