S2, Episode 1: Home Spaces

In this episode MoDA's curator, Ana Baeza, talks to historians Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett about the design of homes in Britain from the nineteenth century onward. They discuss the idea of the home as a private space, and consider how we are currently re-negotiating these spaces in the context of Covid19 through the uses of digital technologies.

Over the last few hundred years, homes have been regarded as private and separate from public space. This assumption has been built into the interior design and lay-out of the house, and has in turn influenced our social interactions and the relationship between outside and inside, public and private spaces.

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Podcast Transcript

Well, I guess in the context of the Covid virus I guess the one word that you could really apply to how home is now is the word “sanctuary.” Because yeah, when we come home, yeah, we feel it’s the only place where we don’t have to worry about Covid-19. You feel more safe in your home in this, in this situation it’s safety, it’s sanctuary is how’s the best way to describe it really.

It feels like it’s a home, but it’s also an office. It’s a very weird limbo stage. I feel like it’s become much better in terms of how I’ve divided those two. Then in the beginning. In the beginning, it felt very much when lockdown first happened. It was just this limbo chaotic space that was meant to be both, but ended up being neither and then at some point not exactly sure when I kind of really had to be like “no, this is where my living space is going to be. This is my home space. This is the space where I relax and then this one room is going to be my office space.

Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), reaching you from Middlesex University in London. I’m Ana Baeza, and I’ll be hosting this second season to explore the multiple stories around home in the current Covid crisis. This time, we’re recording from less favourable conditions, from our homes, so please bear with us if the sound isn’t always of studio quality. And in this season I’ll be talking with historians, anthropologists, activists and practitioners to reflect on the many changes brought about by this pandemic on our homes. As usual we draw inspiration from the museum’s collections to reflect on the present through the lens of the past.

Ana Baeza Ruiz: Home is a fluid category open to multiple meanings. A house is not necessarily a home and these fluctuating meanings really resonate now as we’re all we’re renegotiating our domesticate lives in Covid19 either in lockdown. So the first episode for this season is precisely going to the heart of that question, what makes a home as an idea and as a place? And to answer this we’re going to be leaping all the way to the Victorian period and then to view moments in history that have been key in reconfiguring what home means in the UK.

Where do ideas of domestic comfort, privacy and safety come from? How have they changed and how are they being negotiated at present? How has the design of houses shifted over time and what does it tell us about our social lives? To discuss this with us we have two fantastic guests, Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett. Welcome Trevor and Jane it’s a pleasure to have you here.

Trevor Keeble; Thank you very much.

Jane Hamlett: It’s great to be here.

Trevor: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ana: And I should say that we are recording this remotely all from our homes in our respective homes so at times there might be noise in the background, interferences and the sound isn’t studio quality so please bear with us but I can assure you that the content will make up for those technical glitches. Before we get started an introduction to Trevor and Jane.

Trevor Keeble works at the University of Portsmouth where he’s Executive Dean of Creative and Cultural Industries and Professor of Design. Having initially studied interior design he completed his Masters and PhD in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a founding member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University and his research interests focus on the intersections and practices of domestic design, material culture and homemaking.

Jane Hamlett is Professor of British History at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research interests include histories of society and culture in modern Britain, women and gender, the family, intimacy and emotion and material and visual culture. With Julie-Marie Strange she is currently writing a book on the history of pets in modern Britain based on the collective work for the AHRC pets and family life project, which sounds really interesting and hopefully we’ll get to talk about that in the course of the podcast today.

Home as idea and physical space

Ana: Okay so let’s get started Trevor and Jane, as you know, this season we’re interested in exploring the home as a process rather than something that’s a given or fixed and I’d like to start with this idea that homes are both an idea but also very physical and material space and I think this has become really obvious to lots of people right now in lockdown and perhaps in particular due to constraints that the environment can exercise upon us when we’re literally boxed within these four walls.

And then there’s another way in which home is also symbolic it’s coded with all sorts of social assumptions and personal meaning. So with all of this in mind I wanted to start with some initial reflections on your part about how you think these two components of the home, the ideal and the material, are playing out in the current situation that we’re living.

