The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-Occupation in Britain between the Wars

Abstract

T he growth of owner-occupation is widely regarded as one of the most important social changes to have taken place in twentieth-century Britain. From a position of relatively minor importance in the nineteenth century, it seems, owner-occupation has increased in scale progressively until it now accounts for over 6o per cent of the dwellings in England and Wales.2 Yet while the importance of the phenomenon is undisputed, its precise dimensions and nature remain unclear. Particularly is this the case for the period between the two world wars, when owner-occupation experienced its most rapid phase of growth. What exactly was the level of owner-occupation prior to the First World War? Who were the owner-occupiers and where were they found? What was the level of owner-occupation on the eve of World War II? Was its geographical and social distribution similar to what it had been in I9I4, or had it changed? To these questions there is currently no reliable answer in the literature. Lack of information on this score, however, has not prevented speculation as to the significance of the phenomenon. Both the causes and the consequences of the growth of the tenure have been debated freely, both at the time by those involved, such as building society leaders and politicians, and in retrospect by historians and economists seeking to relate it to other social and economic developments. Perhaps because so little has been known about its precise dimensions, the tendency has been to treat the growth of owneroccupation throughout the twentieth century as a single phenomenon for which one single explanation should be adduced. Thus, while the advocates of owner-occupation sometimes interpreted the growth of owner-occupation as evidence of the increasing virtue of the population, its critics, mutatis mutandis, have seen the growth of the tenure as proof of nothing less than a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, a Tory drive towards a property-owning democracy . . . to maintain the cohesion of the social formation.3