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History of the English House
| Within the span of 100 years, the fabric of the house would change more dramatically than in the previous 500. The turn of the century saw concrete being used in footings, water being delivered at pressure, electricity becoming available and mains drainage the norm. All this coupled with better glass gave the architect a chance to design a brighter and more efficient house. Edward VI became king in 1901 at the age of 59, and he was to preside over a country at the height of it’s power throughout the world, controlling almost a quarter of all land surfaces. The Edwardians took up the challenge with wealth and prosperity behind them they extended the Victorian house into a less cluttered and more spacious series of rooms, but perhaps as with all forms of domestic architectural history it was time for a change. The Arts and Craft movement goes back as far as 1885 with architects such as Voysey designing houses with a rural feel, gone were the vertical red brick structures of the Victorians and Edwardians, and in were ground-hugging individual houses with sweeping roofs, roughcast walls and leaded casement windows. By 1890 Art Nouveau was adding an interior design element with stained glass in door panels and decorative motifs around fireplaces, rather than external design element to housing. Elements of Art Nouveau and Art Deco can be seen in more modest housing through into the 1930’s. The pottery of Clarisse Cliffe epitomizes the style of Art Deco, but few examples of domestic architecture are found, more of the furniture and ornaments have survived, many of which have been taken from the American way of life. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard inspired by a trip to America published a book called Tomorrow, in which he outlined his ideas for a garden city. In 1903 Howard’s ideas were put into practise at Letchworth, where 3818 acres had been bought for just over £40 per acre. Howard’s ideas were ably translated in architectural terms by the architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. Their design set out to avoid the monotony of the uniform grid plans of the nineteenth century housing. They restricted density to twelve houses per acre and planned the layout carefully to use the existing landform, trees, hedgerows and other natural features of a site. Their cottage designs reflected the popular English romantic ideals of the time, producing an architectural quality, which ‘materialised the Englishman’s ideal conception of home as a unit of house and garden combined’. This fundamentally remains the view of most British people today. (Extract from the RIBA Book of 20th Century British Housing, published by Butterworth-Heinemann). In 1904 Voysey was involved in a development of more modest housing in Whitworth, West Yorkshire, designing a terrace with rendered fronts, façade gables interspersed with dormers, a crisp version of traditional Cotswold cottages. It would appear that this concept of rural housing with a through living area, kitchen extending into living area without folding doors, was a feature that was here to stay into the 21st century. Post First World War saw a lowering of building standards during the recession, and the early images of Parker and Unwin of fifty new towns were diluted to such an extent that Welwyn Garden City, founded in 1919, was to be the only new town built until after the Second World War. 1920’s Council Housing was introduced under the 1919 Housing Act that required local authorities to provide housing for rent. The Tudor Walters Report of 1918 recommended that every house should contain a living room, parlour and scullery and at least three bedrooms; a bathroom and larder were both regarded as essential. The houses were to be built in cul-de-sacs rather than long terraces, and the facades of garden city houses were to be emulated. Speculative Housing by the private builders followed much along the lines of redbrick houses of the turn of the century with a bay window and a porch under a hipped roof. The windows were always casement, never sash, and often copying the redbrick windows with larger panes below small ones. Other styles popular with the speculative builders were the ‘Tudorbethan’ and ‘Jacobethan’. These were imitations of Tudor and Jacobean houses featuring haft timbered facades with a mix of red brick and pebbledash, also herringbone brickwork, tile-hung walls and weatherboarding. Roofs were tiled rather than slated, and chimneystacks were often elaborate. |
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 Arts and Craft House 1920 |
 'Tudorbethan' Style 1920's |
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| Bricks and Brass A great site for extra info on the history of the house, and especially for those period property owners. Period style Interiors guide from the BBC |
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| Home ownership grew rapidly from 1950 with most
speculative housing following the pattern of detached and semi-detached
houses built to average densities of around ten dwellings per acre.
In 1961 Parker Morris was commissioned to produce a report on the way housing should address the needs of the modern family. He concluded that there should be more living and circulation space mainly split into an area for quiet and leisure activity, and an area for eating, but the latter could be an enlargement of the kitchen. The room 'saved for best' was no longer considered essential, and the introduction of central heating meant that bedrooms could be used by children for other activities rather than just sleeping. With the ousting of the front parlour, the homeowner needed other ways of displaying his stature in life, and this became evident with the new car in front of the garage, or the foreign holiday just taken. Unfortunately architects lost sight of design and style and concentrated on producing houses at a very low cost, which also echoed the desires of local councils to produce low cost housing. Some might say that the resulting architecture was as close to the'Modernist'movement that we ever saw in the UK, but what really happened was by taking the ease of construction, using concrete, picture windows and cladding, without the overall concept of 'Modernist', we finished up with thousands of characterless boring houses. This is perhaps one of our darkest times in housing, and apart from demolition, we are stuck with it, or are we? (read more) Tower blocks or high-rise living was never popular in the UK, mainly because people were forced to live in them whilst the terraces they had grown up in were demolished. Now many tower blocks have been demolished, but some that remain have recently become trendy with the young professionals who regard them these ex-council flats as good value for money with great views. (read more) 1973 saw the miner's strike and OPEC raising oil prices with the
knock-on effect of highlighting energy efficiency of homes. One
way to improve the 'U' value (the rate of heat loss is measured
in this way) was to reduce the size of windows and double-glaze
them. From 1995 new houses had to conform to a given SAP (Standard
Assessment Procedure) for the overall floor area. Right to buy was introduced by the Conservative government, and by 1982 some 200,000 council houses had been sold with considerable discounts. By 1986 over a million houses had been sold, it was ' The sale of the Century'. Today 85% of new homes are covered by a NHBC (National House-Building
Council) warranty, with the general design and layouts being far
more flexible, but design tends to be a sanitised version of past
periods of architecture, a little bit taken from here and there.
Apart from rare occasions such as seaside towns, do we see 'Modernist'
architecture making an appearance; mainly domestic homes are a collection
of styles fighting with each other, all crammed into a tight space. |
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