Jane: I would say perhaps just to start with the issue of the ideal home that I think, um, the current situation we’re in, places the home as an ideal under tremendous pressure. So homes have always had, um, well, um, for a very long time anyway homes have had an important, psychological and emotional function for people who live in them and I think now, um. Because, we’ve had a lot of other things removed from our lives home is being asked to play a greater and more important role. So actually I think we’re placing tremendous pressure on the ideal of home at the moment.

Trevor: I’d absolutely agree with that, I think that the relationship between the public and the private is central to an understanding of the home. And it changes and it flexes but it’s central to what I would describe as a sort of a modern conception of the home an–and the digital technologies we’re currently using where we’re…we’re literally getting views into people’s private spaces, is challenging in many different ways and, certainly when I’m reflecting on my interactions with my colleagues and seeing the kind of domestic pressures and challenges which I think Jane has just described sort of playing out before me in a very lived real way I think it does indeed challenge the notion of, the home as an ideal. I think one of the things it reveals is actually the ideal is often a very public proscription and the lived reality is often at some distance from that.

Home ideals: origins

Ana: I’d like to ask you a little bit more about this notion of the ideal and where does that come from. It’s something we were talking about before we started recording, how this notion of home gets constituted and I think Trevor you’ve mentioned this ideal of privacy and…and Jane you’ve talked about how there’s a lot of pressure that’s being exercised on the home, so what’s the sort of genealogy? Obviously this is a really complex history but if you had to select some key moments what sort of chapters would you select or how would you tell that story?

Jane: Well I think, um, I think as you say it’s a complicated question, um, and we need to go quite far back in time to answer it. I mean if we’re going to look at British history then actually home as a word was being used, um, in some forms in the Medieval period but really, the notion of the home as a private space, um, a space that should be separate from the outside world, um, really kind of starts to take hold, um, in the 18th century, um, and then it’s really in the 19th century that I would argue that that ideal becomes very widely culturally perpetuated in a number of different forms and very widely kind of accepted and celebrated. So I think, um, the home as an ideal has got a very long history and I think that actually in the Victorian period it was particularly the middle classes who were responsible for creating this idea of the home as a sanctuary, as somewhere where you could retreat from the industrialised world and live out an ideal and virtuous family life.

Trevor: I think, a couple of things that I think are interesting in that moment in the 19th century is, um, as Jane said, the n– the middle class very much form and project that ideal, um, but actually it’s quite…it’s quite fluid, …it’s an ideal that then permeates into the working classes as and when they get the opportunity to do that because obviously the working classes of that period didn’t have the material means to have the kind of differentiated spaces, –and that separation of work in quite the same way. I think another thing that’s interesting is, you know we talk about domesticity and the home generally but actually culturally it is very specific the U…the UK and possibly the English experience of home is very different from perhaps a continental understanding of home. So you know that 19th century conception of domesticity and the home as a private sphere really begins to typify a notion of…certainly of Englishness and it becomes, it takes on something of a national character I think.

Ana: There are some really interesting different threads that come up there, on the one hand there’s this question of spaces and design of the home and you spoke Trevor I think of the demarcation of spaces and there being a class element, so I wonder if you could both say a little bit more about that. And then secondly as a follow up from that this question of national identity and what do you think this at the moment is also, you know playing out in a certain way?

Jane: Yeah I think in terms of the use of space, I mean as…as an antiques and 19th century historian that’s something I’ve been really interested in because, um, the 19th century is often seen as a high point for, um, the demarcation of space in the home, um, the allocation of certain spaces to certain functions and the creation of very sharp divides within the home between sort of different kinds of spaces, so thinking about different spaces for servants and family in a middle class home or thinking about different spaces for different functions, so drawing…a drawing room, a dining room, um, a confined space for the bringing up of children, a nursery within the home.

So, during the Victorian period there was a very strong emphasis on this kind of demarcation of space. Um, and in fact as historians I think we would be quite critical of those kinds of spatial demarcations, often they reflected, um, a social hierarchy which we no longer subscribe to, so a distinct class hierarchy, the separation of masters and servants, um, but also, um, a gendered hierarchy. So, um, the allocation of a closed off study to the man of the house where he could pursue his important endeavours, um, separate from the family for example. but interestingly right now actually I think maybe, um, there’s something that we can learn from that mode of spatial demarcation and actually having, um, sort of clearly marked out spaces within the home maybe something that is becoming more useful to us right now in this particular historical moment, although of course I think it’s very important, um, not to, repeat the way in which space was demarcated in the 19th century home because, it obviously, um, reflected a profoundly patriarchal and deeply unequal society.

