Building's housing editor usually has the ‘resi' patch to herself but when a media scrum descended upon Crest Nicholson's £60k home she found herself having to fight for every soundbite.

It's 8.30 on a Monday morning and I am standing in the drizzling rain in front of the Building Centre. I am not happy. I want to be inside Crest Nicholson's £60k house, not only because it is the reason I have done battle with the Northern line to be here, but because it will be warm and dry.

I can't go in the house to admire its showhome perfection - trendy but in a low cost, mass-market Ikea kind of way, for all you style watchers - because it has become the scene for a succession of television interviews. The mass media, it appears, have discovered Low-Cost Housing. I carry on waiting as my 8.30 appointment turns into 8.45, then 9.00, and then I give up watching the time. To add insult to injury, a lackey from a television channel asks me if I could "move out of shot".

The £60k house competition was launched at the Sustainable Communities summit just over a year ago, amid much scoffing at the Prescottian idea. The competition has produced a series of low-cost housing designs that are exciting and innovative, but not one real £60k home has been sold yet.

Still the media has worked itself up into a fever of excitement about this single mock-up. It's good news for Crest Nicholson, and good to see a positive story about housing making television news, but tomorrow the media will have moved on. Breakfast television will return to its usual coverage of diet tips and holiday destinations. Housing won't matter any more, but it should.

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