The need for human-scale private properties
We should be building homes not housing, but what does that really mean today?
by Amanda Vickery

The British affection for a private home of one’s own runs deep. However, one never had to own the house to be a householder, simply to rent the whole building; the idea that Britain should be a property-owning democracy is a late 20th century invention. This investment in whole house living has done much to contribute to our current housing crisis, but any planning solutions that ride rough-shod over our deepest desires and fears are doomed to fail. Greater understanding of our historic attachment to home as mini castle is crucial to designing housing schemes that will prosper.
Citizenship has been tied to people’s living arrangements for centuries. Before the Great Reform Act of 1832, in many parliamentary boroughs the franchise was dependent on the occupation of a separate dwelling with one’s own hearth and front door to the outside, regardless of ownership. Occupying an entire house (of whatever size) was a sign of respectability and carried political privileges. The man of the house was the householder who qualified as a citizen, thereby his wife was a reputable housekeeper. As a widow she subsequently inherited his householder status in the eyes of her community. Before 1918, the franchise rested upon a property qualification for men, and continued to do so for women until 1927, when the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over 30 who met a property qualification.
A home therefore had important symbolic power and political significance. But occupying a house of one’s own was also the gateway to adulthood. Unlike parts of Asia, and eastern and southern Europe, the British do not expect to live with their in-laws. In Britain, parish registers of births, deaths and marriages reveal that for centuries most people married in their mid-to-late 20s, when they could afford to set up their own home. Through most of our history, marriage rested upon economic viability. A significant minority of people would never marry, often because they lacked the means to establish a separate household. So marriage was not only the portal to maturity, but to stay unmarried and houseless was evidence of economic failure. When circumstances forced the independent into single-room lodgings in the house of another, the decline was seen as a social and emotional defeat.
The belief that once upon a golden age, the British lived with their extended families is a myth; some even supposed our obsession with residential independence to be a defining national characteristic. As one 18th century tourist put it: “An Englishman prefers to live in the most miserable cot than in more comfortable accommodations in the house of another.” While the core of most households in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was the nuclear family, the aged hung onto their independence as long as possible and did not welcome giving up sovereignty to their adult children.
Indeed, the conviction that ‘an Englishman’s house is his castle’ is embedded in common law and reproduced in 18th century legal manuals: a man was entitled to defend his ramparts. The occupation (though not necessarily the ownership) of a two-up, two-down terraced house was a reasonable ambition for the Victorian working-class family. A self-contained, double-storey terrace became the norm in England and Wales, with Newcastle flats and West Riding back-to-backs being the iconic exceptions. Even the language used to describe units in shared buildings were un-English; ‘apartment’ being French and ‘flat’ Scottish.
With rapid urbanisation in the 19th century, other European capitals erected purpose-built apartment houses and blocks, but in England and Wales the answer seemed to be building more urban and suburban single-family houses. Apartments, and the continental life-style that went with them, were considered peculiar. In practice, the industrial towns and cities of Britain were so overcrowded and space at such a premium that as much as half the housing stock might be sub-divided into lodgings. In 1855, architects Arthur Ashpitel and John Whichcord, studying town dwellings, found middle-class houses in London to be strange, anomalous places: “Planned for one family, they are inhabited by three or four, who are perforce to some degree associated, however opposite their elements may be. With thin partitions and thinner doors… where any one can pry into each other’s movements… there can be no privacy, no comfort, no home.”
Nevertheless, despite the reality of all the multiple lodgings in towns and cities, a strong feeling persisted that they were somehow demeaning. Ironically, metropolitan flats were adopted most happily by the very rich, as a second home; a delightful pied-à-terre in town or a convenient base for a bachelor on the loose, and aristocratic flats were built from the mid-19th century. But while flats might suit bachelors, the suspicion remained that they were not the place to raise a nice family.
The middle classes were, and remain, more enamoured of the suburban house and garden than any continental-style apartment. Perfect homes were private, self-sufficient, intimate little nests. By the 1920s, working people in local authority housing often welcomed the move from terraces, which were often ‘slums’, to new suburban estates with little gardens.
Living outside the familial household was hard work. By the 1950s, if ordinary men and women wanted to escape the suburban family then they had to take rooms in a boarding house and eat what the landlady dished up, or manage in a bed-sitting room. It is no coincidence that the definitive play of 1956, Look Back in Anger, was set in an attic bedsit in the Midlands. While the majority of the population married from their parental homes, a stint in ‘digs’ was a common rite of passage for the adventurous or hard-working.
Solo living was gradually improved by new devices. Individual gas fires meant no more toiling upstairs with a coal bucket. Small gas and electric water heaters, though temperamental, produced moderately hot water on tap, so no more boiling up water in a pan for a stand-up wash with a flannel. The first launderette in Britain was opened in 1949 in Queensway, London, in the heart of bedsit land. Individual refrigerators were very late on the scene, so you had to put any wine in the sink, the milk on the window ledge and rely on your tin opener.