Trevor: I think that’s a really interesting point. One of the things that I would note about the current situation is we’re, um, we are I think as you say Jane, moving back to some sort of sense of demarcation of the Victorian home, but of course we now live in very different sorts of homes. So what I’m seeing when I’m working with colleagues, and even to myself to some degree, is a sort of re-zoning and a renegotiation of the space of the house. Um, I think this is particularly telling, if we just think about, you know the kind of scenario, you know wh–where you’ve got homeworking parents who are also running a school and possibly a crèche, um, the challenges people are facing at this moment are actually spatialized challenges. I’ve been in many meetings where suddenly the children come in and, you know the whole thing comes to collide and I think that’s particularly interesting because as Jane noted in the 19th century the workspace within a home, a man’s workspace is very clearly demarcated and it’s a space with a door and you close the door and then you enter back into the kind of the the space of the home.

And so that’s certainly the case in the middle class home. now we…we…we’ve lost that ability to distinguish, and I think that’s particularly challenging perhaps for women, because actually the…the balance of domesticity and professional life was…has always been a very challenging and uneasy fault line for women in the workplace, if we think about, um, you know the…the, um, the equality of gender in the workplace and now I think we’re seeing some of that uneasy, um, challenge re-emerging, um, in the home.

Jane: I completely, um, agree with that I mean again, um, actually kind of gender divides in the home is something, um, I’m quite interested in as a historian and, although I think sort of the main trend in the 19th century was to organise space in the favour of the man of the house what is interesting is at the time, there were some female domestic advice writers who tried to, um, reclaim the space of the home for women, particularly arguing for, um, the use of a morning room as a kind of private space for the woman of the house where, um, she could pursue her work. And so, um, again although, um, I think we should be very critical of those kinds of Victorian narratives at the same time I think some of them, um, do point to some potentially useful models actually for finding, um, a way forward in terms of dividing up space, um, in the home in a more equal and, um, and in a way that can actually work for, um, for the kind of very difficult working practices, um, families are facing at the moment. Um, and I think that, um, you know although, um, we’re all facing a very difficult time people are also I think working to find new ways of dividing things up between them and in some ways I think sort of the way this whole situation has brought the work that parents do in caring for small children alongside doing their jobs I think in a way it’s…it’s highlighted it and it’s highlighted the need I think, moving forward after this, to come up with working structures that help support people when they’re doing that.

Trevor: I would really agree with that. I think there are some really valuable lessons coming out of the way we’re working now. I was…I was interested at the beginning of the lockdown I read an interesting newspaper article just about the challenge this was posing to Japanese work culture…and again this cultural distinction becomes really important because there’s a very high profile kind of culture of presenteeism, getting in early, being there late and the distinction between the home life and the workplace is so marked and, you know the locking down of people having to work from home is fundamentally, you know th—the article was basically arguing that it’s fundamentally challenging some of those assumptions and suppositions and the question was w–would working life in Tokyo, for example, change afterwards? And it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in different national and working contexts but I think returning to Jane’s point I think there are a lot of things that institutions and organisations can really gain from this experience in better understanding the kind of work situation that…that their colleagues and teams actually need in balancing work/life balance.

Home: inside and outside

Ana: And I’d like to take us to thinking about how the traditional boundaries between what is home or isn’t home be increasingly blurred at the moment, so for example there’s many activities that we’d often do outside home which are now taking place in the domestic environment. But this exerts pressure especially on those people who live in small spaces, who would have previously relied on the world outside for many activities which they need to do at home.

Jane: Yeah I mean I think this certainly places a lot more emphasis on the immediate spaces we inhabit and as a historian I’ve been really interested in how people manage to create a sense of home or domesticity in confined or restricted circumstances and I’ve been…one of my…one of my research projects looked at how people managed to feel at home or domesticity is created in institutional spaces and in particular I was interested in asylums, lodging houses and schools. And I think that actually people have the capacity to make themselves at home in quite physically limited spaces and I think sort of a crisis like this really throws that into relief if you like and really draws our attention to how actually we can create a sense of emotional security through quite small domestic acts. I’ve always been a big fan of the novelist Barbara Pym who I think, who really celebrate small acts of domesticity like putting a flower in a vase or cooking a meal. And actually I think there are some very positive ways in which we can sort of start to see this kind of restricted domesticity working. Obviously I’m…you know I don’t want to be overly positive here but that’s one suggestion.

