Which home would you buy for £625,000? Vote for your favourite
EPC E (potential B) — on a scale of A (best) to G (worst)Upside Surrounded by activities and entertainment. Downside Terraced houses can be noisy.Price £625,000Contact sowerbys.com
Walking distance from the centre of Stroud, this handsome four-storey semi offers 2,329 sq ft of living space and is full of period charm: think thick oak floorboards and an original stone fireplace. The ground floor comprises two reception rooms and a kitchen/dining room that flows into an oak-framed conservatory. There's a 279 sq ft cellar plus six bedrooms arranged over the first and second floors. There's no garage but there is space to park at the front of the property as well as a low-maintenance lawned garden, which backs on to playing fields. It's on the market chain-free.
EPC D (potential C)Upside In the catchment for two Parent Power ranked grammars.Downside It's on an A-road.Price £625,000Contact hamptons.co.uk
Oakholme is a grade II listed semi-detached cottage described in its Historic England entry as having a 'timber-frame exposed on north gable and front … where projecting wall suggests former jetty'. The three-bedroom house is in North Warnborough, a small village on the northern fringes of Hampshire's chalk downs, about eight miles east of Basingstoke (from where trains to London Waterloo take about 40 minutes). The hallway leads to a living room with built-in storage, a kitchen/diner with French doors opening on to the garden and a shower room. Upstairs are three bedrooms, one of which has an en suite bathroom complete with a roll-top bath.
EPC N/AUpside There's a separate garage to the rear.Downside The upstairs bathroom situation is not ideal. Price £625,000Contact mccarthyholden.co.uk
Tucked away on a back lane in the tiny city of St Davids, this five-bedroom home looks out over the cathedral and miles of greenery. Through the wooden front doors is a corridor with beamed ceilings and the lounge and reception area on either side. The kitchen has an archway leading to a dining room, plus useful storage areas and a utility room. French doors open on to a rear garden set over two levels with panoramic views of the city. One of the bedrooms has an en suite bathroom and there is a separate shower room.
EPC D (potential B)Upside A stunning location. Downside Interiors could do with some imagination.Price £625,000Contact westwalesproperties.co.uk
The Highland town of Strathpeffer exploded into life in the Victorian era, when sulphurous springs made it a popular spa resort, and a new railway station connected it to the national network. Eaglestone, a B listed five-bedroom house, built in the mid-1800s, was one of the results. With its symmetrical three-bay frontage and continuous open-fronted veranda, supported by cast-iron columns, it has a striking design. The symmetrical reception rooms on the ground floor, and two large bedrooms above them, all have one elegantly curving wall with original cornicing. Inverness is about 40 minutes away by car.
EPC E (potential C)Upside Former coach house has conversion potential.Downside Local railway station long since out of operation.Price Offers over £625,000Contact galbraithgroup.com
An example of Scottish Arts and Crafts architecture at its finest, this six-bedroom villa is tucked away in a quiet leafy corner of the Craigie residential area of Dundee. Built in 1911 its three-storey design, rising to a sharply pitched roof, is one of a kind. A cleverly configured porch and bay-windowed living room gaze down the long south-facing lawn. The house retains much of its original painted decorative woodwork — a key feature of many Arts and Crafts homes. The one-acre plot is shrouded from view from the street and neighbouring properties by tall mature trees and has a large timber garage.
EPC E (potential C)Upside Dundee and Broughty Ferry are less than a ten-minute drive away.Downside The neighbourhood is not the prettiest.Price Offers over £619,000Contact verdala.co.uk
Here are 36 glorious acres of potential — minus the house, fences, neighbours and, conveniently, that pesky mortgage. This mixed mature woodland between Handcross and Lower Beeding, near Horsham, offers sweeping skies, an array of trees ranging from oaks, beech, larch, pine and horse chestnut, and is flooded with bluebells in the spring. One notable feature is a Second World War bunker on its northern border.
