Why you should pay your parents £100 board a month

Researchers calculated that young adults save £8,000 a year by living at home – and worked out how much they should pay for board each month

The ‘boomerang’ generation still living with their parents

Young adults should be paying at least £100 a month to their parents for living at home, according to a major academic study into the costs of the “boomerang” generation.

The main additional cost is food, say the researchers from Loughborough University and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. They found that on average parents spend an additional £15.86 a week on “cupboard food” and cooked meals for their returning offspring, while the extra gas and electricity added up to £4.78 a week.

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The 'boomerang' generation still living with their parents

Soaring house prices leave millions of young adults unable to afford to move out

How do the finances work for ‘boomerang’ generation families?

Would you want to move back into your parents’ home after university? How much rent, if any, should you pay? Can you survive socially into your 20s and even 30s living with your parents? Those are the dilemmas faced by millions of young adults as soaring house prices have forced millennials back into the parental home.

This major change to family life has happened shockingly fast. In 1997, around 25% of under-34s were living in their parents’ home, according to the Office for National Statistics. Today the figure is 32%. For men, it’s even higher; 37% of men aged 18 to 34 lived with their parents in 2017.

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What makes a great place to live? Answer: it’s not a shopping plaza | Simon Jenkins

Hipster watering holes in formerly run-down neighbourhoods are the new cathedrals

The best place to live in Britain today is Salisbury. So says the Sunday Times. The Office for National Statistics disagrees. It says the best place is Farnborough. No, says the Royal Mail, it is Winchester. The Provident says it is Worcester. The Halifax says it is Stornaway. And so it goes. This is listicle season, and not a magazine is without some daft “survey” of topographical superlatives. Each year groups of travel editors get together over a good lunch, with a road atlas and contented sponsor to hand.

Salisbury’s award appears to be in compensation for last year’s novichok nightmare. To be free of novichok is clearly a marketing asset, but it is hardly a standout virtue. Other criteria include a low crime rate, good schools, transport links, air quality, nice buildings and friendly neighbours. The one thing these lists have in common is that nobody agrees. Apparently if you ask most people the best place to live, they say their home. Good for them. There is nowhere like home. But dig deeper and the trends in modern “liveability” are intriguing.

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How much value does an extra bathroom add? Nottingham Estate Agents

Gone are the days when family members were happy to take their turn in the bathroom. Make no mistake: a house with two bathrooms trumps a home with just one. In the shopping list of building works that can add significant value to a property – from conservatories to loft conversions to new kitchens – […]

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Rockeries are back in fashion, say British garden centres

With many gardeners short of weeding time, rocks and alpine plants are in vogue this Easter

A rockery revival is under way. A new generation of gardeners, inspired by Instagram images, are once again buying boulders to build rock gardens that had until recently been written off as an old-fashioned idea.

Garden retailers and designers are reporting a comeback for rockeries, which are viewed as low maintenance and a welcoming environment for garden wildlife.

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Rockeries are back in fashion, say British garden centres

With many gardeners short of weeding time, rocks and alpine plants are in vogue this Easter

A rockery revival is under way. A new generation of gardeners, inspired by Instagram images, are once again buying boulders to build rock gardens that had until recently been written off as an old-fashioned idea.

Garden retailers and designers are reporting a comeback for rockeries, which are viewed as low maintenance and a welcoming environment for garden wildlife.

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Let’s move to Ely, Cambridgeshire: still haunted by its past

‘I can imagine a rather fabulous Nordic-noir inspired TV detective series being set there’

What’s going for it? It’s an odd place, Ely. For a start they have an annual eel-throwing competition on Eel Day. (That’s toy eels, animal lovers.) But that makes it all the weirder. I can imagine a rather fabulous Nordic-noir-inspired TV detective series being set there, under the flat, relentless Fen skies – possibly set in the 15th-century (Ely’s heyday); possibly starring Paddy Considine as a monk detective, with issues of course. (You can have that idea for free, scriptwriters.) It’s the city’s uncanny combination of isolation and exposure, brought on by its geography and history: all by itself high up on an island of clay, surrounded by marshes and miasmas. What an astonishing spot it must have been in medieval times, with its fantastic cathedral newly completed, the Ship of the Fens, and hooded clergy dominating this isolated, lonely place of gothic arches and misericords, eel traders and clay potters. Executive estates may now cling to the island, tour buses come to gawp at the cathedral, and Cambridge is only 15 minutes away on the train, but its intense past seems seeped into the stones, haunting the place centuries on.

The case against Its unique sense of place won’t be for everyone. It remains, despite good train links, decent local culture and community, relatively alone, quiet and small.

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