Mark Burton’s Tiny House and the Dream of Affordable Home Ownership
Mark Burton’s tiny house on wheels has caused quite a stir online and in the UK press — compact, ergonomic and ecological, you can take it anywhere! From the wilds of Scotland to London Town, this portable cabin can find a home (and even become your home, albeit a small one).
Burton also builds and designs customized static tiny houses. The tiny house movement is big in the US and Canada and Burton sees a real need for economy of living space in the UK as a solution to the housing crisis — in particular, with regard to the inaccessibility of the property ladder and the seemingly unreachable goal of young people becoming first-time home buyers.
“OK, it’s a tiny house not a proper bricks and mortar property, but it’s a start!” says Burton. “Take university students as an example. They get accepted at a university, in most cases away from home, so have to stay in digs. The next step would be to gain student finance. The largest outlay for a student in this situation is living (rent and bills). Most students that have completed their term at uni then have to face the fact that they are £30,000 in debt, in some areas it could be as much as £50,000! Great start to working life… not!”
He has a dream of fully off-grid student communities or villages of tiny houses, with each tiny house being brought in at around £20 – 25k. The student would then have no massive rental debt to pay back after his course finishes, and in fact, he would have a tiny property to sell on and get 80 percent of his money back. Or, if a person chooses the portable variety, he could elect to tow it around the world if he wanted to — at around 135 sq. ft., Burton’s tiny house is small enough to easily get about.
When positioned by a main, fully hooked up building, the tiny house need not be off-grid, as all its water and energy needs can be supplied by a system of connecting cables. (Keep in mind that currently you still need planning permission to erect a small dwelling in your garden or on land in the UK.)
If Burton’s vision of widely available compact living comes to pass, for the price of a deposit on a conventional property, you could have your own tiny home!
“As a child, I grew up in an amazing space: an old hunting lodge in Virginia Water, which was tucked away in the middle of a forest surrounded by 400 acres of trees we called ‘The Woods.’ From a very young age, building camps and tree houses was almost an obsession, every project became more and more challenging with bigger and better ideas,” says Mark Burton.