CJSF said:
I enjoy the old things in life, like cars, cottages, and vinyl.
I like old cottages too. However, I have come across very few that have preserved anything but the basic structure and - in listed properties - the original outward appearance.
Most have 'Homes And Garden' designer interiors and are owned as weekend and holiday homes / 2nd homes / homes for rich 'downsizers' escaping from busy cities. It's all granite and glass and stainless steel and bl###y AGAs now.
A lot of what are called cottages nowadays are usually old terraces of one-up, one down dwellings that were knocked into one property. Many were simply bulldozed in the last 70 years due to being unfit for human habitation or because they were in the way.
A friend's mother - who is about 80 years old - grew up with her grandmother in the 1930s and 40s in a two room cottage, with a dirt floor downstairs, in the New Forest. Post war building standards ensured that it was demolished and the occupants re-housed. (They were basically country 'slums' no matter how quaint they looked.)
With the building of the motorway network (especially the M4) and the increasing mechanisation of agriculture, the surviving cottages became extremely popular as holiday and weekend properties with well-heeled incomers from the 1970s onwards. The (usually retired) occupants were grateful to sell their badly heated, badly drained, draughty, insanitary and ill-maintained homes for the newly inflated prices on offer and were often baffled as to why anyone would want to live there if they didn't have to!
How it's all changed. Half a million will barely get you a farm labourers cottage or a converted piggery within an hour's drive of London any more. Your neighbours will be ex-bankers, media executives, owners of carpet warehouse chains and the kind of people who think Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV shows depict 'real' country life. (That's if you ever actually see the neighbours anywhere outside of their cottage, or the local 'Gastro Pub', or briefly unloading all the Waitrose bags from the Range Rover. when they arrive.)