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

Summary

The strong preference, indeed the overwhelming desire of the working classes, was to be re-housed in good accommodation, which for them meant a house, not a flat or a bungalow. The most preferred house type was a semi. Such a house gave them an opportunity of enjoying modern facilities at a price they could afford. As Muthesius has said 'What the investigation of the varieties of the small house in the nineteenth century has shown is that there is no argument on the most suitable form of dwelling...Most of its elements originated with the Domestic Revival during the later nineteenth century and seemed to have first found their way into ordinary speculative housing in the south-east by about 1900. It became the basic ideal of the housing reformers...and of all the speculative house builders in the interwar period' (102). The speculatively-built semi was that house. It could be built at a low enough price to be bought by someone on a low wage and yet have sufficient accommodation with electricity and internal bathrooms. Its layout would almost always included a parlour a garage space and bay windows. These were aspects of its design which made it different from the council house and gave the owner a perceived mark of status.

The establishment, in the form of the architectural profession and organisations such as the National Housing Committee, did not understand the needs of the working classes, their attempts to put their theories into action did not meet with any success. Generally, only the speculative builder met the needs of the working-class buyers, if he failed to do so his houses remained unsold.

(102) S. Muthesius, The English Terraced House (London, 1982), p. 145.