Urbanization, Suburbanizati

on, and the Meaning of

Home in British

Culture,1860 - 1920

19th-Century Europe:•Industrial Revolution

•Flight from country to city

•No urban mass transport system

•Urban overcrowding

•Housing shortage

•Poorly-built housing

Gustave Doré, “Ludgate Hill” (1871)

Doré, “Over London – By Rail” (1871)

London, 1860 (population ~ 3 million)

London, 1900 (population ~ 6.5 million)

Holloway (home of the Pooters)

London, 1900 (population ~ 6.5 million)

Victorian inner suburbs of London•Identical row houses

•Mass produced

•No green space

•Street as public space

Victorian townhouse floor plan(“My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house, ‘The Laurels,’ Brickfield Terrace, Holloway—a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour.”)

The case against mass-produced suburban houses:Comptetitive capitalism has "established everywhere the cheap substitute in place of the genuine article. We have to take not only what does not suit us, but what is not the real thing at all -- fatty compounds for butter, glucose for sugar, chemicals for beer: and just as certainly the sham house for the real building, its style a counterfeit, its construction a salable make-believe."

-- Edward Prior

"One is inclined to weep . . . at the harm [the suburban builders] have wrought--the quiet villages round London that have been turned into neighborhoods that will provide the slums for the next generations."

-- The Building News (1909)

“sham”: Made in imitation of something else; made to appear to be something which it is not; made of inferior or base materials (OED).

•“sham” houses = inauthentic lives

•How to balance authenticity, individuality, and “homely” dwelling with the necessities of mass-production and modernity?

Response to:-- Victorian “pastiche” historicism-- “Machine-made” production

Principles:-- Holistic design (architecture,

furnishings, art, landscape)-- Artisanship (hand-made, local materials)-- Vernacular styles-- Harmony with landscape

The Arts & Crafts

Movement

Wallpaper by W. Morris

Chairs by C.R. Mackintosh

Ernest GimsonStoneywell Cottage (1898)

C.F.A. VoyseyMoorcrag (1898)

Edwin LutyensMunstead Wood (1896-1902)

Edwin LutyensMunstead Wood (1896-1902)

“[I]t does not stare with newness; it is not new in any way that is disquieting to the eye; it is neither raw nor callow. On the contrary, it almost gives the impression of a comfortable maturity of something like a couple of hundred years . . . And yet there is nothing sham-old about it; it is not trumped up with any specious or fashionable devices of spurious antiquity; there is no pretending to be anything that it is not--no affectation whatever. But it is designed and built in the thorough and honest spirit of the good work of old days.”

--Gertrude Jekyll, on Munstead Wood

The Invention of Tradition

•“‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.”

•“In short, [invented traditions] are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the ‘invention of tradition’ so interesting for historians of the past two centuries.”

-- Eric Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions”

Marketing Suburbia

William Cowper, from “The Task” (1785)

'Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,To peep at such a world; to see the stirOf the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;To hear the roar she sends through all her gatesAt a safe distance, where the dying soundFalls a soft murmur on th' uninjured ear.

•What do the various elements in this image signify about “suburbia” and suburban life?

Semi-detached

housing: a compromise

solution?

[F]or millions, and mostly by choice, the city was too much to bear. It was a place to leave. And for those millions, throughout the modern period, the experience of modernity was the experience not of the street, but of the road, not the sidewalk but the lawn, and not the jarring and unpredictable visibility of public spaces and public transport, but the enclosed private worlds of fences, parlors, and automobiles.

--Roger Silverstone