Matt Edmondson

Full transcript

Home Again – Interview with Matt Edmondson

Introduction

Matt Edmondson: I was like, "I'll go and see it. Yeah, of course. We'll go and have a look. We're never moving there, but we're gonna have a look." And we did, and we both left and was like, "Oh, I think that's... I think that could be home, you know?"

Ella: Hi, I'm Ella.

Matt: And I'm Matt, and you're listening to Home Again, a podcast by SpareRoom about the places we live,

Ella: Where we ask our guests to pick three homes that have shaped them.

Matt: Who's our guest today?

Ella: So today we're talking to Matt Edmondson. People will probably know him from listening to Radio 1. He hosts the afternoon show with Mollie King.

I personally have been listening to Matt probably since the age of about 13. I'm a big Radio 1 fan, so I'm super excited to speak to him today.

Matt: And I also found out that he's not only a member of the Magic Circle, but he has a company that makes board games.

Ella: Oh.

Matt: I know.

Ella: Who knew?

Matt: Yeah, let's find out.

Ella: Hi, Matt. Welcome to the podcast.

Matt Edmondson: Thanks for having me. What a treat this is.

Ella: Oh, well, thanks for being here. We're so excited to have you. We've asked you to think about places in your life that have meant something to you, homes that you've lived in, and so when we asked you to think about that, was that an easy sort of thought process for you?

Matt Edmondson: Do you know what? It was. There were some that were like, that was a core memory in my life. That is a place that I loved. And I actually haven't brought my childhood home in 'cause I was like, "No, no, I wanna go for places that I chose to live in." I think I'm a creature of comfort. So, if I like where I am, if I like the situation I find myself in, there's very little internal motivation for me to make a change. And so I really had to be dragged from one place to the other by my then-girlfriend, now wife, and thank God I was. So she's been very instrumental in a lot of the kind of moving on to the next place that we lived in. So yeah, I think the three that I've chosen are all special in their own unique ways.

Home 1

Ella: Okay. Well, shall we just dive into the first one then?

Matt Edmondson: Let's do it.

Ella: Okay. So the first was a house share in Greenwich.

Matt Edmondson: Yes. So this was the first time I'd left home. I moved out. I lived in Portsmouth, and I was so ready to move. You know when you're a teenager, and you're like, "I've walked every inch of Portsmouth. I know it too well. I need to get out and see something new and do something new."

And my friends Mark and Rhys—Mark I've known since primary school, Rhys I've known since secondary school, and I still am friends with them now, we hang out all the time, I saw Rhys yesterday—they were moving up to go to London, to a university in London, Queen Mary.

And I don't know if you get the vibe from me, I try and hide it pretty well, but I'm not cool. And neither are they. In fact, I'm the cool one. Imagine what kind of nerds they are. And they were like, "We don't wanna go and be in university halls. We wanna create our own environment." So we found this place, and I was like, "Right, I'm gonna move to the big city, and I'm gonna try and become a TV presenter."

So we all went up together, and we found this place. We talk about the day often in our friendship group, which was largely built actually from the various people that came to live with us in that house, 'cause there were the three of us, but there was always a fourth room, a spare room. And so we had to find someone on various rotations to come and be that fourth member of the gang.

And as a result of that, that group of friends just built and built and built. And on the day that we came to Greenwich, I'd never been to Greenwich before, didn't really know anything about it. We kind of got off the train. We were early. We went for a walk, and we stumbled upon Greenwich Park. I don't know if you've ever seen or been to Greenwich Park.

It is so beautiful. There is an observatory on top of a hill, and it's like lush. It feels like you're in the countryside. It's like lush greenery everywhere. There's a deer park. We were just wandering around going, "This is... sorry, we're in London now?"

And then we went to see this place, technically in Deptford, but we told everyone it was Greenwich. And it was perfect. It was this family. They had got this really lovely house, like a new build house on this big development. Felt really safe, and they'd done a really nice job with it. But the dad had got a job abroad, so they'd all moved, and they were renting it out. They didn't want to rent it to us 'cause they were like, "You're students. We were hoping for a family."

