‘Property porn’: is TV’s obsession with home buying fuelling the UK’s housing crisis?
Do you remember the timber cottage with panoramic views (Cornwall, 2014)? What about the Gaudí-esque “Barcelona pavilion” (West Sussex, 2015)? Or the historic water tower conversion (London, 2012)?
The first episode of Grand Designs– a TV show in which Kevin McCloud takes us inside architectural marvels that are often also expensive money pits – aired more than 20 years ago in 1999. Then, the average cost of a home was about £91,000. A decade later it was £279,000.
Fast-forward another 10 years, to 2022. There is a horrendous housing crisis across Britain which has left tens of thousands of people – many of them families with children – living in temporary accommodation, and created a stagnant waiting list with, according to Shelter, more than 1 million households in need of social housing.
Despite this, property reality TV, though often less vainglorious than Grand Designs, is still a mainstay of national broadcasting. There’s Location, Location, Location (Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer’s Channel 4 show, which first aired in 2000 and is currently airing series 37); Homes Under the Hammer (a BBC One daytime TV staple since 2003); Changing Rooms (recently rebooted by Channel 4, complete with interiors cognoscente Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen); and last year’s Extraordinary Extensions, hosted by Tinie Tempah(also Channel 4, and featuring an £11m Knightsbridge basement). It is no surprise that these shows keep getting commissioned, when you look at the impressive viewing figures. The new Changing Rooms wasChannel 4’s third highest rating hobbies/leisure show in the weekday 8pm slot for adults 16-34 in 2021, drawing in 86% more viewers aged 16-34 than the shows that are normally broadcast in that slot. And, Grand Designs is,
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