Trevor: I think it’s a really interesting suggestion. One of the things that interests me is the way in which actually, um, to flip it around people domesticate the workplace an–and that flower in a vase is actually one of the ways of doing it. One of the other interesting ways, and I think this is pertinent to the experience we’re currently having with digital communication media where we’re basically talking to one another through screens, is actually the role of photography and photographic screensavers. I remember being in a conversation a number of years ago with someone where there were a few of us and actually there emerged a real divide between who puts personal photographs on a screensaver and who doesn’t. And there was this idea about blurring a boundary, you know some people wanting to bring family, domesticity, home to the workspace and some people very clearly wanting to demarcate it. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges at this moment where actually the demarcation is simply not possible. But I really like that idea of, –that Jane mentioned that the ways in which people domesticate even in small spaces and that can be external to the home. I think that’s actually, a key point, people kind of inhabit, I think it’s part of the perpetual kind of desire somehow to inhabit and make place.

Privacy Online: [16.49]

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home. I’m Ana Baeza and I’m talking to Jane Hamlett and Trevor Keeble. We’ve been discussing the origins of home as a space and how it’s evolved overtime, and now we’re going to move onto talking about how it feels, under lockdown, when others enter our most private space. But before we do that, here’s a short extract from an interview with one of our listeners as to how for a lot of people Covid might have challenged their sense of privacy:

I’m sure everybody’s been feeling this, is how you can feel like 150 people have gone through your home in a day. And that’s actually quite a difficult one to deal with psychologically. You do sometimes feel like crowds of people have walked through your sitting room by the end of the day, and that’s quite a strange psychological space.

Ana: And I wanted to ask you about how this sense of privacy that you’ve been connecting to the home might be especially jeopardised now…homes are being displayed in public or semi-public online gatherings, and so this puts into relief the uncomfortable separation of the inside and outside, doesn’t it?

Jane: Yes it’s interesting isn’t it? There has been quite an interesting Twitter feed on the way in which people in the media portray themselves, um, with books in the background or otherwise.

And that’s… we’re a little bit, um, yes there are some rather judgemental comments about, um, people’s books. I think Monty Don and Ed Miliband came out of it very well, their bookshelves earned a lot of praise. Um, other peoples were being dismissed rather harshly. So in that sense it’s…it’s rather fun and it sort of does allow, um, allow us to kind of see some celebrities in a different way but actually sort of it is…it is actually a more serious issue. And, there are potential issues around people’s privacy, that, you know mean that it’s not always good to be able to sort of show yourself or your home through a camera in this way. And of course actually some of the online meetings that we’re all having are sometimes vulnerable for security reasons and so forth. So it is problematic as well. But I have to say in some respects it’s certainly been fun.

Trevor: I would agree; I think certainly at the beginning of this lockdown period the peering into other people’s home was perhaps the most fun part of it. It–it reminds me of a, um, one of the late 19th century’s, domestic design advice writers was actually Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde used to make a fair buck out of writing taste advice in magazines…there’s a very interesting quote where he rails against big windows and he does so because he doesn’t want the thought of people looking in, which is obviously a very prescient thing for Wilde with his, um, er, private life. But that idea of the screen and people peering in one of the things it reminds me is that the home, first and foremost, is very much a personal identification and it’s personal but it’s also familial and so that idea of the home and the home you create is a manifestation of yourself, it’s about selfhood. And so I…it’s been interesting watching people consciously and at time unconsciously shape their background as it were, their backdrop and I think at the beginning of the lockdown, I think people were intensely conscious of this and I think as the weeks have rolled on people just really not bothering now.

One of the things, interestingly, um, Jane and I both work in universities and we’re currently challenged with, you know thinking about next academic year and how we’re going to deliver and there’s going to be a chance that will be online delivery and…and whilst we’ve been dealing with this in the current year we’re having to think ahead and certainly in my university is that we must make it look more professional and we must have some sort of brand identity and we must have some sort of backdrop and that’s actually about taking the home out of it…

Trevor: It’s about the inscribing and I think that’s really quite interesting and certainly some people have been using, um, there are softwares where you can have a backdrop and so you’re actually not showing your home – I had a meeting a few weeks ago with a partner colleague at another institution where he literally was sat in front of the Golden Gate Bridge where there was this huge panorama of San Francisco behind him and I just thought that was really fascinating because it’s a very conscious choice to not show your home.

