There’s No Place Like Home — The Spatial Home

Abstract

The idea of home as space, a physically delineated, geographically locatable place, is perhaps the most common way of reading home. We instinctively think of home and people’s relationship to it in spatial terms. Home is, Douglas (1991: 289) asserts, ‘always a localisable idea … which starts by bringing some space under control’, even if that space is not necessarily fixed. We ask new acquaintances where they are from, as a way of locating them physically and culturally, making assumptions about their class, education, ethnicity, interests and influences by placing them in a recognisable setting. At first glance, the spatial home appears to be the least complicated and most obvious of the four aspects of home under investigation. The spatial home could be a village, a town, or other collection of residences. It is usually a house or similar building, or a semi-permanent dwelling, but may be a tent or other temporary physical structure. It is the landscape providing the setting for our lives. Yet the longer we look at the physical home, the more we realise that the ground is moving beneath our feet. As Massey (2005: 137) points out, even the seemingly constant mountains of England’s Lake District are not what or where they seem, due to the land’s gradual movement over millennia.