And we were like, "No, no, no. Don't worry. It will be fine." And they took a punt on us, and we stayed there for maybe six, seven years. It was like a really core bit of my life from being a teenager to my kind of mid to late twenties and just had the most fabulous time with my best friends and some various random people that came in that we still hang out with.

Matt: So funny, innit, when you first move somewhere new, particularly somewhere bigger than you grew up, that first bit of the people you either meet or the people you explore it with can be the make or break, like we're staying or we don't get it. You know, and to be there with your mates and stuff must've been such a good way to start that next chapter.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, it was, and they were really excited 'cause they were going to uni, and they were kind of doing their thing. I was excited 'cause I was like, "This is my time to hustle," you know? I'm gonna go out and try and make my dreams come true.

Mainly it was the joy of every day coming back and just doing the things that we would have had to walk to each other's houses to do when we grew up as kids. Every night we would play cards. We would play Mario Kart on the N64, battle mode. I was terrible. We'd do three rounds on that, and then we'd just sit up all night talking, and it was a complete joy. Every memory I have of that place is just joyous.

Yeah, we had some fun housemates that joined us. We had a girl called Betsy from America who was there for about two years, and then she went off and did some other stuff. I used to work on kids' TV, and there was a guy who walked into the office that I worked in. He worked on Blue Peter. I was on the team of people that went, "Here's Blue Peter."

And he walked in, and he was so funny in the space of about forty-five seconds. I was like, "Who is this person?" And I asked them. They're like, "Oh, that's this guy Jamie. He works on Blue Peter." And I just emailed him and said, "Hi, you just walked into our office. Do you wanna go for lunch?" Because I felt in my bones I need to know this person.

And went for lunch, and then he lived in Ealing, which is quite far from Greenwich, like an hour away. But he was about to move out. We went for lunch. He said, "Oh, I'm just about to move out." And I was like, "Where to?" He's like, "I haven't found anywhere yet." I was like, "Do you wanna move in with me?" Literally at the first time we ever sat down.

He was like, "Yeah, okay." And so he did. And then he was like one of the best men at my wedding. He was a housemate and then lifelong friend thereafter. So yeah, it was a joyous time.

Probably more so for me than it was for my housemates. I am very easily bored, so I need entertaining. Even if those people are writing a dissertation, I'm like, "Hey, come on, let's do something. Let's hang out."

The only bad times I ever had there were when Rhys and Mark had decided to start watching The West Wing whilst I was away. So when I arrived back, they were already too deep into it for me to join. So they had this couple of months where they're like, "We're gonna watch The West Wing now." And I was so annoyed.

Ella: That's bad housemate etiquette.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, what am I gonna do? And they also once tried to watch The Lord of the Rings, which I really didn't like. And I don't know why—I think the reason was boredom—I took myself off and dressed as the director, Peter Jackson, and returned to provide a director's commentary as they were watching it to irritate them to the point where they were like, "Fine. We'll do something. We'll come and play a game with you," which is invariably what I always wanted to do.

Matt: It's a quite extreme way to achieve that.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, but fun. Really fun. It's great, you get to do a Kiwi accent. I made a beard out of a bin bag, I think it was. You know, long term they enjoyed it. At the time, in the moment, they didn't, but Peter Jackson was asked to come out again at other events to commentate on things.

Matt: Films he'd made or films he hadn't made?

Matt Edmondson: Anything.

Matt: Anything. Top Gun with Peter Jackson doing the—

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Ella: But I feel like that's the stuff you can only really get away with with people that you're comfortable enough with. And I feel like housemates—I mean, you said you were close with your friends before—but just that extra level of living with someone day in, day out, you can really get away with stuff like that, I feel.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah. You get to know absolutely everything about them. What was interesting is that Mark, our friend Mark, was very much like the mother hen of the group. I have ADHD, but at the time did not know. But basically means I have object impermanence, which is if I am holding a thing and then put it down, it may as well have disappeared. I don't see it anymore.

