Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian
The first link in the chain was forged when Alf Thompson, an elderly widower, felt short of breath. It was October 2021 and a district nurse happened to be visiting Alf at his home on a cul-de-sac in Shepshed, Leicestershire. Paramedics and family members were summoned. Alf’s daughter Emma Lowe, 51, arrived just in time to follow the ambulance to a hospital in Loughborough, about five miles east across the M1. Alf did not say goodbye to the home he had lived in for 35 years – its rooms laid with shag carpets, a beloved portrait of HMS Warrior above the fireplace – because, that day in the autumn, it did not feel like a final departure.
In Britain, around 350,000 homes are on sale at any one time. Between 1.2m and 1.5m are traded annually. The country is thickly, invisibly crisscrossed by chains of sellers and buyers, some eager to move, some dragging their feet; some wealthy, some very stretched – all tethered together by half-made deals, waiting on a conclusive word from an agent or a solicitor before their hands can close around an unfamiliar set of keys.
