When Germaine Greer states her views, you prepare to be provoked. Invited to speak for two minutes in the Radio 3 series Free Thought recently, Professor Greer chose to deride the British obsession with home ownership.

“Why is it, when the British think of homes, they can think no further than houses? Hundreds and thousands of them, each in a quarter acre or so ... each staring out at a vista of parked cars, and the houses across the street.” H'm. Doesn't Professor Greer possess a country house with acreage, where she strides with proprietorial pride? Never mind.

“Everyone who isn't already toiling up the housing ladder is mad to get on to it, as if it were a human right to struggle with lifelong debt and DIY. They've been brainwashed into wanting to blight their leisure time with compulsory gardening, regular lawnmowing, unblocking of gutters and drains, and redecorating whenever the wind changes ...

“Most domestic architecture has no architectural value whatsoever, regardless of whether it is listed or not. Suburbia is the least efficient, most expensive and dullest lifestyle there is. Excitement is Manhattan or Dubai, not a sprawling eco-town on the edge of nowhere. If you want to live in a place that's really elegant, that makes the best use of available resources, including light and energy, then you should really live in an apartment. You don't have to have a hedge. The house,” she finished ringingly, “is OVER.”

It was a timely moment. The housing market was collapsing, and I was bemoaning the organisation required just to leave a house for a week's hols. Shelling out bribes to children to take charge of house, dog, cat, deliveries, general maintenance and vigilance.

Our six days in France were punctuated by urgent calls from home: a flooding washing machine (two plumbers summoned), lame dog and mauled cat needing the vet, telephone kaput. Got back to find garden a rainforest, parcels to collect that had arrived “while you were out”, more calls for plumber, vet. Days of “you are held in a queue” ensued, and promises to arrive “sometime between 8am and 6pm”. (But thanks to Dave of BT, who restored communication the next day.) These are just normal hazards of home-owning with added pets. How do people manage who are out at work all day? Some resort to what the Victorians took for granted: staff. Look at The Times small ads from people needing gofers to run their domestic lives: “High-profile family in Kensington require PA (9am-1pm),” says one, “to organise social events and general house management.” “Head of Wealth Management needs a PA, £42,000,” says an alluring other: “Charming guy, dedicated to his work, needs total management - business and personal.” Blimey! The only person I know with a real Girl Friday is Maureen Lipman. Nats is an art director by profession, but the first time I saw her she was crouched in the drive outside Maureen's, reassembling a VW Beetle she had dismantled. Nothing fazes her - from walking dog to moving the ménage from family house to cool flat.

Many women I know have made the same move recently. I observe with interest (indeed envy) their obvious contentment with minimalist, clutter-free zones. They extol the simplicity, the freedom - “You just shut the front door and leave.” But someone still has to be there for the gas man and the door bell, whether you have a house or one of the “elegant” apartments mentioned by Greer.

Houses are the essence of British domestic life. The vast majority of English homes before 1900 were houses, whether cottages or Chatsworth. In cities we have always built in terraces and squares. Stuccoed and grand like classical palaces, or Georgian dolls' houses, they still please the eye. The 20th century saw the explosion of suburbia, with Voyseyan gables and inglenooks and mock Tudor, much derided, but championed by Betjeman. The suburbs produced Michael Portillo, Clive Anderson, Julian Barnes, Mick Jagger, Elton John and Twiggy. Michael Frayn, raised in Ewell, has forsaken NW1 and retreated to verdant Petersham. The suburbs have long fulfilled our requirements, even if just for somewhere to escape from. Even Greer escaped from a suburb.

“The house,” Greer asserted, “is incapable of improvement. It cannot demonstrate new building styles.” New building styles? Has she looked inside any contemporary flats? I have. Mayor Boris has declared their boxy rooms “rabbit-hutches”, and vows to bring back Parker Morris proportions (the Government's 1961 “Space in the Home” benchmark for social housing). Storage space, shelving, anywhere to put a Hoover or hang your hat, is non-existent. You can hear every footstep from above, every sneeze next door. The notion of accommodating a pram in the hall, or any form of family life from toddlers to teenagers or aged parents, is laughable.

No thanks, Germaine. I am more than semi-attached to my semi-detached. Complete with hall and fireplaces and staircases and superfluous parlour, labour-intensive garden, and essential larder, laundry, linen cupboard, library: rooms enough and to spare, devised by the imaginative Mr Collins, who built this house in the 1890s, along with thousands of others in North London. I have accepted the burden of drainpipes, gutters and chimneys, roof slates and sash windows, the consumption of cash and energy and time, the decades of mortgage slavery. For most families, happiness remains vaguely house-shaped. The abyss of repossessions and negative equity we are now in is deplorable: and after watching How the Banks Never Lose, the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Monday night, I wish Greer would direct her forceful polemic not on the pathetic Brits' desire to own a house, but at the grotesquely rapacious, bonus-rich, Ferrari-driving bankers now depriving them of any prospect of doing so.

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