So poor old Mark used to have to deal with me. Rhys, I think, is similarly wired to me. And he—I mean, he was a terrible, terrible offender when it came to mugs in particular. His bedroom was on the top floor of the house, and he would make himself a tea. He would take it up, he would drink it, and then he would just leave it on his desk.

It would never return to the kitchen, and then he would get another mug. At one point, I think we counted thirty-five or thirty-six mugs on his desk where he'd never returned them. And we're like, "Where are all the mugs?" "Oh, they're in Rhys's room."

And when he went on holiday once, rather than clean them away, he just put them in a bathroom cupboard because he couldn't be bothered to take them downstairs and deal with them. And we found them in the bathroom cupboard. We're like, "There's forty mugs in here. They've all got mouldy tea in them."

Uh, so poor Mark had to kind of follow us around and hoover up after everything we did, which he loved, by the way. He's very organised.

And he and I had a really mutually agreed system, which was if I left something out—like for example, I'd eaten dinner and I'd left the plate on the table—he would put it on my bed. And I would come to bed and be like, "Oh, that's what I had for dinner. Fair enough." And I'd put it on the floor and then I'd deal with it another time. So it sort of was quite a good system. Like, there was no resentment. I knew that I was bad at that stuff. He knew that I was bad at that stuff and accepted it. And his quite brilliant system was, "I'll just put this in a place where I can't see it."

Matt: It basically sounds like wherever you went in your house, you were gonna find crockery.

Matt Edmondson: 100%. Yeah, in all sorts of places. We had so many mugs, and there was only one mug that no one was allowed to touch, which was Mark's mug, which was a sportsdirect.com mug.

Ella: A staple—

Matt Edmondson: A staple of every household, which, you know, was, I don't know, five pints worth of tea. As long as you didn't touch that, have any mug you want and leave it in any room you want.

Matt: So what kind of brought that six or seven years to an end? I'm guessing it wasn't wars over crockery.

Matt Edmondson: No. I think had I not been prompted by my then-girlfriend, now wife, to move, I'd probably still be living in that house. Although they may have moved on. I was the first of our core group to be like, "Right, I'm off here."

So I'd met Bryony when I was 20. She was 18. And we had been together maybe five or six years. And she'd moved in to our house because I was going to her house, she was coming to my house. In the end we were like, "You may as well come and live here." And that was great 'cause it's like, I've got my girlfriend and all my best friends, and we're all living together. It's fantastic.

And we all got on. We'd go on holiday together. It was brilliant. She had a friend—she's a personal trainer—she had a friend who lived in this amazing, really tall, really old building in Greenwich. Like, I don't know what era. I'm gonna say Victorian. If it turns out to be Georgian, don't come at me.

He lived in the basement of this place, and he happened to mention to her, "The top flat is going. Like, the woman who owns this place, she's renting it out." And we'd been having the conversation about like, "Oh, should we move?" And I was very reluctant. And my thing was like, if it's any more expensive than where we currently live... By the way, I was paying almost no money to rent where I was. I was like, if it's any more expensive, I don't think we should do it.

But I was like, if you can find somewhere for the same price, let's talk about it. She goes, "I found somewhere. It's exactly what you're paying now. It's slap bang next to Greenwich Park, and it's amazing. But if we want it, you have to say now, and I haven't viewed it."

And I said, "Can you send me some photos?" She was like, "Yeah, but I need to know in the next 10 minutes whether or not you're gonna move out of this house that you love into this new place."

So she sent me some photos, and I was like, "It looks quite low. The ceilings look low." Now, I'm not a tall man. I'm a short king. My wife is a short lady. And I said, "How tall are the ceilings?" She was like, "Well, I can only just touch it with my hand." She's like 5'5". I was thinking, "You can touch the ceiling?" I was like, "Fine. Let's just do it."

So I moved into this place having never seen it before, and that's what prompted us to move out. We were still visiting the old place four nights a week to hang out, but we had our own little area.

Ella: I feel like I need to ask more about the low ceilings. How did that manifest in the end?

Matt Edmondson: Well, we couldn't invite any tall friends over.

Ella: Okay.

Matt Edmondson: So there was a real height threshold.

Ella: A cull.

