B
Bungalows are extremely popular among pensioners, partly because the accommodation is conveniently arranged on a single floor, but mainly because they’re the only residential buildings in which it’s still legal to display garden gnomes, plaster wishing wells, flock wallpaper and wooden signs bearing the word ‘Dunromin’.
Perhaps perversely, bungalows are now among the most disproportionately expensive properties in the UK, with most being bought by people in their forties, and the pensioners thereby displaced routinely moving into mobile home parks, bus shelters and bird hides. By 2025, it’s estimated that less than 3% of pensioners will still be living in bungalows, with the vast majority of these confined to a single-storey ghetto in Ventnor.
In recent years, bungalows have also increasingly been used as houses of ill repute, following the example set by Silvio Berlusconi, who introduced the bunga-bungalow to a cul-de-sac (vicolo cieco) in Rimini in 1997.