Tag: Home

Living the tension

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Don’t worry, this isn’t about watching England play at the World Cup. It’s about feeling the tension between different ways of working and noticing those issues can also translate into how people make decisions in day to day life. What has been emerging is that my own process is showing me that change and creativity don’t always emerge from maximum efficiency.

As someone who is self-funding their PhD beyond having a scholarship to pay their tuition fees, I’m definitely motivated to try and get my PhD completed more quickly. But I’m not ‘just’ here to get a PhD – I want to produce work that is useful and will make a difference.

In some respects then, that context creates the conditions to try and move more quickly and to let go of aspects that feel less clearly defined or on the critical path to delivery. Going for efficiency in the tasks and trying to find ways to do them as effectively as possible.

Yet I’ve had an ongoing tension between the sense that my ambitions and interests are broader than the subject of the PhD, while also needing to develop a PhD project that is discretely bounded enough that it can be completed. I didn’t realise I was doing this but I’ve been reaching towards a broader articulation of the subject and what it is I’m really trying to explore. That has led to a constant baseline level of questioning when doing things about that disconnect as it manifests in a particular area.

The background hum was getting louder and impacting on my ability to be more efficient and effective. The irony of observing myself feeling like I’ve made a decision about the next task I’m going to work on or how I’ll approach something and then feeling like it isn’t quite made as I have that discussion in my head. Eventually it brought me back to some activities that had been postponed week after week, despite having felt them to be useful, where I intentionally give myself a chunk of time to just think, explore and generally thought-shower and play without having to have an end goal in mind. It’s something I’m constantly wanting to do and so creating some time where I’ve got an outlet for that seemed like it was a good idea, felt great when I was doing it and yet got moved into the next week time after time because it didn’t feel like quite the right thing to do.

In giving myself the space to just play, listen to that background hum and try to make sense of it I think I now have a clearer sense of the different layers and linkages between those things. Seeing my PhD as a way to explore ideas through a particular case study that can inform the wider work and underlying questions I’m interested in. Peeling the onion and seeing that I’m still absolutely fascinated by my PhD but also being able to place it in the context of questions that are about what it is that enables some people to make a change and yet others don’t. Exploring and trying to make sense of what kinds of factors help indicate whether something is going to catalyse action or whether it is a good idea that won’t translate.

What felt like a luxury I could live without, even as I could see the value of it, became something that has helped speed things up and brought more clarity to the things I am doing. With that clearer articulation of the different layers and what I’m really trying to explore, I was able to revisit some things like the survey I had drafted and update the questions before they went out into the world. They are still aligned to answering the PhD but also link better to the overarching questions I’m interested in.

Given a lot of what I’m exploring through the PhD is around decision making, that sense of a tension between feeling like the need for speed was helping me make a decision, and realising it was hindering me has been interesting. There can be an underlying sense of a need for speed in decisions people are trying to get agreed that relate to environmental or climate issues – whether it’s an organisational or individual level. That might relate to the urgency of addressing issues that the science and natural systems drives, or it can be artificially generated urgency relating to funding or financing offers that are time limited. John Vaillant in ‘Fire and Flood’ is good at drawing out the different timescales that people can operate at and how time can be experienced differently – what feels fast in terms of the science can feel slow in terms of how humans experience it.

For myself, it’s been a good reminder from that some ways of working which are useful need to be protected in my days and weeks from a practical perspective. Doing a PhD gives me the space to make that happen and become embedded that will hopefully make it easier to protect that whatever comes next. It’s also been a useful reflection to take with me when looking at the circumstances that are being created for people we are trying to get decisions from.

Same but different?

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As summer temperatures increase, at night as well as during the day, people are becoming increasingly aware of how uncomfortable their homes can be but there isn’t an easy fix. One of my PhD supervisors reflects on the fact that part of the challenge is that the same homes are both too hot in summer and too cold in winter. We’re not, for the most part, trying to address one issue in one set of homes and the other issue in the rest of the homes. Yet we’re better equipped for dealing with the cold than we are the hot.

In the event of cold weather, most homes can be improved if you were to throw lots of money at it, without doing anything to the home. You could just subsidise people’s bills, or flat out pay the whole lot. It would be massively expensive and wasteful but still, there’s an immediate lever that could be pulled if we lived in a parallel universe and felt that something needed to be done. We already have an equivalent for cold weather of the Winter Fuel Discount and the Energy Bills Support Scheme in 2022.