Matt Edmondson: Exactly. If you were rolling around anywhere above 5 '9", I'm afraid you weren't coming into the house, or if you were, you were gonna be deeply uncomfortable.

But actually it was great. Yeah, I mean, it turns out if your head doesn't hit the ceiling, it doesn't actually matter how high the ceiling is. I think I was just nervous about the change, and it was like one of those things where you're like, "Let me find any flaw that I can," or in this case it was a ceiling, not a floor. "Let me find any flaw that I can to be like, 'Maybe we shouldn't do this.'"

But it was the right thing to do at the right time, and I'm still best friends with all the people that I lived in the house share with, so it's great.

Home 2

Matt: And how was kind of like making a new home together without them? 'Cause one of the weirdest things as an adult is kind of working out how your different versions of home and different senses of what the word clean means kind of fit together.

Matt Edmondson: Oh, well, we've got completely different senses of the word clean, as established with the object impermanence. I always describe it as like there's almost like frosted glass between me and the real world, 'cause I tend to just be living in a little fantasy land in my own brain, having a great time.

So that's definitely something that I had to kind of adapt to. Like, oh, I am an adult man now. Mark isn't gonna come around and put stuff on my bed so that it reminds me to do it.

But thankfully, it was such a small flat, there was barely space for anything. We had the world's most uncomfortable sofa provided by the landlord. The cheapest sofa at IKEA. I think it's 60 pounds. Absolutely no upper back support. It stops kind of lower back, so you're sat watching the TV in a very awkward way.

The TV we had, we got given by Bryony's parents their old TV 'cause they just bought a new flat-screen TV, which meant their old TV, which was not a flat screen and was actually deeper than it was wide, was now ours. I almost died carrying it up the stairs. We were six floors up of this very old building, and the day that TV came to the house was the day I thought I was going to die. It was so heavy.

But then you kind of feel like, "Oh, we're in our own little bubble," and you find out what you like and what you don't like. We basically had no money, so we were able to buy a coffee table, which was like an old trunk that we used for storage, and that was it. I don't think we bought anything else really for the house to start... Maybe a duvet, but almost nothing else. And I was pretty happy with that.

Matt: Are you a stuff kind of person? Does having stuff around bother you?

Matt Edmondson: My relationship with physical things is I don't really care about them. What brings me joy is making things. So if I can be creative in whatever sense, whatever guise that takes, I don't really mind about having nice things around.

That's definitely changed as I've gotten older, and I think you develop, together as a couple, a sense of taste, which is basically what Bryony thinks is good. Things have never really done it for me. I'm not like a, "Oh my God, I must get that. That will bring me joy," because they never do.

Matt: It's funny, isn't it? Some people kind of, when they see a space, they're imagining their stuff in it, and some people wanna fill things with their books. And some people are like, it doesn't really matter.

Matt Edmondson: Mm. I just didn't have that much stuff. I was travelling real light. And we were both, I guess, at the infancy of life. We'd lived in this house share where everything was in the house already. You know, all the beds were there, the sofas were there. I think even stuff in the kitchen was already there. You never had to go and buy a spatula.

So we had to go and get the essentials, and that was fun. But yeah, it's never been a thing that's brought me peace. Definitely with my wife, it means a lot. She's got a good sense of taste and style, and she cares about how a room's put together.

I weirdly can't... When people say, "Oh, imagine what we could do with this space," I'm like, "I can't." I genuinely don't understand the vision you're seeing, which is weird, 'cause most of my life is having ideas that people can't see. But just when it comes to the interior side of things, I literally don't know what should go where and what should be there.

Ella: And do you feel really sentimental about that flat then? It was your first kind of place together. That feels like quite a big step in a relationship.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, definitely. I think that is the second one on my list. Have we seamlessly moved towards it without even having to try pulling attention to the format? My God, you guys are good.

Yeah, it definitely was. It felt like a big moment in our relationship 'cause it's quite a big commitment, isn't it, moving in together and starting to build your life together.

I remember it being phenomenally hot 'cause it was old single glazing, so in the summer it was just like a furnace. And then in the winter it was freezing.

