Of course, this situation is severely location dependent.
As oldpilot55 says above.
I pay a few k a year for hangarage. I know a pilot "up norff" who pays about 1/10 of that, in an area which is a total dump, where nobody wants to live, where the weather is crap (even by UK standards), etc.
There is a whole pile of cheap places in East Anglia, but I would not want to live there if you paid me for it, and seemingly neither would most of the UK otherwise they would all be there now (nice beaches, etc).
In the South East, it's lovely to live here, the wx is good, but property is expensive and so is hangarage and most other stuff. Even pub food is expensive. And getting planning is often very hard or impossible.
Much of Kent is inaccessible, due to crap roads, otherwise everybody would be flying out of Lydd. Headcorn is similar and is grass (see below), Goodwood is grass, Sandown is grass (and is on the IOW so basically no good for anything except a burger run, or if you live on the IOW, because transport to/from the IOW makes Sandown meaningless for going somewhere), Redhill is grass. Hangarage in these places is mostly nonexistent. Dunsfold looks interesting but is on a crap road (A281) and has some other issues. I think that kind of covers the area...
There is a good bunch of strips there but they are very tight (Deanland e.g.) as to who gets the Royal Pleasure to visit them
and most are inaccessible for an aircraft with any significant mission capability (I mean beyond a burger run).
Shoreham is a unique facility which nobody should do anything less than support. Yeah, there are difficult issues concerning the fraught politics of its ownership which I won't go into here (but know a great deal about).
And I am not even talking about IAPs, which, frankly, is moot for just about any UK coastal airport unless it has an ILS (because you can descend well enough over the sea, etc...). I would certainly not regard an NDB as useful - it is useful purely to support commercial flight training, and certain passenger carrying ops where one needs the facade of an "instrument approach approved by the CAA". One just uses a GPS in the OBS mode.
The problem with "grass" is that the risk of potholes goes way up, and a prop strike is about £20000. Prop strikes are a BIG thing in GA, which tends to get swept under the carpet, except by the insurance companies and the luckless owners. The prop shops love it of course.
Of course a hard runway with grass taxiways, and crap transitions between the two, is just as bad. One rarely gets a prop strike on the runway (short of a seriously wheelbarrowed landing). So most owners of "higher quality/performance" hardware want a proper runway etc. And they want hangarage otherwise the plane just rots. Also, constant operation from grass does translate to a more mucky plane, more crap everywhere, and bigger maintenance bills. And most pistons twins or turboprops cannot be sensibly operated from grass (high tyre loading) unless covertly reinforced and that costs about £50k-100k for a runway and a bit of taxiway.
I don't want to start another "LAA" thread but one needs to be careful to not try to bring down GA to its lowest common denominator. The community comprises of a broad spectrum of stuff and while a great deal of it could exist purely out of farm strips, on Tesco petrol, this is far from a solution for everybody.
Airports like Shoreham are vital and should be supported.