From Theodore Zeldin’s “The French” (1983):
Almost one in every six families has access to a second residence
Translate that into British, we’ve some 25 million households, there should be 4.25 million second homes.
According to George Monbiot we have rather fewer:
Before the pandemic, government figures show, 772,000 households in England had second homes. Of these, 495,000 were in the UK. The actual number of second homes is higher, as some households have more than one; my rough estimate is a little over 550,000.
We are, thus, short some 3.75 million second homes. If we wish to be like the French that is.
This is more than just snark - tho’ snark is always fun. The important thing to understand about housing across cultures is that each is a technology. A machine for living in. And those cultures, technologies, which have people living in dense urban cores, in apartments, also have the wide ring of summer places surrounding them. This is true - from personal experience of people here - for Germany, of the Czech lands, or Russia (to the point that one of us has endured a lecture from a Soviet car factory manager on the importance of providing dachas for the workers. And it was important, growing your own was the only way you’d get vitamins, let alone vegetables.) No, an allotment is not the same thing - it is illegal to even think about staying overnight on an allotment. All these country places will have at least a shack with bunks.
The Southern European towns tend not to have gardens attached even to the houses, let alone the flats. But they have different inheritance practices (real property must, by law, be divided equally among all kids) and are also several generations closer to the land. At least a part share in Granny’s hovel out in the country is near universally available.
Those stack-a-prole worker flats that our UK urban planners think we should all live in are only part of that whole housing technology. By observation that works only with that addition of the second place in pulchra agris. The British solution to the same idea, that housing technology as a whole, has been the des res with front and back garden and on that quarter acre plot of land. Exactly the thing that is now illegal to build given required densities of up to 30 dwellings per hectare.
They’re technologies. Suburbs of housing with gardens, or flats with second houses. They’re integrated technologies, things where you need both parts to make them work. Our British planners have decided to go off half-cocked with only half of either technology. They’ll allow the house but not the garden, the flat but not the shack in the country.
We might have mentioned before that we really don’t like planners or planning. This is one of the reasons why - the planners we actually get are ignorant.