Home Ownership

Ann Lanchbury was married in 1960. When they were first married she and her husband rented a flat in Coventry city centre. Below Ann describes the different opinions she and her husband had about social housing and home ownership:

Ann: We started to buy our own house probably about nineteen sixty-two, in sixty-two when Aunt Sarah gave us, lent us the deposit for the house and that’s when we started to buy […] Never occurred to me to buy our own house when we got married, you know? And I must have been a bit of a dumbo because I could never understand this great attraction for buying your house and I could never understand that I was ever going to live away from Pinley Fields, not Pinley Fields, from Stoke Aldermoor, I automatically thought I’d want to live near my mum, but my husband soon scotched that.

Hilary: Why?

Ann: Well because he said, ‘No, it’s a council estate, we want to buy a house.’ His father had bought two houses on a farm worker’s wages, he’d saved and saved and saved, um, and when I suggested to Neil that, you know, ‘What are we going to do then, are we going to rent a house round here?’ ‘No way! We’re going to save up and buy our own place.’ But I was quite surprised by that.

Leave a comment