EPC N/AUpside Great view of the stars.Downside Roof a little leakyPrice £625,000Contact batchellermonkhouse.com
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BBC News
2 minutes ago
- BBC News
The East Anglian artisans keeping their heritage crafts alive
Traditional skills - some of which have been around for millennia - are at risk of dying out because so few people practise them. Three artisans, whose heritage crafts are on a national Red List, have given their thoughts on what can be done to pass their skills to the next generation. 'We need to do manufacturing ourselves' Daniel Bangham is an endangered to national charity Heritage Crafts - which promotes and supports traditional UK crafts - there are "serious concerns" about the "ongoing viability" of his trade of 45 instrument making, which Mr Bangham does at his own workshop in Linton, Cambridgeshire, is among more than 90 crafts it classes as are just enough skilled craftspeople to keep the work going, and to educate others - for now - but more is needed to be done to safeguard its is clearly a demand for his work: top musicians still need bespoke instruments that are not mass-produced."Professional players depend on craftsmen to get the last five to 10% out of their instruments," said Mr Bangham."Without the instrument maker, you can't have musicians at the top of their game because a top musician will need constant contact with a maker and repairer to get the very best of their instruments." Manufacturing of woodwind instruments - as with many other things - has moved to East Asia, he says, but the reliance on imports needed to change. "As a nation we need to do primary manufacturing ourselves, everything from steel, through to making microscopes and musical instruments," he said."People will still want to hone their skills, but they have to be given the opportunity, the environment and the encouragement."Heritage Crafts has singled him out for praise for being one of the few people to take on years ago, he set up a workshop studio to teach skills to others."We have enabled 250 instruments to be made, and of those we have had four people who have become professional," he Mr Bangham believes the trade could die out because apprenticeships are "not easy or affordable"."Very often someone will go into a profession obliquely, they never thought they were going to go there," he said."They started making a small widget, found they would be good at it, then got more interested in the bigger picture and became a dedicated craftsman." 'You never stop learning' You may have seen examples of Ian Warren's craft, but perhaps not known what it is or moulded plasterwork - pargeting - is prominent in East Anglia and is used to create motifs of coats of arms, fruits, animals, or even entire scenes on has been a skilled craft in England since King Henry VIII brought in Italian plasterers to decorate one of his palaces. Mr Warren, who works out of Tillingham, near Southminster in Essex, is one of just 11 pargeters known to Heritage Craft. "You can see it around Lavenham and Clare [both near Sudbury in Suffolk], where they had men with more money," said Mr Warren."They had pargeting done to let everyone know that." Heritage Crafts believes the issues affecting pargeting include changing tastes in housing design and the strict restrictions imposed by conservation legislation. It can also be expensive and takes time, which does not correlate with competitive tendering Warren has seen all these problems, as well as commonly-used materials not being up to the task."Modern rendering is now resin, it's not sand, cement and lime anymore, it's prebagged and it doesn't lend itself to pargeting," he explained."Flat rendering is cheaper and some [building] designs are very boxy; it looks wrong on a modern house."Nevertheless, he is hopeful for the future. He has diversified by pargeting on to small panels which can be hung inside as works of art "that will last hundreds of years"."I've been doing it 35 years and I've never been out of work, but I have adapted by doing these smaller things," he said."I started doing panels to take to shows, and because I don't like going up scaffolding in the winter anymore."There are builders and developers, especially around here, that still want that look, it's sellable."Heritage Crafts points out that practitioners need "considerable artistic talent" and also want a labour-intensive is no training school, apprenticeships or courses beyond the occasional introductory day school."You never stop learning," said Mr Warren, who is self-taught. "I think you need to be like myself, you've got to be enthusiastic and work for yourself."You have to have a bit of artistic flair in the first place."I could teach someone to a standard, but they have to have that bit about them to take it on their own." 