4 - Housing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Summary
‘There are many ways of regarding the house’, warned The Builder in 1881, ‘and most of them, it must be confessed, are prosaic.’ This caution is salutary, but it may be that a concentration on two of the many possible approaches to the history of housing may avoid the perils of tedium. One is the relationship between design and society, between the physical form of housing and the social life it contains. The individual house could relate to the external environment in a variety of forms, with the threshold between private and public space drawn at different points and with more or less emphasis. The physical structure of the house might be articulated in a number of ways, with the internal space used in a more or less specialised or undifferentiated manner. The second theme is the relationships which emerged from the ownership, management and occupation of housing. It is wrong to view houses merely as a collection of inert bricks and mortar, for they involved conflict over the distribution of income and resources between landlord and tenant, rates and rents, private enterprise and public initiatives. The outcome could affect not only the daily lives of residents, determining the amount they paid for accommodation and the terms on which it was held, but could also impinge on social structure and political debate. The emergence of a nation of owner-occupiers has very different social and political implications from a nation of tenants, and it is necessary both to explain how this change occurred, and to assess the consequences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 , pp. 195 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
References
- 5
- Cited by