The conviction that a real home is a family house is deep-seated and persistent, but our domestic fantasies are belied by the realities of how we live now. Average family size has plummeted, from the typical Victorian brood of six children, to just over two in 1945, to 1.8 today. An estimated 42% of all marriages will end in divorce. There are no adequate statistics on the failure rate of cohabiting couples, but obviously these partnerships run comparable, perhaps even increased, risks of dissolution. Meanwhile, an increasing number of women will not be mothers, either by chance or design; while 9% of women born in 1946 in England and Wales had no children, this is true for 17% of those born in 1970.
The 2011 census revealed that mother, father and two kids were far from the average household. Lone parent households are still increasing, and a fifth of all children now live in a lone parent family. The most common type of household belongs to a couple (whether married, in a civil partnership or cohabiting). Households inhabited by couples have made up 58% of the total fairly consistently since 1996. And households with no children (or without dependent children) are now more common than families with kids at home. After the couples, single people make up the next most common type of household, 53.8% of which are occupied by solo women.
Solo living
Whatever advertising and sitcoms tell us about the normality of family meals and family rows, nearly a third of us live alone. The rise of smaller households and solo living in particular is a decisive trend. In 1961, a mere 13% of households contained only one person; 50 years later, the 2011 census showed that this figure had risen to 31% of all households in England and Wales.
Naturally, the reasons for living alone vary, but it is increasingly the fate of the elderly, especially widows. Women typically are a little younger than their partners and live longer. Independence is still treasured, but chronic isolation is the destiny of many. Yet it is the proportion of people aged between 25 and 44 living alone that is growing the fastest.
The metropolitan singleton — sociable, hedonistic and ideally spendthrift — is the target of advertising campaigns. Today, young flat dwellers expect to be self-sufficient, with their own washing machines, hot water on tap and a microwave meal for one. With late night gyms and supermarkets, and a galaxy of restaurants and bars, it has never been easier for affluent urban individuals to please themselves. On the other hand, soaring property prices and rents have forced an increasing number of young adults to remain with their parents. Nevertheless, even within larger households, family togetherness has wilted. Central heating (now in 95% of homes) means that individuals can comfortably lounge in their bedrooms. The proliferation of TVs, computers and mobile phones has made the consumption of leisure ever more individualised. No more compulsory congregation in the only warm room to watch the family TV. No more grinning and bearing Match of the Day. Home is where most expect to indulge their personal tastes, not to bow to the routines of a collective.
Ironically, the same technology that has facilitated our self-indulgence has made our private lives much less private. The electronic invasion of our domestic frontiers would have horrified the Victorians. The internet, the laptop and the mobile phone ensure that there is little mental reprieve from work for the professional classes and office workers, and no escape from peer pressure for children. Parents rightly fear the internet as the potential enemy within.
We still covet a small house and garden. But at the last census, the percentage of people owning their own home in England and Wales fell for the first time in a century, now at 64%. The private rental market has taken up the slack, while the social housing sector has shrunk. The census exposed some overcrowding, but also the fact that most houses were under-occupied. Today, 91% of homeowners and 56% of renters live in a whole house. So most of us still live in houses; much emptier houses.
The rise of solo living is not in itself a cause for disquiet. Independence and self-sufficiency do not necessarily make one anti-social (perhaps the reverse) or any less of a concerned citizen. In fact, there is some evidence that the childless middle-aged are happier and much more charitable than their friends with kids. But one person’s adventure is another’s loneliness. Living alone in old age and frailty may be defiant, but it is not glamorous, as the current crisis in the social care system attests. But if all of us insist on our own three-bedroom house we will have to concrete over the nation. There are over 56 million of us and we are in the grip of a housing crisis.
Our domestic ideas have not kept in step with realities. The home makeover show has been a fixture of the evening TV schedules for the last 20 years. Advertisers still want us to believe that cooking is mostly done by a mother for a family, yet most catering is for one. Rural nostalgia for cottages is alive and well. Visiting historic houses is often listed as one of the nation’s favourite pastimes, only slightly less popular than gardening. In sharp contrast, our population is increasingly urban and modern tower blocks are what many call home. Our sympathies and our realities are at odds.
The need for small housing units will only become more urgent
The average household is now tiny by historic standards: comprising a couple or a singleton. The need for small housing units will only become more urgent. Canny developers have already perceived the gap in the market. Starter home developer Pocket Living has been selling little flats aimed at young Londoners since 2005. The ‘compact, pocket, one-bedroom home’ tends to have a small kitchen area, big windows and some shared social/outdoor space. Yet their average customer is aged 32 (and set to rise), not the twenty-somethings they envisaged. Many, if not most, will no longer graduate to a three-bedroom detached house. It is time to tailor our vision of the ideal home to our actual circumstances.
Can it be beyond architects and councils to acknowledge our deep-seated attachment to residential independence and build apartment blocks that people actually want to and can afford to live in? We seek a balance between privacy and community, safety and sanity in low-rise, human-scale buildings with access to a garden. Home is tied to self respect. Architects forget our history at their peril.
Amanda Vickery is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, and the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Private Life
This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 2 2018