'People have done this for centuries' Mark Clifton's trade of flintknapping - the shaping of flint by "percussive force" - has been around since the Stone Age but could die out because of a skills shortage. Heritage Crafts says the work is "extremely challenging" - it requires technique, accuracy and good hand-eye Clifton, who works out of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, type of flintwork is for the building sector, with Mr Clifton breaking the stones to specific sizes and shapes to create a flush finish on walls. It is time consuming, back-breaking work, with few skilled people still doing it in the UK."I spend half my time on my knees, and as you get older it gets painful," he said."It's a very manual job."You break the flint in half and then you trim it to fit them around each other, and then fit into the wall." Churches and other heritage buildings need the real deal like Mr the shortage of craftsman - and lack of training opportunities - means that, elsewhere, cheaper walls are often created by pressing the stones into concrete as a "short cut", Heritage Crafts says. "Not enough people are getting into it," added Mr Clifton."There are just a handful of good ones, across the country."I fell into it... I'd never knapped in my life but had done whole stone, had slightly the wrong tools to begin with, and went from there. "It's quite a skill."He said he hoped its growing popularity as a feature of modern buildings could be its saviour, but colleges needed to offer courses. "It makes me sad that it could die out," he added. "People have been flintknappers for centuries. "When you think people would quarry flints and knap them at Grimes Graves [a prehistoric flint mine in Lynford, Norfolk]."I still might train someone; I've had apprentices in the past, they've stuck to the course, some have now done it for 28 years." Published annually by Heritage Crafts, the Red List categorises five skills as extinct, 70 as critically endangered and more than 90 as endangered."The Red List underscores the urgent need for greater investment and support to safeguard these skills for the next generation," said Daniel Carpenter, executive director of Heritage Crafts."Reversing this decline would represent not just the continuation of skilled trades, but also a significant boost to the UK's cultural heritage and countless opportunities for future innovation." Follow East of England news on X, Instagram and Facebook: BBC Beds, Herts & Bucks, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC Essex, BBC Norfolk, BBC Northamptonshire or BBC Suffolk.
The Guardian
4 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘A yorkshire pudding like a dishcloth': how did British pub food get so grim?
It was supposed to be a special occasion: an extended family get-together for Sunday lunch at a country pub. The setting was promising: a traditional establishment recently redecorated; outside terrace by the river; plenty of customers. The menu was also promising: a giant sheet of paper like a medieval charter, with glowing descriptions of how they aged their beef and sourced their produce locally. The food, though, was awful. The starters were assorted deep-fried pellets of unidentifiable organic matter; the meat was cold and colourless, the gravy watery, the roast potatoes soggy and the yorkshire pudding chewy as a dishcloth. It was very difficult to believe all of this had been freshly prepared in the kitchen that day. It felt more like reheated leftovers – for £30 a head. You may, like me, have had this experience – and the lower-budget equivalent, the pub menu that consists of 700 variations of pie or burger, all of which arrive at the table via the freezer and the microwave, molten hot and almost glowing. With chips. How did pub food get so grim? We like to think the bad old days of British cuisine, the days when it was a national embarrassment, are far behind us, that the 1990s and 2000s ushered in a wave of quality gastropubs and that the shires are bursting with talented chefs cooking local produce from scratch. In some cases, that is true, but more broadly – in my view, at least – pub food in the UK is on the decline. 'You're definitely not alone,' says Katie Mather, a drinks writer and pub culture blogger. 'There is evidence to support your hypothesis.' Ray Bailey, one half of the bloggers Boak & Bailey and a co-author of 20th Century Pub, also agrees. 'Pub food has quietly been on the decline for a few years now, both in terms of quality and availability. There was a golden period during which you could rely on being able to get a solid meal for a reasonable price, but now many pubs have closed their kitchens or outsourced food to fast food popups.' Pubs have never had it so hard, you could argue. They face significant and often inexorably increasing costs: rent; staffing (partly as a result of the recent national insurance contribution increases); energy (to heat and chill food and people); alcohol (duty on a bottle of 14.5% red wine has risen by nearly £1 in the past two years); and food (one chef tells me beef has gone up 50% in the past eight months). This comes on top of Covid recovery and the cost of living crisis. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, 15,000 pubs have closed in the past 25 years. There are still roughly 45,000 left, but the UK is losing about six pubs a week. 'Pub food used to be the moneymaker, but with the rising price of literally everything, it really isn't as cheap to do that any more,' says Mather. 