Do English people have a cultural aversion to flats? Is it deep-rooted in our DNA to envision a home to be specifically a house? Or is it just that England's planning history means houses are the majority? Is the market really responding to demand, both presumed and real?

Flats and apartments saw the largest increase (in gross terms) for any type of accommodation between 2011 and 2021 in England/Wales, with 21.7% of households being of this type, up from 21% in 2011.

However, these percentages are still very small compared to the EU, where the average percentage of people living in flats was 47.5%. And it isn’t the Soviet-style Eastern European apartment blocks that are responsible for this large percentage. It is Spain with 65.6% of its population living in flats, and Germany with 62.7%, that are the EU countries with the biggest proportion of people living in flats.

The history of housing in England and Wales gives us part of the answer for our dominance of houses over flats. The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe, largely due to the Industrial Revolution and a housing boom post second world war, which means our housing stock has expanded outwards and not up. 

The increase in the proportion of flats being built as new housing has several advantages. For example, they are the most energy-efficient property type in both England and Wales. They are quicker to build than houses, and speed will be necessary to meet the Labour government's goal of 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. They also take less land space to build than houses; the average total floor space of a house in England and Wales is 102.75m², compared to 61.5² for the average flat. This makes flats a good solution to the government's anxiety that housing development will infringe upon the Green Belt area (although 90% of land in England is undeveloped!).

Despite housing build trends favouring flats, this doesn’t mean that English people like them. The Department for Communities and Local Government found that 72% of respondents desired the building of more houses, whereas only 14% desired more flats.

Clearly ‘the dream’ isn’t to live in a flat or an apartment, and I wonder why this is. It might be because English flats are typically smaller than houses, which is less desirable considering English houses are already some of the smallest in Europe. Even the British term ‘flat’, as opposed to the more American ‘apartment’, has more negative associations and perhaps contributes to our cultural aversion. 

But does this tell us more about the English psyche than it does about the state of our flats? 

The saying ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ emphasises that our homes need to be private. They must be self-contained and shouldn’t be overly shared with other people. Is the thought of living in an apartment block with other people too communal for English people? There’s the horror of meeting neighbours in the corridor when taking the bins out, or hearing the conversations in other flats through multiple shared walls and above the ceiling. 

An Englishman’s castle must also offer freedom, something that a house provides more readily.  For example, in a house you have the ability to relax as you please in a private garden, which flats can’t provide. The pride in buying a first home is a crucial part of the typical ‘English dream’, and the vision it evokes is of a front lawn leading towards the front door, not of a shared corridor. 

There is also something inherently more family-orientated about a house; perhaps it is only a house that can truly be considered a home in the English imagination.

Simply put, an apartment ≠ a castle.