What’s the deal with basements?

Kev and I went over to Illinois a few weeks ago for our American wedding reception - a party at his parents’ house. The weather was pretty atrocious. A stationary front sat across middle America, spewing out violent thunderstorms and tornados. We missed one tornado by 12 miles, and there were Tornado Watches (be aware) and Tornado Warnings (be prepared to take action) many of the days we were there.

I will confess, it made me a bit nervous. Thunderstorms I don’t mind, but the idea of tornados scares the bejeezus out of me, mainly because I simply don’t know what the signs are that you have to go and hide in the basement. If you’re in a town, then there will be a tornado siren, but you can’t hear them from Kev’s parents’ home. One thing I would like to do on Kits and Mortar is to research various weather-related and geological issues such as tornados, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, but in the meantime, all this talk of basements set me to thinking.

Kev’s parents have an enormous basement. They live in a single storey ranch-style house, and the basement has really good head height and is roughly the size of the house footprint, although I don’t think it extends under the garage. For Americans, this isn’t unusual - lots of houses in the US have basements and they provide not just a massive amount of storage space, but also maybe additional living space, and at the least, a laundry.

Even if you don’t do much more than use the basement to store stuff, I love the idea of having one. It’s cooler than the rest of the house, so with an air recirculation system you can actually use that air to cool the rest of the house on hot days. And of course, if a tornado does come, you can run down to the basement and hide in the northwest corner (relevant bit is Myth #5).

Of course, in the UK we rarely have strong tornados, but we do get about 33 each year which cause minor damage. We also don’t seem to go in for basements quite so much either. In Bath, for example, where I thought there were loads of basements, it turns out that these ‘basement’ flats are in fact at ground level, and the road has been built one storey up, supported by arches and with vaults underneath. Sounds a bit like Ankh-Morpork to me.

You do sometimes find houses with cellars, but again, they are not very common amongst the houses I’ve ever seen. A friend of mine had an old flint and brick house in Arundel which had a cellar accessible from a stairwell that led down off the lounge. It was dark, dank and cold down there, and if you stored anything there for any real amount of time, it would go mouldy. The floor was rubble, and you had to bend over to get in there because the ceiling was so low. Hardly ideal.

I do wonder why we don’t have more basements here, given how useful they are. Is it just a fashion thing? Are basements just out of vogue in the UK? Are they that much more expensive to build? Are there issues keeping them dry? It’s notable in the episodes of Grand Designs that have required a house to be ‘tanked’, i.e. made waterproof, there have always been problems. Kev’s parents use a pump to keep the basement dry, which is problematic if the electricity goes out, as it did one day we were there. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.

I really am curious to know why basements aren’t more common here, so please do leave a comment if you have any insight!