About a year ago, I stumbled across a saying. 'If you don't build your dream, somebody else will hire you to build theirs.'

I love my day job; I'm a freelance copywriter. I've spent the last ten years hopping between big companies. But I don't want to do that forever. I want to spend time building my own dream and see where it takes me.

I can't explain how the houses started. Maybe it was always going to happen like this. My family come from Stoke-on-Trent, and I grew up on tales of glazing, firing, selecting and packing, Royal Doulton and roses made from clay. I loved pottery at school and I've been through countless obsessions with clay-like materials, from plasticine figurines and polymer clay beads to paper clay Christmas decorations and now houses, in lots of different mediums.

I've been into photography for years and I can never resist a shot of a good window, a battered door, house numbers or street signs. More than anything, I'm fascinated by the variety of buildings all around us. This ever-changing legacy of homes, new and old, living alongside one another. Proudly cleaned, extended, re-painted, demolished, re-built, improved. Passed on from owner to owner like so little else is these days.

And into these houses, our lives fit. Over the years, every house in every street of every town sees hundreds of lives, thousands of stories, and countless memories. In a way, our homes are us, and we are our homes.

I still don't know how it started. Let's call it fate.