‘There’s no place like home’

‘Home is where the heart is,’ says thousands of signs sitting in bargain bins around the world. Although the saying makes me squirm, it does have some merit.

For me, Inner Sydney is home, and although I no longer live there, it is the place I still consider home. It is where many of the most integral moments of my life occurred. It is a place where you could spin me around 3 times and put on a blindfold, and I would still find my way with the confidence of a pigeon.

It’s not just the physical environment that makes it home; more importantly, it’s the people and community who were there as I grew up, whether passively or directly. Because Architecture gives a place its character, people give a place its soul.

A place that feels like home is a unique dance between character and soul, one that makes you feel part of it.

Of course, that dance will change course, whether that is due to its natural progression or external forces.

And I’m gonna drop the big G word. Gentrification. It is one of the forces that changes the rhythms of this dance, removing the soul but not the character. So, it remains eerily familiar to those who call it home.

When this change feels outside of your control, it can be excruciating. Like looking at a photograph of someone who has passed, you are comforted by their image, but it is painful because they themselves are not really there.

These days, I go home, it feels like home, but different, like I’m out of step with the dance, and the soul I once knew and was a part of has changed like a peasant at a royal waltz. The home I once knew, which is a part of me, is becoming more and more simply a part of me.

It makes me sad when a place that feels like home, you so desperately want/need to be a part of, no longer wants you. You simply become an observer of a place you call ‘home’.