Date published: 2008/10/12
Lisa Jardine says on the BBC:
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The family as a unit has varied considerably in the course of history, but the bond between those who live under one roof together has always been an important one. Today, a "family" tends to mean the tiny cluster of individuals related by birth - typically, father and mother and one or two small children, but increasingly, one adult and a partner or dependant - who share a residential unit.Until the 19th Century, however, the word "family" was a synonym for an entire "household", and was used to cover all those who lived together in a dwelling, whether related by birth to the householder, employed in their service, or simply lodged with them. "Home" was the bricks and mortar in which half a dozen or more adults lived their lives, supporting one another by their labour.
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But increasingly domestic structures centred on the housing needs of the growing middle classes. Scaled-down town-houses were put up, many of which still survive today, modified for modern use. These still provided lodgings for dependants and servants under a common roof, but centred on the family life of a group of blood-relations, in a way we can recognise.Further down the social scale, accommodation was also always shared, but here it was fraught with difficulties. Just as happens today in rapidly urbanised economies, most of the working classes found themselves living in ad hoc ways, in overcrowded accommodation, which entirely lacked the privacy that we all now crave, and could hardly be said to offer the stable communal structures that Erasmus and Richardson wrote about.
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In our own times, the drive towards privacy has become paramount. We can see the modern ideal emerging in those wonderfully dated advertisements for domestic appliances from the 1950s and 60s, which show a smiling housewife, immaculately turned out in a many-petticoated dress with a cinched-in waist, pushing her vacuum-cleaner over expanses of carpet, or admiring her shiny new refrigerator.
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That dream is summed up in the so-called Parker Morris Standards, adopted for social housing in the 1960s. They became mandatory for council housing in 1969, and remained in force until 1980.The Parker Morris Standards laid down the dimensions for typical items of household furniture for which the dwelling designer should allow space, and provided anthropometric data needed to calculate the living space required to use and move around that furniture.
Its rules specified that a four person terrace house should have 74.5 square metres of space; kitchens for one or two people should contain 1.7 cubic metres of enclosed storage space; in one, two and three-bedroom dwellings the WC could be in the bathroom, but in four person houses it should have a separate compartment. The Parker Morris Standards for space, privacy and convenience continue to provide the familiar features of what we feel to be a modestly comfortable and convenient family home today.
But since the scramble for home ownership in the 1980s, our demands for personal space and privacy have come to dominate the planning and construction of domestic dwellings, and residential units have got ever smaller.
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Now is perhaps the time when we have to begin to ask ourselves whether the units of accommodation which have been constructed - often in glamorous high-rise blocks, with built-in appliances and fabulous views - are really, in the long run, fit for "family" living, however we define that family.
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Perhaps the drive in Britain towards compact, separate "homes", with ever-tinier floor-plans, crammed together by developers on restricted urban sites, is our housing equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s - our housing South Sea Bubble.
Heaven forbid that the peasants have their own home, with a decent amount of space.
Jardine, being academic middle class, completely misses the real point, which is that there has been a cosy conspiracy between the developers, the urban planners and the academic middle class to force more and more housing on less and less space. There is plenty of land in England, so much in fact that everybody could easily have a decent house with a decent garden. But it's not allowed to build on this land. That is the real problem, not that ordinary people want a bit of "privacy". The British ruling elite have forced this misery on the entire country.
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