THE LOW BLOW FACED BY BUNGALOWS

Once a symbol of middle-class luxury, the prized one-storey dwelling is disappearing at an alarming rate as profit-driven developers grab plots to pile them high... but at what cost?

- By Jane Warren

'LL ADMIT it: I'm a “bungalow gobbler”. Obsessed with the dream of building my own home, in 1997 I set my sights on a half-acre plot in Pulborough, West Sussex. The problem was that the rural spot already had a building on it.

In my hunt for land, it had soon emerged that the only way to secure a half-decent and affordable plot in the countryside was to gobble up a tired, postwar bungalow.

Unloved and low-slung, it was the perfect candidate for demolition - making way for my kit house imported all the way from Boston, US. The upside - as the Grand Designs effect had not yet taken hold of a nation of self-builders-in-waiting — was that the shabby bungalow cost me just £100,000 to buy, plus a few thousand more for the demolition of the existing structure.

In 2000, I achieved my dream — documented through a dozen articles in the Daily Express property section and in the second series of Channel 4’s Grand Designs — and soon, that little bungalow was a distant memory, replaced by a triple-storey house that hauled my sleepy lane into the 21st century with cedar cladding and an assertive use of double-height glazing.

Back then, and still so today, snapping up a bungalow is often just shorthand for buying land.

Take Sandbanks in Dorset - the country’s most expensive coastal enclave, where homes now average a jaw-dropping £1.28million.

Here, modest postwar bungalows are routinely razed within weeks of purchase. Few remain. Buyers see them not as homes but as “site value” — the cost of land minus demolition fees — with replacement houses selling for millions.

Yet, as I bulldozed that modest semi-derelict property to make way for something much taller, I unwittingly became part of a nationwide trend that has pushed bungalows to the brink of extinction.

Only around two million true bungalows remain in England and the number is falling every year due to redevelopment.