We had a hatch that we were told we weren't allowed to open that went onto the roof. We obviously opened it and went onto the roof, and that was magic 'cause it was like... I felt like I was in a movie. You know like in a rom-com they've got, they're on the roof, and the world can't see them, and it's just their secret space. That was what we had up there. And suddenly it felt like the flat, which was quite small, had the entirety of Greenwich as its floor plan.

I really remember being aggressively woken up by a bird that was nesting right outside our bedroom window. I've never been as angry at anything as I have at that bird. It woke me up every day at like 4:00 in the morning, to the point where I think I tried to throw something at it, which is very hard when you're on the sixth floor of a building. But eventually it migrated or did whatever it did, but it left us. Thank God. But I really remember... That bird, the TV and the bird really stay with me from that flat.

Matt: And it sounds like, well, the way you talk about it, it sounds like London felt like home really quickly. I've been in London for years and it's my home, but some people come and do a stint, go away again to become everywhere settled. It feels like you just transitioned into being a Londoner instantly.

Matt Edmondson: Weirdly, I never felt like a Londoner. I felt like a whatever the person who lives in Greenwich is called. I'm not a party animal. Don't know if you can get that vibe from me. Nor were the people I lived with, so they weren't going out to freshers' nights and getting mashed up. We were sort of sitting around chatting.

So Greenwich, to me, felt very safe. It was like this leafy, beautiful, historic place, and we kind of spent years exploring it and finding all the non-touristy bits, occasionally going and enjoying some of the touristy bits as well. And it felt like a kind of perfect bubble away from the chaos of Central London, which by the way, I do love.

I don't think I could live slap bang in the middle of London, but Greenwich was just enough removed that it felt like this kind of magical land that no one else knew about. And when I'd say it to people, they'd be like, "That's miles away." 'Cause if you live north of the river, Greenwich feels like—you may as well be saying that you live in Japan.

And I felt the same about people who were like, "Oh, we live in Archway." I'm like, "What? How will I ever get there?"

I felt more at home there than I did in Portsmouth where I grew up. There was something about it being a place that was on my terms, that I'd chosen who to live with, and I was sort of living out the life that I had really dreamt that I would live out as a kid. But it was even better than I'd imagined. So yeah, loved it.

Matt: Well, it's really interesting, that thing of, well, you mentioned at the beginning about wanting to pick places you'd chosen and the idea of moving somewhere 'cause you don't choose where you live as a kid. And some people remain really closely tied to those places throughout their life, and that will always be kind of "home". And some people move on, and I love the idea that you're thinking of places that were like a conscious, "This is what I'm doing next."

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, absolutely. The house I grew up in in Portsmouth was... It's really weird. I try and remember what it was like, and the scale of everything's all off because I was a kid. So it felt bigger than I think it was.

Matt: Turns out the ceilings were five foot eight there as well.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, yeah, but they just felt really high. Weirdly, the house I'm in now is actually quite similar in terms of the type of house to the one that I grew up in. So apart from that house share, I've always lived in old houses. I'm drawn to stuff that has a bit of character, and that maybe needs a little bit of love.

Home 3

Matt: Well, and I think that maybe is our seamless transition into the third place you've chosen, 'cause that is where you live now.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah. So I never thought I would ever leave Greenwich, genuinely. To describe it as like falling in love with a place, that's as close as I can compare it to in terms of the feeling. Like, I really felt like it was part of my identity. "This is where I live. This is where I feel at my safest and my best."

And then we had our first daughter, Ivy, and we had her just before COVID hit, and so we were kind of in this house in Greenwich. Really nice house. We'd bought another house in Greenwich that was tiny, and then we'd gotten another house, and then we finally got to this one, and I was like, "We're done. This is where we're living forever."

And we realised that, A, we hadn't looked into schools or any of the kind of stuff that you have to think about that you never imagine having to think about before you have kids. And we just didn't quite have the space that we wanted our kid to be able to have.

And we'd had some friends who'd left Greenwich, and they'd moved to places nearby: Hither Green, Brockley, Ladywell, basically bits of Lewisham. And I was like, "No, not doing it. Never leaving. Gonna stay in Greenwich."

