BORN and bred - now there's a solid phrase, one that makes a reassuring thud when tapped with a spoon or some other phrase-beating implement, although not a lump-hammer because that would be taking things a bit far.

All of us are born somewhere or other, but some of us are bred all over the place. Staying put doesn't happen for everyone.

I've been here and there and a few places in between, which presumably makes me what York stalwarts Neil Cussons, Steve Barley and Andy Bonner would call an "incomer" who swaggered here from the south. I don't recall arriving with a swagger but it was 17 years ago, which is a long time to remember a swagger

If I did, some years earlier I swaggered from south Manchester to south London, and before that from Bristol to south Manchester (although this may not be so because I don't think nine-year-olds were allowed to swagger in the 1960s).

Neil, Steve and Andy have set up a new political party committed to putting locals first. The aims of Keep York Local include providing truly affordable housing for York people, full protection for York's heritage and narrowing the gap between the city's rich and poor.

Fair enough aspirations and it's certainly true that housing is too expensive in York. Yet it's a bit steep to blame it all on those of us who arrived from elsewhere (or even Lewisham). Kate Lock wrote an interesting column last Saturday in which she stuck up for incomers. Her situation is similar to mine, although she's a slightly more recent invader.

Dousing newcomers with blame seems a little pointless. People have always moved about the country (and the world), bringing with them different insights, fresh energy, unusual ways and an MG Metro bursting with new baby and new baby clothes, newish wife and newish wife's clothes and so on.

Baby one was followed by two and three, and here we all are. The children have only ever lived in this city.

I've been in York longer than anywhere else so it feels like home, and if there's a gap between rich and poor, that's where you will find me, along with most other residents, incomers or not.

Roots are funny things. We've all got them but some have been chopped about, transplanted from one bit of life to another. In a sense people such as me don't really come from anywhere or perhaps we come from everywhere, accumulating little bits of here and there. Aside from the places already mentioned, my family DNA includes traces of Southampton, Essex and the East End of London. Virtually no one in my family still lives where they were born. Brothers, parents, nearly all the cousins - all have moved on.

Sometimes I envy people who stay put, with their family networks and friends round the corner; and sometimes I don't. There are advantages to settling somewhere new, to marking out your own territory at the other end of the M62.

To return to Neil, Steve and Andy, they are annoyed by all the new flats in York. They are also irked that Burton Croft, the home of John Bowes Morrell, who founded York's university, was demolished to make way for yet more bloody flats. I'm with them on that and have the dusty columns to prove it. As for Burton Croft, my stout defence of that venerable, but now departed, building shows what power and influence this column wields.

There is a passing irony here. By helping to set up the university, Bowes opened York to the outside world - and did more than most to attract incomers to the city.

Another irony lurks just out of sight. It is this: if a tenth of the huge (and understandable enough) fuss about Arc Light centre attempting to relocate to Clifton had been spent on saving Burton Croft, just round the corner, the old place might still be standing today.

Updated: 08:50 Thursday, September 01, 2005