Most homes have central heating, so to try and warm up the homes it’s then a case of having the heating on more. Census data from 2021 suggests that only c.1.2% of homes don’t have central heating so there are a lot of homes where it is then easier to provide funding towards the cost of energy to make it more affordable. For those households that aren’t using mains electricity or gas to power their central heating there would be more steps because they have to procure extra oil or solid fuel. If they already have this fuel system, this is something that they are used to doing and would have suppliers that they are able to contact to try and source supplies.

That isn’t the case in terms of cooling a home though. Even if you subsidised everyone’s bills in the same way to try and make the home cooler, there would be more steps in between. Some of that would involve getting more immediate cooling options such as fans or cooling units. Having invested in a fan the internet told me was whisper quiet and effective, which turned out not to be so, I don’t think we can assume that it’s quick or straightforward for people to get something which will make a difference. There are things that could be done but they aren’t quick – from shades, shutters and awnings to more hard-core air conditioning units. That means there are a lot more steps, which need a lot more levers.

This also suggests that where possible, it obviously doesn’t make sense for people to be coming up with separate but related proposals. Too often adaptation and mitigation can get separated out but in many cases it should be the same approach which addresses both, or could be the same approach with some tweaks. That if there are going to be works done to a home, they should be things that will make sense for as many of those scenarios as possible. Instead – as my supervisor’s work surfaces – they can work against each other. Measures to improve the ability of the home to retain the warmth in winter can, if not properly detailed and dealt with as part of a wider approach which considers ventilation, make the home warmer or more difficult to cool in summer too.

If vulnerability is a mix of the underlying circumstances and the extent to which you can or can’t adjust, then these heatwaves reflect how much more vulnerable we are to hotter weather than cold weather. The design of our buildings increases our vulnerability as the climate warms up because, for the most part, they aren’t designed to cope with this amount of heat, this regularly – particularly with nights where the temperature doesn’t drop that much. The fact we have much less ability and focus on managing in the heat than the cold will continue to exacerbate this. A lack of quick levers we can pull to try and help (some?) people in emergencies compounds all of this.

Addressing this vulnerability therefore needs a focus on both addressing the underlying conditions alongside the levers to provide more immediate support. To date the focus has been more on trying to address the way buildings operate or how we can use them differently. Reducing the vulnerability to extreme heat will need a more systems based approach to try and make a substantive difference, focusing on one aspect is better than nothing but ultimately has limitations.

Dis-aggregating the home

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It sounds obvious but it can be helpful to think about the home in terms of the different parts and how they have changed, recognising elements don’t all change at the same time or in similar ways. This moves it away from thinking of it as one monolithic entity which changes in a monolithic way and it strikes me this feels like a shift from some ways in which people can talk about the home. And it made me wonder if perhaps part of why it can feel difficult to improve homes is that often the homes get conceived of as monoliths, which can feel quite daunting.

From a historical perspective, there’s been lots of investigations of how the home and parts of it have changed over time. Judith Flanders brilliant ‘The making of home’ takes the long view, while ‘The great indoors’ by Ben Highmore is looking at how homes have changed over the last 100 years or so in particular. There is also plenty of work looking at different aspects of the home, from Barbara Penners ‘Bathroom’ to chapters in Irene Cieraad’s ‘At home: an anthology of domestic space’ that variously cover how entrance halls have changed, Dutch windows or the move to open plan living.

Perhaps the focus on a ‘whole-house’ approach might be part of what drives that sense of the house as a monolithic space for many in the environmental sector. That the need is there to try and improve all of the building fabric, think holistically about the ventilation strategy and consider factors that will affect the movement and management of moisture in and around the building to avoid damaging the building or creating issues with mould and damp.

In part that view of the home as a monolithic entity also seems to stem from the understandable intention to try and avoid the performance gap. Treating the home as a whole system and trying to understand what’s particular about it – from a technical perspective but also in terms of what people value about the place. Albeit in practice that isn’t what happens enough of the time – either in terms of the design or the installation of measures.

It’s obviously possible to do a whole-house retrofit that takes place over time – so even if that’s the end goal it can then be more light in terms of the interventions. For a long time I had a great love for building renovation passports as a way to help people work out how to integrate retrofit measures into their wider home improvements. There’s lots of work happening in the social housing sector that takes a more piecemeal approach to improving homes over time. Some of that is driven by applying for sources of funding as and when they come up, and some of it reflects that over time a home will move through different teams who are responsible for works to homes – from voids to repairs and maintenance or special projects for instance.

