AMANDA VICKERY: “The Battle for House and Home in Britain, 1945-1970”

ABSTRACT:

This paper charts the struggle the working classes faced to be truly at home in post-war Britain. The country emerged from the Second World War with an acute housing crisis. Bomb damage, the priorities of the war economy, and the inadequacies of pre-war housing stock, combined with demobilization and baby boom, ensured housing shortage was an urgent keynote of political debate in the 1940s and 50s. There were three major housing options in post-war Britain – home ownership, private rental, and social housing – the council house rented from the state. The latter was transformative for the living standards, health, and well-being of swathes of the working classes. Yet celebration of the New Jerusalem of Welfare State Britain masked considerable variation and outright deprivation. The case files of Brentwood house (a rehabilitation centre for mothers and children) operating outside Manchester in Lancashire between 1943 and 1970 brim with semi-official letters cataloguing the extremities of squalid housing nationwide well into the late 1960s.

What did people want? The majority aspired to live in a self-contained, small house with a garden. Most recoiled from communal utilities, having experienced far too much involuntary sharing of space and facilities. An Englishman’s home was his castle. Post-war architects expected to dictate how people lived, enforcing conformity, eradicating the working-class parlour, and imposing open plan designs. Austere all-encompassing modernism did not find a mass market in Britain, but modern elements crept in by the 1960s - the coffee table, coloured Tupperware, formica – though most homes were a medley of all sorts. Official design bodies held popular taste in contempt, finding working-class women at fault.

House and home were the site of a persistent battle between state actors and experts on the one hand, and consumers and inhabitants on the other. A phalanx of officials exercised enormous surveillance of the working classes, especially working-class women in their own homes. Indeed, the proliferation of agencies empowered to cross the domestic threshold and check if a woman’s drawers were tidy is astonishing. Nevertheless, resistance was lively, as the numerous complaints against female vulgarity themselves testify: ‘an immense number of ugly, inefficient and shoddy goods are purchased daily by tens of thousands of women’. The ability to make your own choices and to defend your boundaries and is key to dignity and social existence.