RETURN OF THE BUNGALOW
They may have been unfashionable once but more one-storey homes need to be built to accommodate the demands of our ageing population, according to a report
ON A site at the edge of the Norfolk village of Wymondham a gated community with landscaped gardens is under construction. Once complete it will boast a pleasing environment of hedges and mature trees and each of the 30 properties will have a garage or dedicated parking and its own patio or garden.
Nothing particularly unusual about that, you might say, but what makes it unique is that every single house is a bungalow and that is a style of housing that has become the Cinderella of the sector in recent years.
Indeed, over the past three decades the number of bungalows built each year has dropped from more than 26,000 in 1986 to 2,600 in 2017 as developers look to get more bang for their buck by building multistorey houses or blocks of flats that provide a greater return. Meanwhile, planning policy has encouraged high-density housing and the preservation of the green belt.
But this week a group of MPs and peers argued that Government policies were “overlooking the housing needs of older people”. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People observed that the elderly living in the countryside are used to “low-rise environments” and that the “muchderided bungalow may need to make a comeback”.
Retirement housebuilder McCarthy & Stone is already on the case. Apart from its estate at Wymondham – where 60 per cent of the properties have been sold off-plan at prices ranging from £369,950 to £419,950 – it has others at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, and Buntingford, Hertfordshire. In all, the company has 240 bungalows at various stages of completion across 15 schemes and is in the process of acquiring land for a further 180 bungalows.
“As the UK’s population ages rapidly more people are looking for retirement housing,” says chief executive Clive Fenton. “We have seen huge interest in our bungalows.
This comes as no surprise to former shadow home secretary and Daily Express columnist Ann Widdecombe, who has lived in her bungalow on Dartmoor for eight years.
“What’s not to like about a bungalow?” asks the 70-year-old. “First of all they haven’t got any stairs so you are never going to have to worry about putting in a stairlift when you are older.
“Second, it’s like having a flat except that it’s detached and you have a garden which you would not have with a flat. And finally they are a better shape.
“They are good for the elderly, good for anybody looking after the elderly, good for anybody who is disabled and good for mums with children because they don’t have to cart their children up and down stairs. When my parents retired to their bungalow it was in a close which contained five bungalows and in those days four of those bungalows were occupied by parents with children.”
She adds: “And when a roof tile falls off you can shin up and put it back yourself! We should be building loads more bungalows.”
Widdecombe even has an old joke about how the name came about: “One workman got tired and he said to another, ‘Let’s bung a low one up for a change.’”
IN FACT the word dates back to the British Raj meaning “house in the Bengali style”. It referred to the sort of easy to erect one-storey residences encircled by a verandah that were constructed for British officers and administrators.
On their return to Blighty, old India hands yearned for similar accommodation and the first modern British bungalows, designed by architect John Taylor, were built at Westgateon-Sea, Kent, in 1869 to 1870.
They became a popular feature of English seaside towns in the 1920s and 1930s when thousands were built at affordable prices. There was another boom in the aftermath of the Second World War with 150,000 prefab bungalows erected to house those left homeless by wartime German bombing.
Now the pressure is on to build a new generation of bungalows to allow older homeowners to move, freeing up their properties for families desperate to move to bigger houses.
Last November former Cabinet minister Nicky Morgan said: “We have got to go back to building housing stock that people are going to move into in later life. In the Midlands there is a desperate shortage of bungalows and suitable accommodation for older people.”
But bringing about this shift is easier said than done, according to McCarthy & Stone land and planning director Gary Day. “In the rural context there is an awful lot of land that is protected through green belt policy or other environmental protections and in the urban area the emphasis is on smaller homes for first-time buyers from a planning policy perspective,” he says.
“In both instances it is quite difficult to bring forward sites for this type of housing. We are doing the best that we can because we very much share the general principles underpinning the report and we certainly feel that bungalows provide an important element of housing choice for older people.”
And he has no doubts about their enduring popularity: “I was born and bred on the south coast and we have got quite a lot of bungalow land in and around Bournemouth.
“My understanding from those estate agents I talk to locally is that as soon as bungalows come on to the market they are snapped up.”