Whereas if the discussion was dis-aggregated and focused around specific aspects, might it feel slightly less daunting? Dialling down the stress of it all, reducing the temperature a bit. It might feel easier to imagine looking to engage people with the need to change out a heating system rather than trying to get people on board with thinking about the whole house in one go. For most people, that’s how they think about their homes more generally – the bathroom needs doing, something needs to be done about the cupboard under the stairs etc – so it brings it in line with other elements too. In and of itself that makes it more manageable for people when thinking about their own homes.

This shift also allows for an approach which accepts that it isn’t just going to change incrementally in terms of aspects of the building but also over time too. So that then it isn’t about trying to claim that this is the ultimate perfection that can be offered but recognising that a particular technology might be the best for now, but that is likely to change in time too.

That change of mindset can then help people think more tactically too. My PhD is all about linking in environmental improvements to wider home improvements – instead of thinking about the whole house it’s then trying to find a way in and working from there. Going with the grain of works that either need to be done because something has broken, or works that people are exploring or choosing to get done.

There are lots of practical implications which arise from making that shift, and I hope to explore those further as my PhD progresses. But the act of thinking differently about our homes, and therefore parts of our homes, feels like it could be a helpful mindset shift that makes it much easier to talk to people about changes. Taking the idea apart to help put the actual space back together a bit differently.

The power of one

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For all of the talk of relational approaches to increasing the take-up of energy or environmental measures, I was struck when hearing a friend’s recent account of home renovations about the limits to that approach.

Talking about my PhD can often lead to reflections from people about their own homes and experiences. One friend talked about how their plumber had done some research and come to the conclusion that heat pumps didn’t work unless the home is really well insulated. On that basis my friends ended up going ahead and getting their ailing boiler replaced with a new one, with lots of attendant disruption to have a more efficient system put in. They also had a builder who didn’t understand building physics and hadn’t raised any concerns when my friends wanted some air bricks covered up as part of works to replaster and repaint walls.

Had my friends got a plumber who had investigated and come to a different view, which is quite possible given the increasing number of use cases that are coming online of heat pumps performing well in inefficient buildings, they might have been persuaded to have a heat pump. Similarly, had they got a builder who had a better understanding of building physics, when there was a discussion about covering over air vents the builder should have raised the ventilation point. The builder might have explained the premise of the ventilation strategy the home was built with and suggested some alternative options if they did still decide to cover them over. They could also have suggested mitigations in rooms where previous owners had already covered over or removed air vents. Instead my friends randomly found out about the ventilation approach because the algorithm served up some information.

That reliance on others who are seeming experts and placing trust in their views is very in keeping with a relational approach. This holds that we make decisions on the basis of how the home will be for those we care about but also that trades-people can have a big impact on the choices people make. However these examples from my friends also seems to suggest it really depends who you get and there’s an element of luck in that currently. In the absence of requirements or an environment where information about how homes work is a foundational part of being a trades-person, for a relational approach to energy to work for good performance outcomes a higher basic level of knowledge is needed.

It was another reminder of how far away we are from that baseline situation now and how normal it is that builders don’t consistently have, or need to have, a holistic level of knowledge. There were lots of ways in which the builder seemed to have done a good job but those were in aspects that were more visible to my friends than the potential impact of closing up the ventilation would be, at least in the short term. If it is incumbent upon non-experts to be in a position to challenge experts that seems to be a situation which is unlikely to drive good behaviours, isn’t realistic or fair on those who are getting the work done and leads to a situation that looks much like the one we have now.

This suggests the relational approach can be important in helping people make decisions and there’s something valuable in focusing on that as a route to reach people. However, without improving the underpinning levels of knowledge it feels like there’s a real risk that approach will end up perpetuating the idea the building trade can’t be trusted and does poor work – this time more explicitly in relation to energy or environmental measures. In a sector which has issues around the quality of work done through government and energy obligation funded schemes, widening the range of tenures mistakes get made in doesn’t feel ideal. Finding a way to have improvements in generating demand – for instance through the relational approach – going hand in hand with work to improve the quality of the supply chain feels like a way to try and sustainably address issues in the round.

The Anna Karenina principle?

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I was reminded of the Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina that ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ when thinking about the surprising absence so far in the novels I’m reading for my PhD. One of the strands of my research is looking at existing materials to try and get a perspective on homes and how they’ve been represented, what the view is on how to improve them or just what ‘good’ looks like. As part of this I’ve read a few novels, and have still lots more to read but I’ve been surprised not to have found many examples of ‘the ideal home’, or even ones which are very happy yet. In remembering the Tolstoy quote it made me wonder if there’s something inherent in novels that explains this lack, or whether it’s more a reflection of my limited reading so far.

