In this Chapter:

THE WORKING-CLASS OWNER-OCCUPIED HOUSE OF THE 1930s

MODERN HISTORY: M.LITT: HILARY TERM 1998
Alan Crisp M.Litt Oxford Thesis 1998 Email

At the end of this thesis is an earlier piece produced for the Open University called

ART AND SOCIETY IN HE 1930S AS REFLECTED AND CONDITIONED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE TIME.



CHAPTER 5

BUILDING THE NEW HOMES.

The House the Speculative Developer Built

This chapter will concentrate on the form taken by the 1930 semi-detached house. In the first section the design options open to the speculative builder are discussed, and it will show why the developers choose to build small semi-detached houses on estates which were laid out differently from those of the local authorities or the builders of the garden suburbs. There was a definite distinction between the speculative builder's estate, the garden city ideals and with the type of house and estate lay out adopted by the local authorities.

The second section deals with the manner by which the developers incorporated into the houses features such as projection bays and vernacular neo-detailing, because they thought it would help to sell the houses, and they could be built by using a largely unskilled labour force. It will explore the various historical issues in the division between popular taste as expressed by the speculative builder/developer, and the professional and educated taste of architects and planners. It will show how the semi-detached evolved, and what influences the speculative developers absorbed in order to produce small cheap housing in such large numbers for the working classes. The differences in form and style between the owner-occupied working-class semi and the council house built for the working classes will be illustrated. The role, or lack of one, of the architects will be explored, together with their relationship to the speculative builder, generally the architects were unwilling to accept that the speculative builder, building without input from the architectural profession, was the only one satisfying popular tastes. Educated opinion could not see that there was a diversity and not a crushing uniformity in the design and arrangements, both internally and externally, of the speculative estates of the 1930s. For as Oliver has said of the typical semi-detached house of the period: 'It seems likely that the vociferous critics of Dunroamin had no personal experience of the suburb and drew their conclusions from the railway carriage on the way to their rural retreats' (1).

This chapter will show how the speculative builder was able to meet the requirements of the working classes by building at a price and to a design which was satisfactory both to the builder and his client, the working-class buyer. For the builder/developers were generally only building houses in batches, often a small as ten houses, which were sold when the market allowed, it would therefore follow that the types of houses that they built satisfied the market. The Dudley Report of 1944 and the work of Mass Observation during and after the war confirmed how correct the speculative developers had been in assessing the needs of the working-class owner-occupier (2). The local authorities on the other hand were shown by the Dudley Report to have been out of touch with modern trends, as they had generally followed the dictates of the Tudor Walters Report of 1919 and the ideas of Raymond Unwin, which the Report encapsulated, all of which had been written in an entirely different era from the 1930s. The Dudley Report was produced by a committee set up by the Ministry of Health's Central Housing Committee in 1944 to report upon the design of pre-war council house dwellings. The Report concluded that the design of council houses was lacking in variety, offered insufficient living space and required higher standards of services to be provided within the houses. In just over a decade since the publication of the Tudor Walters Report there had been great changes in the manner in which people expected to live and the types of houses they looked forward to owning and/or occupying as tenants. These changes had been recognised by the speculative builder but not the planners of the municipal house.

(1) P.Oliver, I. Davis, I Bentley, Dunroamin, the Suburban Semi and its Enemies,(London,1981), p.25.
(2) The Design of Dwellings:.Report of the Design of Dwellings Sub-Committee of the Central Housing Advisory Committee appointed by the Minister of Health (HMSO,1944), The Dudley Report. OHID 1944 (7).
T. Harrison,Mass Observation:Living Through the Blitz, (London, 1990) and Mass Observation File Reports 1937-1949,D.Sheridan, Mass Observation,Among You Taking Notes: the Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison,(London, 1986).