‘It makes you feel you’ve got a really dirty house’: what’s behind the UK’s plagues of flies?

From Leicestershire to Carmarthenshire, neighbourhoods are struggling with wave after wave of houseflies. Why are they suffering while others are spared? And is there no alternative to nets and zappers? Francesca Davies’s living room is absolutely teeming with flies. You can’t enter the contact centre worker’s home without a cluster of insects rising from the sofa or the floor to buzz around your face. Davies and her family live in West Heath, a suburb of the Cheshire town Congleton. Davies’s...

By Lucy Knight