The Anna Karenina principle takes the idea from Tolstoy and applies it more broadly, holding that there is only one way to achieve success in that the key factors need to be in place, but there are countless ways to fail. This principle has been applied in contexts as diverse as ecology, banking and the domestication of animals.

Turning to the novels, there are a few slightly oblique glimpses of homes that seem to be happy. The couple who have their home and themselves attacked by Alex and his droogs in Anthony Burgess’s ‘A clockwork orange’; the family home of one of the main characters in ‘Glass Houses’ by Francesca Reece – although that’s more how it is represented or seen through the eyes of a visitor than by the occupants. Maybe some traces in the Elizabeth Gaskell novel ‘Cranford’ – but even there it isn’t straightforward because of the financial concerns of many of the protagonists. Alice’s home in Sarah Moss’s ‘The Fell’ has some details in there about how she takes comfort from details around the place, yet there is also a real sense of her isolation as she is recovering from cancer alone in a time of pandemic.

Looking at the list of novels I’m still yet to explore, none of them jump out at me as being about homes that are harmonious, idyllic refuges. I might find some more representations of that in the surrounding characters but the central premise of many of the books is about the home as a site of, or representation of, things falling apart, disconnection and sadness.

Perhaps this is because fiction tends to have a narrative drive at the heart of it. A tension which needs to be resolved somehow, and so happiness can be less easy to place there because the ‘happy ever after’ is the end not the through-line. That there is something implied about unhappiness being ‘news’ or a step away from the norm of a happy home. The novel is then a way to show how the world could be, and is for many others with all of the pain and darkness that can bring. Allowing us to understand something we might not experience ourselves.

Or could it be that the home as an unhappy or unsafe place works as a plot device because it immediately enables the reader to compare the context to the idea and ideal of home. A difficult home context allows the reader to get a sense of the protagonist being in a bad place. This can make them more sympathetic to the character. It also makes it understandable the character would be seeking a way to improve their situation in a way the writer doesn’t need to explain as much as they might for some other choices or needs.

Of course it could also be because writers don’t see enough happy homes around the place to make them feel believable or true. Writing novels can be a way to draw attention to things that aren’t right. To reflect back things society needs to or isn’t engaging with. From Dickens and Hardy in Victorian times to the novels of the 2020’s, art and culture can offer insights to lives that are beyond our own, and empathy for them which makes taking action necessary. For the novels of the 2020’s on my reading list, without even having read most of them there’s a clear theme emerging around how precarious housing can be. From Ella Frears’ ‘Goodlord’ which takes the form of an extended email to an unscrupulous estate agent to Megan Nolan’s ‘Ordinary human failings’ about families in temporary accommodation, to the 2024 novels ‘I see buildings fall like lightning’ by Keiran Goddard and ‘The lodgers’ by Holly Pester, about a housing estate and the UK housing crisis respectively.

That leaves me wondering if it’s less of a surprise I’m not finding more happy homes in the novels. While the quote from Tolstoy helped shape that sense of surprise, the principle doesn’t feel quite right in terms of the view of home. It’s true that even in the 14 novels I’ve read so far I’ve loved the diversity of style, tone and characters – a huge range even as the subject itself remains fixed and the homes are largely unhappy. Yet while there are lots of commonalities in the factors constituting a happy home, the plurality of ways a good home can be made seems to undermine the principle from that direction.

A time capsule

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My latest study visit took me to Sambourne House, the family home of Linley Sambourne, the artist and Chief Cartoonist for Punch magazine that has been preserved almost untouched. The space has become a show home but still feels very lived in. It gives an insight into Victorian life and particularly for that of a family with an artistic disposition. The house shows how homes can absorb the influences and advances of the time, and yet still allow people to express their own tastes.

The house reflects the ‘House Beautiful’ aesthetic of the time – this saw a reaction to mass produced products, favouring the handmade and recognising the value of furniture and furnishings as artworks. The style tends to include lots of natural motifs and more muted colours – which can be seen throughout the house in the colours and designs, including William Morris wallpapers.

However, the house also reflects how people can take aspects of the current styles and adjust them to their own tastes. Another aspect of this style is a restrained, pared back approach and that is most definitely not the case in the Sambourne’s house. As the picture of the living room below shows, it is a space that is very full of things indeed.