Jane: Yeah universities are facing this challenge of how, um, how best to move towards online teaching and how best to create a kind of online projection of lecturers are as we are and what we do. And I think, um, yeah, I mean I think that issue of what the backdrop is, is really…really interesting and really crucial. I mean it’s a tricky area isn’t it because I think, as I well I do think sort of, showing people’s backdrops potentially exposes inequality doesn’t it? And actually unfortunately we do have quite a lot of inequality within our teaching system, people on different kinds of contracts and so on and so forth. And I think that’s also actually an issue, in terms of how we display ourselves and as Trevor said perhaps the best way is to have a standard backdrop that, um, doesn’t, you know – detracts from those issues perhaps.

Trevor: Well I think that’s certainly what the university would like. I’m not sure we’d like that. I–I like the idea of watching people in their own domestic environment and I think there’s also, there’s a sort of a pretence in having the backdrop as though we were actually in a lecture theatre, it feels slightly more artificial. But yeah you’re absolutely right about the inequality and I think that sits in that sensitivity around the consciousness of people in their environments, people are acutely aware of this. You know there are very few things that are as aspirational and media and image-driven than the home and so much to the material.

And this goes historically, so much of the material whether it’s through design advice or whether it’s through popular media right from the late 19th century right through into the 20th century is absolutely aspirational, it’s about telling people how they should live or how they should want to live, an–and that…that sets up an anxiety. You know there’s a lot of work been done on the role of social media and personal mental health, and there are significant critiques around social media and actually it makes people unhappy. And that’s in part because people, themselves when they’re consuming social media, what they’re actually consuming is the most aspirational presentation of their colleagues and their friends, their social life. It’s not actually real.

[23.08]

Ana: Jane, you’ve mentioned the spatial inequalities that might become more visible through this digital communication, but Trevor you also hint at how a certain aspirationalism might also obscure that, especially in the ways people use social media. So, I wanted to discuss this further, already before lockdown many people have been in insecure and unsafe housing, but now the ways in which your sense of home might be unmade or eroded – because you can’t afford it – or because you have to live 24/7 in such cramped conditions. So this has really become exacerbated now, hasn’t it?

Jane: Yeah I mean I think I’d probably go back to that idea of home being placed under pressure and I think that applies to home as an ideal. But I think, being in our homes all the time and focusing on them very closely makes us scrutinise our physical environments more intensely. So we might suddenly become very aware of, you know, some decorating that we’ve failed to do for the last ten years but actually, you know it’s sort of screaming…screaming to be done now because we’re looking at…looking at the sort of paint flaking off every day. But more broadly I do think that actually, um, it prompts us to be more reflective and think more about the spaces we’re inhabiting and perhaps about the restrictions on those spaces.

I mean something that I’ve reflected on quite a lot during this period is that actually, yes in London particularly many people are living in quite small spaces and that is a product of the current property market, the current kind of economic system And, you know, that system has really produced a situation in which access to space is profoundly unequal really and I think that has been really kind of exacerbated by this crisis. I mean I would say however that obviously there is no point in history where we have not had an unequal social system in which some people have been able to access more space than others. But I would say that, in the past decade or so, the particular situation and the particular conditions involved in the property markets in Britain at this point, have really kind of exacerbated that divide.

Trevor: I would agree absolutely with that point. I think the lockdown situation and actually Covid itself has really exposed and exacerbated inequalities and made vulnerable people more vulnerable. I think one of the things that I find really interesting is that local authorities actually housed homeless people and I find it really, um, outrageous in many ways that it takes a pandemic to think about homing homeless people, putting them in housing and putting roofs above their heads. I think the entire kind of lockdown period has shifted that balance in the privatised family and then community and I think it’s redrawn boundaries and I think that’s happening in a number of ways. I think, you know if we just think about the difference between being in your own home, being in a care home at this moment I think that’s been a really interesting, problematic challenge. One of the challenges that we’ve seen played out in the press and in personal lives for those of us that have, family or relatives who are social care workers is moving from a private home into a care home. And that’s been one of the real fault lines in this virus and transmission. Um, but then it goes beyond that, even things like, you know on a Thursday evening standing out in the street and clapping for the NHS is actually an interesting act of community and one of the questions I would have, or one of the things I’ve been wondering is the extent to which that community might sustain beyond Covid.