'For a long time, business owners have been able to hide the effects from customers to a certain degree; they've been able to cut corners in kind of invisible ways. But it's become so difficult to deal with.' Pubs have had it hard for a long time, says Brian Hannon, a co-founder of the London-based restaurant group Super 8, which includes Brat, Kiln and Smoking Goat. Previously, he worked for 18 years in the pub sector. The shake-up began with the beer orders in 1989. In an attempt to improve competition, the government limited the number of tied pubs a brewery could own to 2,000. At the time, 75% of UK pubs were controlled by six breweries (Bass, for example, had to sell nearly 5,000 of its 7,000 pubs) and 95% of their revenue came from drinks. This change created conditions for new pub chains and independents to flourish. By the time the beer orders were revoked, in 2003, the industry had been transformed. Habits were changing, too. By the 2000s, we had what Hannon calls the three Fs: 'Food, females and fenestration.' Pubs opened up literally and socially, while food revenues made up for declining drinks sales. It was the era of new chains, such as All Bar One, and the original gastropubs, such as the Eagle in Clerkenwell, London. Pub food became a route to culinary acclaim and celebrity. In 2001, the Stagg Inn in Herefordshire became the first pub to receive a Michelin star. The Hand and Flowers, Tom Kerridge's pub in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, has two stars. This era didn't last long, though. 'I refuse to use the word gastropub, because I don't think it means anything any more,' says Oisín Rogers, the head chef at the Devonshire, one of London's hottest pubs. 'Gastropubs in the 90s and the 2000s were always chef or mom-and-pop operations where you'd have a single freeholder or leaseholder who was in the kitchen all the time, cooking from scratch, making really delicious things in a place they were really proud of. And that was copied by the [pub chains]. They'd say: 'Look, this is a gastropub. It's the same colour and the menu looks a bit similar,' but actually you're getting a far inferior product.' The Good Food Guide stopped using the term 'gastropub' in 2011. These days, you are more likely to see the word in supermarkets: Marks & Spencer has a 'Gastropub' range of ready meals created by Kerridge. Hannon breaks down today's pub food landscape into three brackets. At one end are those putting a premium on quality food and targeting customers willing to pay for it. At the other end are the big chain pubs, operating on the basis of low cost and high margins. 'The lower the price, the more likely it's been bought in and not been cooked by a chef,' Hannon says. However, he adds: 'The chains will apply their skill set and their muscle to actually get not-bad food produced well.' In the perilous middle ground, smaller chains and independent pubs try to present a gastropub-looking menu for minimum outlay and maximum profit, which, in this climate, necessitates compromises – and may well explain my unsatisfactory Sunday roast. (On closer inspection, the pub in question turned out to be part of a group, offering very similar menus across several sites, which suggests some degree of centralisation.) 'What often happens is the guy who's running the pub has a spreadsheet that's been sent down saying: 'This is where you get your beef, this is where you get your yorkshire pudding, here's the instructions on how to do it,'' says Rogers. 'And they've followed the instructions, maybe not completely correctly, and ended up with an inferior product on the plate.' Hannon says: 'The people in the middle are making no money out of producing food because, number one, the cost of employing a chef is really high and, number two, it's hard to actually get the staff, especially given that pubs are often out in the countryside. And then the economics of running those have been really challenged. So what they're now doing is de-skilling their food.' A pub menu will never say: 'We don't actually make this food ourselves.' But more and more pubs are quietly outsourcing some or all of their cooking. 'We've heard stories of pub kitchens serving microwavable supermarket ready meals because they're cheap, last for ever in the freezer and have incredibly high mark-up,' says Bailey. Even big names have been caught out. In 2009, Gordon Ramsay was found to have been serving food prepared at a central kitchen in three of his London gastropubs, presenting it as 'freshly made', at considerably inflated prices. One indicator of this trend is the growth of external catering firms. Visit the website of Brakes, the market leader, and you will find more than 9,000 products: everything from fresh, raw ingredients to frozen pub grub – 20 formed cod fillets in batter for £1.69 each, yorkshire puddings for 35p each. They do 66 kinds of chip, says Paul Hulyer, Brakes' head of hospitality customer marketing. He doesn't provide exact figures on how their pub business is doing, but he says: 'We've sustained very good, healthy volumes in the sector.' Having worked for pub chains himself, Hulyer knows how the pressures have grown. 