As the picture above also shows, there are lots of elements of the interior which are connected to the exterior. Chinoiserie and pictures from and of the wider world – from their travels and also to reflect their connections to and placing themselves in relation to the world. Rugs and vases from around the world too – showing how homes are not just individual spaces but are connected to other places and people and that people intentionally seek out those connections. Influences and designs, a way of showing off both your taste and sense of self, allowing you to be somewhat out in the world even when at home, and signalling to others that you are cosmopolitan and connected.

There was a strong sense of comfort about the place, with lots of places for people to sit, rich and warm fabrics and materials covering all of the surfaces, and fireplaces in the rooms and even in the hall. I was very intrigued to find a curtain over the doorway in one of the rooms – part of it was on a pole that comes out so you can open the door without getting the curtain tangled up with the door. I had never seen that technology before but it makes such sense.

Another sign of the modernity of the house was that it has a downstairs cloakroom toilet as well as a separate bathroom with a toilet. This increased prevalence of toilets was something that was starting to come forward in Victorian times, following The Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace. There the expression ‘to spend a penny’ came into being, as people could spend a penny to trial the first paid public toilets. This helped increased expectations about the availability of toilets, and the privacy of having a separate space for them.

The downstairs cloakroom is so modern that the sink is a technology innovation – to empty it you would have to tilt it to let the water run out of. These sinks allowed people to have access to running water and enabled them to wash their hands without needing to have the pipework plumbed in. This made it much more accessible for people to have installed, it also got around the issue which arose where plumbing systems initially were quite smelly – rendering them less attractive for people from that perspective. I wasn’t able to get in to the room to have a look but typically these sinks would empty into a bucket which would be cleared away – by the servants.

While the rest of the house is very highly decorated, the cloakroom has the white tiling that Barbara Penner talks about in her book which have come from a medical context – where the white tiles are designed to show how clean the place is, or make it easy to tell if and where it isn’t.

After Linley and his wife Marion died the house was left to their son Roy, who kept the house largely unchanged. When he died in 1946 the house was left to his sister Maud. Maud already had a large London residence, and so the house became a time capsule, mostly unoccupied and unchanged. Maud’s daughter Anne became fascinated by the place, leading to her setting up the Victorian Society and the continued preservation of the house.

I was interested by Roy Sambourne – choosing to live in the house and preserve it largely unchanged from when his parents had lived there. It seemed like an odd choice, to consciously choose to preserve somewhere, particularly somewhere that wasn’t a ‘stately’ home or one belonging to particularly famous people. I wondered how much it was a conscious choice or if it was something that reflected more a lack of decisions and action to make changes

As I found out more about Roy it came to make a bit more sense. From what I’ve been able to gather, he never really found his way in life. His mother Marion Sambourne wrote that “she was worried that her son had inherited none of the ambition and capacity for sustained hard work which had made his father so successful”. Roy’s biographer Shirley Nicholson writes in her book ‘An Edwardian Bachelor’ that “All Roy ever wanted to do was have a good time with the minimum amount of effort. This may not be an unusual attitude among the young, but Roy was never to grow out of it; Life carried him along, while he made no effort to shape its course”. When I read that, it became easier to see how he might choose to live in the house and not make any particular changes to it – beyond apparently getting the woodwork in his bedroom changed from red to white – while still leaving a space that didn’t feel very minimalist, as the picture of his room below shows.

A time capsule that developed from a comfortable family home into a place that shows how people lived then. It felt quite different to the more restrained designs that can typify the modern Victorian aesthetic. For a place that hasn’t been lived in since the late 1940s it nonetheless felt like a real home, and one that people obviously tried to make comfortable and reflective of their tastes. An old fashioned feeling space now but one that was clearly quite modern in lots of ways then.

Choosing to dance

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I’m at the point in the research where I’m actually drafting the questions to ask people, and it’s exciting yet it also feels a little sad. It’s a reminder that actually doing things you want to do and care about risks messing things up and dealing with messy reality but it is good to push through that for the same reasons. It has felt like a dance between ideas and reality, the literature and exploring peoples’ lived experience as well as between myself as a researcher and the people I’m asking questions of.

It feels a bit sad because to choose is to pick some things and to leave others behind. Areas that I’m really interested in, that I think would be useful, where it seems like there’s a gap – they are getting cut. Sometimes it’s because they feel too far removed from the subject, that it doesn’t feel like it would help to provide responses that add up to a cohesive set of information. This also means that if I’m asking questions I don’t think I can clearly use the answers from, I’m not being respectful of people’s time by getting them to fill in survey responses I can live without. Some questions have similarly had to be culled because I think, even though they are closely related to the area, I’ve got too many questions overall to realistically expect people to complete a survey that long. Especially because, for the kind of number of people I need to complete the surveys, I’m relying on more than just my partner and a couple of friends completing it.

