Mortgages still in lockdown despite stamp-duty holiday

Low-deposit home loans are coming back … but choices are limited and lenders are applying new terms and conditions

These are difficult times for anyone who wants to buy a home. Despite the government’s attempt to reinvigorate the market with a temporary stamp-duty holiday on properties costing up to £500,000 in England and Northern Ireland, unless you have a large deposit you could face a struggle.

During the crisis lenders have pulled mortgages, with those for borrowers with small deposits disappearing fastest. Some of the big banks and building societies have started to return to the market – last week saw 90% deals launched by Coventry building society and Metro Bank, and, from Monday, Nationwide building society will also be offering them.

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Do houseplants really improve air quality?

Received wisdom is all very well, but sometimes the science proves otherwise

Gardening is full of received wisdom that is treated as gospel and handed down across the generations – from putting a layer of crocks at the bottom of pots for drainage, to the back-breaking work of Victorian “double-digging” to improve soil structure. But when tested scientifically much of this old-school advice turns out not to be supported by evidence. In fact, in the above two examples, they are actually likely to give you worse results than if you simply hadn’t bothered at all.

Even scientists aren’t immune to repeating received wisdom, or potentially extrapolating more from the data than it actually shows, particularly if the claim supports our existing views. However, the wonderful thing about science, unlike gardening dogma, is that it is forever changing as new evidence comes to light. In fact, as a botanist, I think the freedom to change one’s mind, to hold your hands up to getting it wrong, is science’s greatest strength – particularly in 2020. So I am starting, in my own small way, right here.

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Do houseplants really improve air quality?

Received wisdom is all very well, but sometimes the science proves otherwise

Gardening is full of received wisdom that is treated as gospel and handed down across the generations – from putting a layer of crocks at the bottom of pots for drainage, to the back-breaking work of Victorian “double-digging” to improve soil structure. But when tested scientifically much of this old-school advice turns out not to be supported by evidence. In fact, in the above two examples, they are actually likely to give you worse results than if you simply hadn’t bothered at all.

Even scientists aren’t immune to repeating received wisdom, or potentially extrapolating more from the data than it actually shows, particularly if the claim supports our existing views. However, the wonderful thing about science, unlike gardening dogma, is that it is forever changing as new evidence comes to light. In fact, as a botanist, I think the freedom to change one’s mind, to hold your hands up to getting it wrong, is science’s greatest strength – particularly in 2020. So I am starting, in my own small way, right here.

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Tending land by the sea | Allan Jenkins

How two coastal landscapes shaped my love of gardening

A meditation on memory. Gardening as remembrance. How places and plants can have echoes as well as leaves and roots in the past.

I am thinking of the Danish summerhouse now, and my Devon childhood. How the two gardens in many ways mirror each other, but also of their essential difference.

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How to make money from your spare room Nottingham Estate Agents

For many of us our spare room is a place where we store all those things we don’t know what to do with. But this under-utilised space is undergoing a rebirth as more and more people are letting their spare rooms to lodgers. Often, the key to harmony depends on the tenant fitting in with […]

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Tending land by the sea | Allan Jenkins

How two coastal landscapes shaped my love of gardening

A meditation on memory. Gardening as remembrance. How places and plants can have echoes as well as leaves and roots in the past.

I am thinking of the Danish summerhouse now, and my Devon childhood. How the two gardens in many ways mirror each other, but also of their essential difference.

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True colours in Lake Como

Vibrant hues bring a former silk factory back to life

It is a rare feat to feel genuinely welcomed into someone’s home over the phone, let alone by two people you’ve never met. Yet the Covid-19 lockdown made a planned trip to the home of Italian furniture designer Dalila Formentini and her Irish artist husband Sean Shanahan in Lecco, near Lake Como in northern Italy, an illegal passage.

So instead, we found ourselves on a WhatsApp call earlier this summer. Fortunately their conversation is as vibrant as the colour palette that defines the former silk factory they call home. “We started it and just did it – there has never been a second of doubt,” says Sean. From the pop-pink floors and wallpaper he handpainted in the hall to the jungle-green chimney breast and the unapologetically all-white summer dining room, their home evokes a sense of joy.

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