The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi & Family Life between the Wars. By Peter Scott

Abstract

The interwar period in Britain is overshadowed by chronic unemployment, but there is another, brighter side. This is the social breakout into suburban living, facilitated by a sustained building boom in the 1930s, whose peak annual magnitude has not been matched since. While the coal belt and its legacy industries were depressed, the wave of innovation in electricity, communications, public and private motor transport, and urban services transformed the rest of the country, and even parts of the coal belt itself, while production of housing, furniture, flooring and appliances kept millions more in work. Peter Scott's jacket illustration, taken from an advertisement, shows (as if from a low-flying plane) a bridge crossing over from tight, grey, grim rows of urban terraced houses to a new suburban bungalow drenched in sunlight, its roof blazing red, a green lawn, and a child on a tricycle on orange pathways. This transition is familiar to historians, but that does not reduce the warm glow it can still invoke. Alan Jackson, Ross McKibben, and many others have vividly depicted this migration as primarily a middle-class movement. Peter Scott's contribution is to lay out, in greater detail and penetration than before, the experience of manual workers and the lower middle class. Stefan Muthesius showed that before the First World War, the dominant housing form in England (a single-family house with a narrow street frontage and a long backwards extension) was universal across the social classes, differing in scale, space, amenity, and the presence of gardens depending on cost. Likewise, housing in the interwar period was dominated by a new format, in which the single-family house (usually built in “semi-detached” pairs, the “Semi” of the title) was turned sideways to maximize air and light, and surrounded with a substantial garden, though still differentiated socially by size and style. This design first appeared before 1914, was associated with politically progressive aspirations, was formalized in wartime by the official Tudor Walters Report, and became hugely popular. Solidly constructed housing of that period has endured well and is still popular today.