It happened again this week when reading about the efforts to house the thousands left homeless after the catastrophic earthquakes in Italy.

The ether has been jammed with photographs and footage of ruined homes and towns – all stone and concrete.

I had a thought that it reminded me of images from war wracked Syria (or just about anywhere else in the Middle East). 

The Italians have come up with a temporary housing solution: wood.

They plan to build what they called “wooden huts or chalets” near the fallen down ruins of their old homes. 

Not everyone’s happy about this. Apparently there have been worries about how people would get through the harsh winters in houses made of sawn up trees.

The same suspicion about wooden housing was noted recently on a British TV show when a person had proudly purchased a timber house which had been imported from the United States. The owner’s daughter said it was like living in a shed. 

Wooden housing is well known, and well-loved in Australia and has been for generations. Some of the finest examples of architecture from the 19th Century are timber houses.

We have entire suburbs of houses clad in weatherboards. My childhood memories are of Dad re-painting the house every few years. 

Even our brick homes mainly aren’t. Brick, that is. They are brick clad over timber frames. Many Australians still prefer the character and flexibility of working with wood. Stone or concrete houses are fairly uncommon in Australia.

Kevin McCloud’s TV program Grand Designs celebrates innovative building, yet he so often waxes on about people incorporating timber in their designs as if it was cutting edge. 

But the British media is still awash with skepticism about timber housing. One report jeered about people who build their houses out of sticks. While one advice column says they are wobbly and prone to go up in flames like a box of matches.

British banks regard timber as “unconventional” and often won’t give mortgages to build timber houses. Or they charge a fat premium. One online chat ranter asks why, seeing America was the richest country on Earth, it kept building houses out of wood, cardboard and sheets of tar paper.

One response said while wood might be ecologically better than concrete, it was outrageously exorbitant!

The chat thread ends with comments from Jason: “They (Americans) are morons. Believe me!” A saying about pots and black comes to mind, Jason.

The rejection of timber in standard residential housing seems to be peculiar to the Middle East and Europe. Maybe they had more rock than everyone else? But it’s common through the rest of the world. Indeed, Japan turned wooden houses into a deeply cultural art form.

I’m suspecting that in Britain, the shying away from wooden houses came after the Great Fire of London in 1666 when the homes of 70,000 people went up in a fire lasting three days.

Building out of wood and thatch had officially been banned for generations before that, but most of the poorer people of the old central City of London continued to use it. Not so much after 1666.

WAYNE GREGSON