'One of the things I've noticed is more pubs want to try to do some cooking,' he says. 'When I worked in kitchens, everything was cooked from scratch, you had 12 people in the kitchen, whereas now, with all the increasing costs, you've got to do similar with four or five people. How do you do that? Well, you take some of the prep out. That's what we help to do.' For example, Brakes sells a whole beef brisket, Hulyer explains. 'We've done the seven-, eight-hour cook so you've not had to. And [the pub kitchen] would take it, defrost it and portion it. And then they would say: 'Right, I'm going to flavour this with …' and they would personalise it.' If they don't want to do even that, Brakes also offers a range of sauces. Brakes is scrupulous about food standards and responsible sourcing, of course, but it has little control over what goes on in the kitchens it supplies (assuming anything is going on beyond setting a timer on a microwave) or how their products appear on menus. The language can often be wilfully obscure, with terms such as 'homemade' and 'freshly prepared' covering a multitude of sins, says Rogers. 'Some of the big chains will say they do aged beef, for example, which doesn't mean dry aged; it just means it's been kept in a vacuum bag.' There are also dodgy supply chains, he says, such as what has been called 'long-range chicken', 'where you buy chicken that was bred in Vietnam, packed in Singapore, injected with fillers in the Netherlands and then arrived frozen to a cash-and-carry in the UK'. Everyone seems to have horror stories. 'When I worked as a waiter in a chain pub in the 1990s, the 'homemade' steak and kidney pie was assembled from a sachet of brown goop emptied into a dish with an oval of pre-made pastry popped on top,' says Bailey. The quality end of the pub food spectrum comes with its own challenges. While pub chains may operate on a profit margin of 70%, serving fresh, quality food is far less profitable, which inevitably means higher prices for customers. Mains at the Devonshire's upstairs restaurant are £20 to £40, not counting side dishes, although they do cheaper bar snacks downstairs. Sunday lunch at the Hand and Flowers will set you back £175. When that is the case, Mather asks, can we still call these places pubs? 'I would argue that they focus so much on food that now they are just restaurants.' She defines a pub as 'a place that I would feel comfortable drinking in without having a meal'. Those places do exist, she says, citing her local in Lancashire. 'They do fantastic food, but I could sit in there with pints, just reading a book. I don't feel as if I'm in the way, or taking up a table that someone else might eat at, whereas there are pubs that have gone completely the other way.' It's almost as if 'gastro' and 'pub' are going their separate ways. So how can you avoid disappointment with your pub meal? What are the warning signs? 'Because I'm in the industry, I always look at the tills,' says Rogers. 'If the tills are the corporate type, where it's the same system that's run all over the country, then I'm always suspicious.' Hannon says: 'Look at the menu: size, focus, how it is actually presented. No laminated menus, no menus that try to be Chinese, Indian and Sunday roast. Talk to the staff about where the produce is from, how long the chef has been there.' Rogers continues: 'I think one way to spot a really good, decent pub menu is that it's short. If you've got 35 main courses and 20 starters, you can be certain that most of that is in the freezer.' Look for closer to six starters, mains and desserts. 'If I go to a chain pub somewhere that I've not been to before and I look at the menu and it's like 'lasagne', then you just know that that's frozen and microwaved,' says Mather. 'The fish and chips – that's going to be frozen as well. Unless there's a good specials menu, or it's got really good local reviews, I would eat somewhere else.' There may be other solutions. In 2014, France launched a fait maison (homemade) scheme, whereby restaurants that genuinely made their food in-house could display a special logo. The scheme never caught on, but there are plans to revive it and make it mandatory. At the same time, especially in UK cities, there has been a resurgence of what might be called 'drinking pubs', where the emphasis is on the beer or wine, rather than the food: microbreweries, tap rooms and the like. There is also a growing appetite for locally owned pubs, says Mather, who just visited one in the Lake District. 'Their food was fantastic and their entire staff seemed to care a lot about the food and drink that they're serving.' Pubs were once the heart of the community and some places are successfully keeping them that way, not just with food and drink, but as gathering spaces for all manner of functions: artistic performances, family events, markets, workshops. The best boozers have always moved with the times, but also respected their hungry, cash-strapped customers – who can tolerate only so many soggy roast potatoes.
