In assessing all that we have learnt in recent decades about the concept and experience of ‘home’ one of the key insights is surely what a tantalizing concept it is; how little we know and how far we are from getting to the ‘bottom’ of it. While there remains a certain frustration at the ambiguities that persist, at the slippages of meaning, my sense is that this is the nature of home and the source of its great interest. If we examine the literature base on theories of ‘home’ as reflected in this volume we find that it begins primarily in phenomenological geography in the 1970s (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Buttimer 1980) and then expands into environmental psychology and ‘environment-behaviour’ research from the mid-1980s after the publication of Altman and Werner’s (1985) edited volume ‘Home Environments’. A fine review article by Despres (1991) summed up the work of the 1980s and a great deal more has been published since (Benjamin et al 1995; Groat 1995). Over this time we have learnt a great deal about the meaning of ‘home’ as a place of security and order, an order that is at once spatial and social. The experience of ‘home’ is also a form of ontological security with a crucial connection to constructions of ‘self’ and the question of ‘spirit’ (Marcus 1996). It is a mirror or symbol of the self, a place where social and cultural identities become expressed and stabilized. The experience of ‘home’ is largely unselfconscious and unrecognised until threatened; distinguished in this regard from the much more conscious ‘sense of place’. It is a mode of dwelling that Heidegger terms zuhanden, the world of everyday engagement, contrasted with the vorhanden mode of detached contemplation (Heidegger 1962). The meanings of home are established by repetition and memory; in a marvellous phrase by Freya Stark it is: “...a place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it” (quoted in Tuan 1977: 144). Home is an experience that repeats, a ‘refrain’ that gains depth over time and may become more intense as we age.
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