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This practice review examines some of the early evidence, and reporting, of housing market change in England prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking a transect from central London, through surrounding near-urban areas, to the countryside beyond, it looks at the possibility and implications of more dispersed housing market choices and what sorts of challenges these may present to local planning practice. The pandemic has the potential to accelerate multiple home ownership (MHO), widening current inequalities in the distribution of housing wealth and bringing new demand pressures to near urban and rural locations.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought the issue of housing quality into sharp relief. For many people, home before the pandemic was a place to return to after work, school or a holiday: one of a number of spaces in which life is played out. But COVID-19 has focused daily existence on the home. It has suddenly become more intensely multi-functional: a workspace, a classroom and a leisure space all bundled into one (it was always these things, but never to the exclusion of everywhere else). This situation will not last, but individuals' and households' perceptions of the required utility of home may have changed irrevocably.