Times
36 minutes ago
- Times
Dear Julia: I'm middle-aged. Am I invisible?
Q. Lately I've started to suspect I'm becoming invisible. Not in a cool 'Harry Potter cloak' way. More in the 'middle-aged woman no longer perceived by society' sense. I walk into a shop and the assistant breezes past me to help someone in gym leggings and lip filler. At work younger colleagues finish my sentences as if I'm a slightly confused aunt. Even automatic doors hesitate. I've recently turned 50 and apparently that's the age when women — especially — start blending into the wallpaper. I still make an effort: I've got good hair, decent shoes, I remember to exfoliate — but it's like the world has quietly decided I'm surplus to requirements. I'm not ready to fade out like the end credits of a BBC drama. I know I should rise above it. Be wise. Be dignified. Bake sourdough and embrace linen. But if I'm honest, I miss being REALLY seen. I don't want to pretend I don't care, because I do care — even if I know it's deeply uncool to admit it. So tell me, how do you grow older with a bit of grace — and preferably without having to take up cold-water swimming or start a podcast? A. Thank you for this wonderful, painfully funny and all-too-relatable letter. The way you write — sharp, witty, honest — is anything but invisible. You leap off the page. And yet I hear the ache underneath your humour: the feeling of being overlooked, dismissed, edited out of your own story. What you're describing is real and well documented. Society still clings to outdated narratives that equate a woman's value with youth, beauty and fertility. As men age, they're seen as distinguished and wise. As women age, we're told — sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly — that we're past our prime. It's not just personal. It's cultural. And it hits us at a time when so many other transitions are converging: menopause, children leaving home (and sometimes having more sex than we are), ageing parents, shifting roles at work. There is also the additional, subtler narrative, that to ask for attention when you're older is rather embarrassing. Attention is for the young … It's a lot. I want to say this clearly: society suffers when midlife women are ignored. We hold immense emotional, professional and relational intelligence yet we're often sidelined just as we come into our full power. The loss isn't just ours. It's collective. But now, to you. I'm curious, what's your first instinct when someone breezes past you in a shop or talks over you at work? Do you freeze? Shrink? Laugh it off? I sense a punchy, bold woman behind this letter. Maybe it's time to let her lead. Could you challenge a colleague next time they interrupt — even with humour? Could you ask, at work, whether there's space to advocate for how older women are represented, respected and heard? This is less about making a scene and more about making a mark. Growing older with grace doesn't mean disappearing under a cashmere wrap. It means owning who you are with even more truth than before. And it starts on the inside. This isn't about chasing the next serum or 'anti-ageing' campaign. It's about seeing yourself fully and then showing that self to the world. Not just with exfoliated skin and decent shoes, but with your voice, your presence and your refusal to be erased. Talk to other women your age. Make space to vent, yes, but also to laugh, plan and play. Discuss ways you want to be seen more and give each other feedback about what enhances that. It can be something small, like a new lipstick. Go where you're seen. Dance, volunteer, flirt, lead, write. Look for role models that fit for you and absorb some of their chutzpah. Take up space, in whatever way feels most you. You don't need a podcast or a plunge pool to matter. Move your body in ways that feel joyful and alive. Relish the skin you're in; not despite its changes, but because of them. And yes, if sex is on your radar — however, whenever, solo, together — go and find it. Pleasure is protest too. Make the decision not to fade. Above all, don't go along with the invisible narrative. Caring about this, as you do, matters. And caring also means you'll act on it, which makes you visible. And visibility isn't just how others see you, it's how you see yourself and whether you're willing to show up as that woman, every damn day. So yes, wear purple (from the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph) if you want to. But more than that, be loud, be bold, be seen and take up your space now, not isn't your exit. It's your entrance. Dress courtesy of The Fold