Trevor: We’re seeing community food and community support schemes now in ways that, you know we’ve always had them but there’s a sort of a visibility and there’s a kind of a recognition of need which I–I certainly hope will continue. And it’s interesting when you see some of the government action and government response, um, I read something earlier this morning about the State being back, you know of all…of all the governments this is the government which in a sense is now having to go Big State through its furloughing scheme and all of its support schemes. And that’s interesting because I think it opens up the question about the need for community but also actually for sharing of resource. And that’s…that’s a kind of a question that doesn’t get addressed enough and it fundamentally underpins inequalities; and I think the point Jane made about the housing situation in London over the past ten years or so, um, is absolutely key to that.

Ana: Yeah and obviously we’ve heard a lot, um, in this respect about connections being made to previous crises and I’m thinking especially of the Second World War what do you make of these comparisons to that previous historical moment and how do you think things might unfold?

Jane: Mm I mean I think that the way the comparison with the Second World War has been mobilised is slightly problematic actually and I think that, we like to think of the Second World War as this moment of great kind of communal effort where everyone pulled together and to a certain extent that’s true. But I think we forget about the fact that actually, during the Second World War, a lot went on but actually revealed class difference and a lot of people also, um, sort of in some cases… You know we can look at something like, um, evacuation which actually caused a lot of class tension and class conflict. So I don’t entirely agree that the Second World War was a moment of great communal pulling together. And I think this has been quite widely questioned by historians who’ve talked about the idea of the myth of the Blitz which becomes something that’s celebrated and promoted in British post-war culture really. So I mean to me it’s interesting how as a sort nation we return again and again to the Second World War as this key national moment but as a historian I think the communal nature of the Second World War is somewhat overstated.

Trevor:  I think the mobilisation of the war as a metaphor for the experience we’re having now is…is…if I’m honest I find it really inappropriate in so many ways.

Jane: Mm yeah.

Trevor: Um, and it does hark back again to this sort of…this slightly strange national psyche thing around the business it’s part of that fear… I can’t help but think it’s all very post-Brexit because it is ((laughs)) you know it’s playing into the very similar sort of myths that were, and ideas and values that that, were mobilised politically, and are being mobilised politically. The point for me that’s interesting is the comparison actually with the immediately post-War moment because what we see in the post-War moment, um, is we see home that actually becomes quite central to the reconstruction of nation and the national way of life, and that in itself is political in so many ways. I mean one of the things that happens immediately upon, you know the war is we get the Labour government coming in and they…it’s a big State government, it has to be because it’s…it’s dealing with a…a period of, um, crisis, you know we see the formation of the NHS and we see in the late 40s but through into the 50s we see the kind of really large scale building programme around social housing.

But, you know that’s also mirrored by we also see a re– what’s been described as a repatriation of women into the home because actually they then retreat from the workplace in certain areas, not in all areas obviously but, you know we start seeing a retrenching, er, a retrenching of earlier, um, boundaries and distinctions and, um, understanding of the home. But we also then through the social housing programme, which is about the creation of new towns in some ways, we actually see a fragmentation of family networks that fundamentally change domestic conditions. Those houses are testing out new programmatic ideas that have been developing in previous years but, you know are really put to the test, you know what we would describe as modern ideas, modernist ideas. And they are definitely new heighteners, um, they’re new…new, um, homes in terms of their internal configuration but then in their density these blocks of flats, you know large scale mass dwelling. And so I think the–there’s a very, um, interesting moment there, um, and I…for me, just thinking about some of the work that’s been done on the new towns and the social fragmentation where people are moved away from their families and you see a breakdown of familial network which was essential to work and earning a living. And now obviously that is a…that’s something that’s come back into sharp relief in terms of Covid-19 because obviously grandparents, are currently in our day and age become a means of kind of sustaining living once again. You know, grandparents look after children when people are going out to work. There’s obviously childcare as well but that’s hugely expensive. Covid-19 has actually fragmented that once again so actually parents really are losing the wider support networks that enable them to kind of do their work.