In that narrowing down, from the general broad-brush ideas to the very specific questions it means a lovely idea – which can be all of the myriad of good things I can imagine – becomes a distinct thing. That narrowing down means I have to let go of all kinds of possibilities, some of which I can envisage now and some of which might only become apparent later on down the line.

One of the things I love and find very bracing about Oliver Burkeman is his repeatedly coming back to the idea of the finitude of human life and how we’re always choosing what to put our time and energy into, even if it doesn’t feel like we’re choosing. That we can’t do all of the things, even as we might want to. And that even if we think we’re getting around this by just not deciding, that’s still kind of a decision, just not a proactive one. So it’s better to try and put as much of your time as possible into things that you actively care about rather than just putting things off or getting your faff on.

So it is that, as can often be the case, aspects which makes it feel sad are also what makes it feel exciting. Doing this work gives a strong sense that the work is moving into a different phase and becoming more real. Trying to translate the general concepts I want to explore and picking the words, weighing and testing them – is this too leading? How would I use the responses to that? Trying to come up with answers for survey responses that respect the plurality of views and contexts that people can have about their experiences of home and how they make decisions about things. Imagining the discussions that I would have with people, the kinds of responses that they might give, the worlds and experiences – many of them beautiful but, given home can for too many be a space of violence and insecurity, also experiences that can be difficult and upsetting for them to reflect upon. Thinking about the kinds of follow-up questions and how to frame things to try and give people the space to talk about things without putting words in to their mouth.

In thinking of the structure of the interview, that too feels like a dance – something created between myself and the person being interviewed. Thinking through the logistics and trying to imagine how it might feel to move from one area or question to another. Are there too many questions – and the other person will feel like they are getting rushed and crushed around? That I am stepping on their toes, rushing to talk over them or hurrying them along to try and get all of the questions covered. Is that going to create a stressful situation for both of us – as though we’ve got the dancing equivalent of sweaty hands or stepping on each others toes? Watching the clock and calculating the number of questions still go to rather than being fully engaged in what the person is saying. Considering what kind of time people need to give considered responses, while still being able to get through enough questions that I get a sense of the lay of the land for them. Helping them move through the discussion and also allowing myself to be changed by what they have to say. Reflections that someone might offer up resonate differently when thinking about them in the context of what others share.

The dance still isn’t done, the questions need to be reviewed and updated. Then I want to pilot them to see how they translate in practice. It could be I put my left leg out and then have to pull it right back in again, or it turns out I’ve got two left feet or some similarly mangled metaphor. Nonetheless, that feeling of exploring and continuing to turn ideas into action is the kind of dance I want to be doing all of my days…

Lists of lists

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Recently the reading I’ve been doing is about the meaning of home or, really, the meanings of home. Cumulatively it can feel a bit like the scene in ‘Being John Malkovich’ where John is in a restaurant surrounded by people who are all variations of him, all talking but the only word they say is Malkovich. The word ‘home’ starts to blur as it gets repeated over and over and over and. It feels like the words fold into each other, until the meaning starts to go or it all becomes quite Malkovich, Malkovich. That could just be because I’m marinating myself in the subject but it’s also made me reflect on what turns those lists and frameworks into things that are useful and used.

Reading Jeanne Moore’s (2000) piece ‘Placing home in context’, I think she’s great at setting out a variety of ways in which the meaning of home has shifted over time, and how it can vary across countries. How different disciplines have engaged with the idea of home and how meanings of and feelings about home have been represented. It’s a bit of a speedy romp through the subject so it’s more about breadth than depth.

She does draw together lots of lists and frameworks that have been developed to try and capture the meaning of home. Seeing so many of them together in one short article makes her reflection that lists ‘imply all meanings are equally experienced, and do not encourage a focus on the relationships between items’ more apt. A sense there are so many different ways of describing what comes through as quite a consistent set of messages. Lots of overlap and commonality between them, with Putnam & Newton (1990) finding that privacy; security; family; intimacy; comfort, and control consistently appear in research about the meaning of home. Other lists have the same words or similar meanings, which perhaps isn’t so surprising, at least for those lists and frameworks that are talking about a suggested ideal of home.