One day my wife was just having a look online at houses, as she does literally every day, and said, "Oh, look at this house. It's amazing." And I looked at her and I was like, "That's great. Where is it?" And she said, "It's in Brockley." And I was like, "Oh, this conversation again." I was like, "I'll go and see it. Yeah, of course, we'll go and have a look. We're never moving there, but we're gonna have a look."

And we did, and we both left and we looked at each other and said, "Oh, I think that could be home, you know?"

And my first thing was, "I'm just going to now..." I ride a little scooter around. Not a cool, not like a Vespa, like a push scooter, like a child. I was like, "I'm gonna scoot to Greenwich from here and just see how long it takes me." 'Cause I was like, "If it's in scooting distance, I think I'm okay to know that I can get back there." And I did, and it was like 12 minutes or something. And I was like, "Okay, I think we can do this."

And we moved into this place, and yeah, we've been there ever since. Touch wood, we will be there now for a very long time. I love it, and I love Brockley in the way that... maybe not with quite the same intensity that I loved Greenwich, but I feel like if offered the chance to move back to Greenwich, I would stay where I am. Which, if you'd met me six years ago, I'd have been like, "Absolutely not. You're crazy."

So yeah, it's a great house, made all the more fun by the fact that our kids are there. I mean, they've completely taken over the entire thing. There's almost no place that isn't dominated by them and their stuff, but I quite like that.

A big activity in our house is den building. So there's lots of spaces for dens. My kids are very into pillow fights. We will often gather every single soft or soft-adjacent item in the house, put it on the floor of the living room, turn it into basically a massive soft play, and then beat the hell out of each other with pillows. They always win.

It's a lovely, lovely place. We've got a little garden. Got a little slide swing set down the bottom of the garden. Greatest investment I've ever made. It wasn't that expensive, but my goodness me does it keep those kids entertained. Like, the entire summer holiday, they just are on monkey bars. It's great.

So yeah, I can't imagine moving. And we're slowly trying to kind of do stuff to it. It's expensive, guys. Trying to do anything to a house is so expensive. So we sort of redecorated our bedroom. The next year we redecorated the kids' bedrooms. I'm bracing myself at some point for doing a kitchen, like redoing the kitchen, which I think is going to financially bring me to my knees. But you know, I think that's some way off.

Ella: And so you said when you walked into the house immediately, both you and Bryony just had that immediate, "Oh my gosh. This is it. This is us." What was it? Do you have any... Can you put your finger on it? Because it sounds like it wasn't an easy feat to get you to leave Greenwich in the first place.

Matt Edmondson: What was it? It really reminded me of my childhood home, and it really reminded me, from the outside, of my favourite place on Earth apart from Greenwich, which is New York.

In New York, they have the busy bit, and then outside the busy bit, you've got the townhousy part of it, and you walk around. It's like when you watch Friends and you see these incredible houses, and a New York brownstone is like... You've made it in New York if you've got one of these. Sarah Jessica Parker lives in one of these things. It's the dream.

And this house felt, and the street felt, like a New York street. And I remember thinking, "Well, I'm not gonna live in New York. This is kind of the closest I'm gonna get to that." And to come to a street and go, "Oh, it feels like a bit of that excitement of that fantasy," I was like, "that sold it for me."

Also at the time, I was obsessed with learning music production. It had hit me in lockdown, as these things sometimes do to me in my life where I'm like, "I'm gonna be hyper-focused now on this incredibly niche thing for a few years." And at that point I was really into music production, and it had a loft, and my wife had said to me, "You could turn it into a studio." And I was like, "Sold. Let's go."

We never did, and I don't think we will. But certainly just the idea that we might be able to do that. But I've transcended that phase of enthusiasm now, so it's now just a loft.

Matt: Do you find yourself... like at a point that you have kids, does thinking about home change? When you're a young adult or whatever, you go, "Well, I just need to be where my mates are and where things are happening and where we can do what we do." And then there's this gradual creep as you get older of going, "Well, maybe home means..." I don't know. And then, but for me, having a son, thinking about, "Well, how do I want him to..." You talk about, "maybe this is the place we could be forever and the kids love it," and did that sort of sense of what home meant kind of expand over time?

