BACK to the future we go - back a good century and a half this time in the search for the £60,000 house.

None of us with grown-up children still in rented properties and house-shares at an age when our generation was diligently paying its 25-year mortgages would argue with the quest.

It did strike me, however, that most people took that phrase "the £60,000 house" very much at its face value, thinking it wasn't at all bad for a very basic starter home.

Sadly, the £60,000 isn't a realistic price tag; it's the total cost of production: infrastructure (roads, pavement, drains and so on), building costs and the builder's profit.

Site cost doesn't come into it, as the Government would give the land for such houses.

Just glance at the rebuilding costs quoted in your buildings insurance. These don't include the cost of the site either, but there isn't as much "infrastructure" as a new property because the phoenix will rise, possibly all too literally, from the ashes of your old house.

Adjust the figure for even a basic two-up, two-down plus bath, and £60,000 says more about loss than profit.

Nevertheless, the Government has invited housebuilders to enter designs for such a house and that's where the back to the future bit comes in.

The house which might be built at that cost would, according to a design shown in a national newspaper, be very familiar to us here in the North.

Many thousands were built to house the workers flooding into towns and cities to find work in the new "manufactories" of the industrial revolution in the 19th century.

The 21st century version would be a small ("compact" will be the euphemism of choice) terrace house. Semis and even terraces not in a plumb-straight line cost too much. The kitchen and bathroom fittings would be bottom of the range and that bathroom would be another hark back to the past, because the rules now say every new house must have a downstairs lavatory and £60,000 doesn't stretch to two. Downstairs it is. Oh well, at least it's not so true to the original that it's down the yard.

Those original terraces have been done up with fitted kitchens, and bathrooms, double glazing and central heating. They are solid, comfortable and advertised as "ideal starter homes", but one in Darlington in need of modernisation is advertised at £68,500. The done-up versions come rather more expensively.

Not far from the offspring's house-share is that city's one tiny area of Victorian-era small terrace houses. It has become so painfully trendy that one house goes for a price which would have built the whole area, profit and all, originally.

Prefabs, anyone?

* Back to the future, part two: walking past a store popular with the young and trendy who want today's must-have at a price which lets them dump it tomorrow, I came to a sudden stop.

There, in the window, was exactly the peasant-style skirt I made for myself at least 20 years ago, a tiered style in virtually the same orangey floral material with the same black lacy edging.

Nothing new under this summer's sun, then.