We are not at Home: Protecting Domestic Privacy in Post-Fire Middle-Class London

Abstract

This article explores the attitudes of mainly middle-class post-Fire Londoners towards domestic privacy, focussing on the visible and invisible thresholds setting private space apart. It presents a reconstruction of the complex interplay between material structures, patterns of behaviour and evolving mentalities, all of which were in a state of flux before they settled into new, widely received concepts of middle-class normality.It identifies key changes in London's domestic architecture which took place after the Great Fire. As the pre-modern nexus between spatial proximity and social cohesion was broken, new ideas about privacy arose which were translated into both bricks-and-mortar structures and patterns of behaviour. Domestic privacy was not only protected by means of material thresholds, but also by a new protocol of polite visiting. Visits became stage-managed performances: an edited version of private life was acted out before one's visitors while intimate nuclei of privacy remained securely hidden away. Interior domestic spaces were refashioned following a tripartite division (rooms used by servants, rooms inhabited by members of the family and rooms which were made accessible to visitors). This type of arrangement guaranteed an adequate protection of areas designated as private space. At the same time, notions of gender roles changed along with a clearer separation of domestic space into female and male areas. Domestic space became private in that intruders could be excluded from it at will. However, the system of multiple thresholds which protected the private home was by no means impenetrable; its most characteristic feature was its selective permeability.