Matt Edmondson: Yeah, definitely. Well, as you know, when you have kids, suddenly your interests aren't the most important thing. It's, "Okay, we wanna find a really nice school for them. So what catchment area do we have to be in to be at this school, which we think is gonna be nice?" You're thinking about, "Do they have some outdoor space? We want them to be able to run around and climb trees and have adventures and all that kind of stuff."

And for them to have their own bedrooms and have a place where they can kind of express their own identities a little bit. And a playroom and all those sorts of things.

So you start thinking less about, "What is it that I want?"—although granted, the music studio would've been really cool—and more about, "What is it that we as a family are gonna require?" So it definitely changes how you think about home.

And I think you do realise that wherever you kind of end up, it is more about the people that you're with. Although I think that is kind of true with even the rented house as well. I think if it was stay in this house, but we'll swap all your besties out, or all of you uproot and go somewhere else, but it's less nice or whatever, I would've always chosen option B, because you wanna be with the right people.

Matt: Yeah. I definitely feel like the best times of my life have not necessarily corresponded directly with the nicest houses I've lived in. It's been all about people, definitely.

Matt Edmondson: Yeah.

Matt: It's really interesting kind of talking about the places in Greenwich. You used the word safe several times. And it's such a fundamental thing about just feeling like you've got somewhere that's got your back, and then you can go out into the world and do whatever you need to do, but you've got your little space. Whatever that means. That means different things to different people. But just, it's such a key thing when you think about home, innit?

Matt Edmondson: Yeah. I think for me, it was like this sense of community within Greenwich. I knew the guy who ran the café. I used to run a market stall in Greenwich Market. I was friends with all of my neighbours. I would see the same people out walking their dog when I was out walking my dog. It really felt like, "Oh, there's a little community of people here," and it felt like a secret. You know, "This is our little place."

And actually Brockley has that as well. It has a real sense of community. And with the kids, you end up running into other kids from the school and their families literally every... You can't leave your house.

There are two things that always happen to me every day. I will always see some parents from my kids' school, and I will always see Professor Green because he lives in Brockley and he goes to the same café every day that I go to, and we have the same small talk every day. I'm like, if I don't see him, I hope he's okay. "Where's Professor Green today?"

But yeah, I think the safety thing for me is like just feeling like, "Ah, this is where I belong." And it's hard to know what that is until you've experienced it, I think.

Matt: Yeah. But it is a beautiful thing when you find it and you feel it kind of through every bit of you when you know it.

Matt Edmondson: Mm.

Ending

Matt: It's been a real joy getting to chat to you about all of this and just kind of your experience of home and how that's felt. Thank you so much for talking to us.

Matt Edmondson: It's been a joy. Thank you. I've actually felt very at home.

Ella: We're glad we could facilitate that.

Matt: What a fantastic conversation.

Ella: Yeah. He was great. I could have listened to him talk all day, honestly.

Matt: I sort of felt like our job is to make him feel at home enough to talk to us, and yet it's just so easy.

Ella: He spoke with such passion, and he clearly cared so much about... You know, it's not just the places, but it's really the people that make those places special to you.

Matt: Yeah. And whether it's flatmates or your mates or your partner or your kids, it's this thread that sort of runs through. 'Cause he's clearly so attached to a particular place in London that he moved to and just wanted to stay there forever. And then the idea that you can find that again somewhere else and that feels like home is lovely. Thanks to Matt for joining us. You can catch Matt on Radio 1 Monday to Thursday, where he hosts the afternoon show with Mollie King.

Ella: And if you enjoyed today's episode, you can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to see full video episodes, you can check out our YouTube channel. There's also a link in the show notes where you can follow us on our socials too.

Matt: But for now, I'm Matt.

Ella: And I'm Ella. And you've been listening to Home Again, a podcast brought to you by SpareRoom.

Matt: See you next time.

Ella: Bye.