It is the British dream to own the roof over one's head. But with the average home now costing £180,000, that that dream is bleeding millions dry

The yen to own one's own home may well be universal, but foreigners arriving in England are reliably taken aback by the extent to which this craving dominates both private and national conversation. At first it seems relatively harmless, an easy-to-caricature national trait, like saying sorry all the time, or making portentous observations on the weather, but gradually it becomes clear that discussions of house prices are always loaded with much, much more: where a person falls in the fine gradations of class, how their achievements compare with those around them, who they are, who they would like to be. All of which goes some way to explaining the anxiety caused when, as is increasingly the case, it becomes impossible to own a home (among the latest statistics afflicting first-time buyers, for instance, is the fact that the average property loan now stands at more than £150,000, up from £134,000 a year ago). Not having a foot on the housing ladder becomes evidence of some kind of moral failure; marvelling at how much wealth a home has accrued on paper both a 21st-century equivalent of being born with blue blood (ie, effortlessly, smugly lucky) and the socially acceptable face of avarice. "The home is our identity," says Kate Fox, author of the anthropological book Watching the English. "We define ourselves by our homes."

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