I went to the Museum of Home for their event ‘More Than a Place: Centre for Studies of Home Annual Lecture 2026’ which was a talk and Q&A with Katie McCrory exploring what she describes as the eight universal emotions that come together to create ‘a feeling of home’. This work is based upon the Life at Home report by IKEA, and in the book she identifies ‘comfort, control, security, accomplishment, belonging, nurture, enjoyment and aspiration’ as the eight emotions. Plenty of venn diagram overlap there with other lists and frameworks too.

Within an academic context I can see that lists and frameworks provide scaffolding for thought and a way to organise and reflect findings. A drawing together of what’s been learned and found, a chance to reflect on how those findings relate to the wider literature – findings suggested x which differs from the previous literature in y scenarios. Trying to represent and honour what’s been found in a way that some other literature might not quite feel it does, even that which can appear to be similar. So if people talk about security rather than privacy, it would make sense that security is the word that’s used, even though the sentiments might be analogous to another piece of research where people talked in the language of privacy. The weight of different words can vary from person to person and so when analysing the research, in the absence of anything within the wording which explicitly suggests one or other of those choices, different researchers might lean towards one rather than the other. Over time, the development of the frameworks and lists helps build up an understanding of an area and that can develop into recommendations and more directional proposals.

From a policy and practitioner perspective, I’m conscious that lots of reading I’ve done which suggests a framework has been developed, has seemed hard to translate into practice. Thinking about frameworks I’ve used in a policy or delivery context, they would be ones that have some actions or processes attached to them. There would have been underpinning research which led to the development of the list of criteria. No doubt there could be the same questions about why some options or wording were selected rather than others but when it’s accompanied by input which allows the framework to be used, rightly or wrongly, that can feel less of a pressing concern. Or at least, if the framework itself feels useful, if it seems totally bonkers then that’s obviously something else altogether.

Having a sense of who I want the work to help and what they might need, then helps shift some of that Malkovich, Malkovich energy. Given I’m intending to develop a framework as part of the outputs of my research it’s useful to have in mind more of a sense of where I want to be aiming towards. It helps explain why lots of the ones I’ve seen haven’t felt very satisfactory, that I find myself asking ‘and then what?’ about them. Being able to take a step back from the lists and lists, and indeed the lists of lists, to see the aspects that are common across those and why and where there might be gaps. Holding in mind that it is about being able to translate those lists and frameworks into action and activity that’s useful, rather than feeling like what I’m trying to do is come up with one list to rule them all. How to do that is another question, for another day, but having a sharper idea of what I’m aiming towards is very clarifying.

It’s like Piccadilly Circus in there

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Policy makers can be reluctant to put in place policies that are seen to impinge upon the privacy of people in their own homes, yet commercial entities are less worried about this. From adverts in kitchens on fridges to people having massive logos on their clothing, accessories and in their homes, it’s another way of letting the outside in, making homes more public spaces.

Instinctively the idea of adverts on fridges feels quite shocking and a departure but reading Saunders & Williams 1988 piece ‘The constitution of home’ was a reminder that it’s perhaps more of a variation on a theme. They were talking then about advertising coming into the home through the TV and radio, and how this connected the home and outside world. They had slightly mixed views about the extent to which the home is or isn’t a private space but it was helpful to be able to see these adverts in a longer-term context.

TV and radio advertising has helped pave the way for the adverts on fridges, but with TV and radio, the ads are quite one-way. The people and organisations placing the ads would be able to get viewer or listener numbers and they might be able track if there was an uplift in activity as a result. They would have much less information available than is there now through tracking on phones and internet devices. This creates much more of a feedback loop between the adverts, organisations and audience. It’s also providing much more data which can be tracked and logged and used, with the attendant concerns about the possibility of personal or big data being used in ways we would find unethical.

Some of the sense of difference might just be the shock of the new, happening in a situation where there are growing concerns about the impact of data and devices. A sense that there’s increased surveillance but it’s not clear that we are safer or benefiting from it in other ways. That devices are making things seemingly more convenient – so smart fridges can tell us something is getting close to its best before date, but at a cost we hadn’t considered, let alone really reckoned with. The hollowing out of high streets, a loss of big and small businesses that can’t compete with massive online, offshore companies, more job insecurity and lower pay for more people. The social impacts of becoming more removed from others – those that we disagree with and now feel more removed from so it’s easier to be angry with and about them. Removed too from those we care about or might care about. Of course, no one smart fridge or other device does that but the cumulative impact of convenient things is something people are concerned about, for instance in the increasing hollowing out of high streets or declining concentration spans.

