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High prices make too many areas unaffordable. Does the past offer a solution?We had an adder in the kitchen once. My mum caught it in a biscuit tin and let it go out by the beck. Outside our front door there was a vast boggy field filled with sheep, and in the autumn, deer rutting in the copse next to it. Windermere lay hidden in a dip some way off, the mountains behind it. When the wind blew we could hear the beat of the music on the tourist boats. It was idyllic, it looked perfect – but it wasn’t ours. The countryside rarely is.I grew up in a tied house, which meant it came with my dad’s job as a forester. Rural industries have been providing accommodation alongside work for centuries. Pit owners built rows of cottages for their miners, foresters lived in cabins on the edge of the woods, slate quarriers lived in houses made with the slate they blasted and reservoir builders stayed deep in the moors for years in tin huts. Whole communities were created as the workers brought their families with them. Schools, hospitals, football teams, even orchestras sprang up. People living in these communities wouldn’t have felt isolated. But if you lost your job, if your husband had an accident, if the men went on strike, or if by some luck you managed to make it to retirement age, your house was snapped back up. Continue reading...