There is something different about the extent to which it’s a choice to engage. With TV and the radio you can choose to switch them on or not. If the adverts come on you can switch off or leave the room, and it’s you engaging when you want to but otherwise they aren’t around. With the adverts on the fridge, the fridges weren’t sold with that function to start with, so it isn’t as though people made the choice and were able to consider the trade-offs. People chose an expensive fridge and then subsequently that functionality was introduced, which feels very different indeed. There was eventually some functionality introduced that allows the adverts to be switched off but it isn’t clear they can be entirely removed.

In many respects then, smart devices with advertising are part of the longer history of the outside coming inside, or there being a much more permeable link between the home and the wider world. What remains then, is a sense of how the lack of choice looms larger in that context, but it also shows how homes, and expectations about homes, can push back on shifts. The company that introduced them thought they would be able to get away with it, yet people felt able to complain and have their views heard in a way that might be harder to achieve in a more communal space.

Why try harder?

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I was yesterday day’s old when I discovered there’s no qualification to become a Retrofit Evaluator. Niche insight but it opened up a bit of a Pandora’s Box because under the British standard for retrofit – PAS 2035 – any evaluation of a retrofit should be completed by a suitably qualified Retrofit Evaluator. If there’s no qualification that can be done to get qualified, I think we can agree it’s hard to see how that is possible. In practice, what this means is the Retrofit Co-ordinator, another role under PAS 2035, and one that does have a qualification available does the evaluation.

In some respects perhaps not so surprising – monitoring and evaluation is an area most would agree is important in any context, yet it’s the area that is more likely to fall away than most. Whether because it’s for a project that is over-stretched, under resourced or behind schedule, evaluation is rarely seen as a core focus. Or the next project is getting scoped up and approved before there’s time to complete a proper evaluation of previous projects that might feed in to the development of the next project. So the fact there isn’t a qualification for this role is less of a concern than it might be for the actual installer roles.

Yet this role without a route to being meaningfully undertaken feels like such a symptom or metaphor for longstanding issues within the retrofit sector. The ongoing performance gap issue is one that has been long recognised but, as the recent 2025 National Audit Report (NAO) on energy efficiency installations showed, hasn’t been fully dealt with. Poor quality works, homes left worse off than they were before the works were undertaken because of mould and damp, affecting the health of the occupants and the fabric of the building itself. The NAO report itself found that 98% of homes that had external wall insulation installed under the Energy Company Obligation and Great British Insulation Scheme have got significant issues requiring remediation.

These issues arise in large amount because of a lack of attention, or ability, to deliver good quality works and ensure the details are right. Good processes, with monitoring and evaluation built in, can really help address or prevent issues. They can draw attention to areas where the work isn’t quite right and allow them to be improved or redone whilst the works are ongoing. Post-completion, they can identify issues with the works before they become much more serious. The intention is also that the Retrofit Evaluator can share lessons learned and areas for improvement with the installer to help them upskill people for subsequent projects.

More widely, in a context where approaches, products and technology are being developed, monitoring and evaluating their performance is crucial. Understanding how they work in practice, if they are easy to work with or need some workarounds to try and integrate them. Finding out how occupants respond, if they are easy for them to use or not. As more heat pumps have been installed in a great variety of homes, including ones that aren’t so well insulated, it’s become clear performance is better in a wider range of use cases than had previously been considered. That makes a massive difference in terms of the level of insulation needed for a home, with knock-on implications in terms of disruption and cost for the home-owner, and resourcing requirements for the supply chain. Without the monitoring and evaluation it’s harder to be confident in a particular approach and the status quo assumptions and actions are more likely to be considered.

What then is the workaround for the lack of a Retrofit Evaluator? As things stand, the Retrofit Co-ordinator now has to fulfil this role. They get to mark their own homework. If the basic level of feedback identifies any issues, they then have to escalate the evaluation to a more in-depth level. This would be undertaken by another Retrofit Co-ordinator. However, this requires them to do that escalation process. The worry is that in practice there might not be incentives to do so, or the quality assurance and monitoring of their work to pick up the cases when they don’t.

If there wasn’t a consistent drum-beat of stories and reports raising concerns about the quality of retrofit work undertaken, it might feel like that was an unfair assumption. Against that background, it feels like another reflection of a sector that recognises the need to change and improve – hence the development of the role in theory Yet it remains a sector that continues to struggle to address fundamental aspects around quality and reliability of the work it’s doing. Undermining trust, the health and well-being of people and their homes, and the ability of their work to get close to delivering the environmental and financial benefits people are paying for.