Households and families

Ana:Yeah, and I’d like to push this a bit further, because as you say Trevor, the immediate post-war period was  time of retrenchment where the nuclear family becomes the primary site of social reproduction, but also other ways of living emerged that challenged this. How might we be in a similarly historically significant moment in which living configurations are being tested?

Trevor :  I think, you know the post-War moment is, you know there is a sort of retrenchment but there’s a huge amount of progress as well. And, you know, the building of new homes was a hugely important step forward and it’s something that I think we…we most…most people I think would acknowledge we need to do now and yet it’s so deeply contested, you know between the public and the private sector. Um, I actually live in Chichester on the south coast and if you try and build anything around here you…you will get the whole city chasing after you, I mean it’s a very heavily protected and restricted area. So we have to begin to really rise, you know and overcome some really quite significant challenges, around house building in particular and providing for our society. So I think there are some comparisons between then and now. I think, you know and partly it is around increasing home ownership: we saw the democratisation of home ownership in the 1980s we saw a supposed democratisation through the right to buy scheme where people bought their council houses. And whilst on the one hand that really did deepen people’s investment and their ownership and their ability to build a place and create homes and have permanence that has had knock-on effects into later years and into this generation where they simply don’t have the social housing that people need.

Jane:  So just to go back to what you were saying about the household and the family and the impact of the current crisis on this. I think this is actually something that’s really quite interesting to reflect on if we think about change in historical perspective. And in fact actually how we define the family in relation to the household has changed a great deal over time. So in the early modern period people often thought of family not always as something that was held together by ties of kinship or blood relations. But actually family was often constituted by the people that lived in a household. So that might include a husband, wife and children, but also perhaps apprentices who worked in that particular household. And actually I think sort of the current situation is forcing us to perhaps find new relationships and new bonds with people who we are living close at hand with. So perhaps, you know if you’re sharing a flat at the moment with flatmates, those people are taking on a new importance to you and perhaps you might be starting to think of them almost as members of your family. Hopefully, you know, if things are going well and you’re in a situation where everyone gets on and it’s not conflictual actually in some ways, this situation might be sort of strengthening bonds.

Trevor : I think Jane raises a really interesting point there, that really highlights the fact that actually the family now is a very different thing to perhaps the mid-20th century, so going back to the earlier point. That was very much about reinforcing the notion of the nuclear family. Family is constituted and home is constituted as a consequence very, very differently. Again there was an interesting point to the beginning of the lockdown period about how do children who have separated parents – what’s their experience going to be? How do they move between two homes? And you know that really cuts to the very heart of a, you know the challenge for a dual family child in a way.

Happy Homes

Ana:vYeah and I think this introduces elements of conflicts that further challenge the mythical ideal of the happy home inherited all the way from the Victorian through the post-WWII period. So my question to you is, might this moment spark a new understanding of the home as a different sort of emotional space that doesn’t correspond to that idea of the happy home?

Jane:vYes I mean I think sort of obviously one of the very negative sides of the situation we find ourselves in is that because people are having to spend more time within their homes that is exacerbating family tensions and problems that might otherwise perhaps not have surfaced. And of course, you know very sadly one of the consequences of all this is, a rise in domestic violence. So yes. And I think, that of course very clearly challenges our notion of the home as this kind of private, safe, peaceful space which is often cherished and perpetuated. But actually I think the situation we’re in is a reminder really that for many people, that simply doesn’t exist. And, you know that has been the case for a very long time. I mean domestic violence unfortunately, is still a big problem in our society now, um, just as it was in the 19th and in the 20th centuries.

Trevor: I think the idea of the happy home again is part of this mythology around the home. For me it raises the question around comfort; the home supposedly the place of comfort and it’s a place of safety and a haven and again you can be comfortable in public places. But, and there has been some writing around this, you know homes are places of threat, they are places of violence in some instances. And again that exposes the challenge or the tension between a notion of the home as a private place because privacy can be thought to be a really positive, comfortable and comforting thing but privacy can also be about secrecy and it can also be about, things happening behind closed doors. So, you know that’s one of the challenges and I think as …I think as Jane has described it’s perpetuated and it has always been there. And, it’s in tension with the ideal.

Homes, emotions and pets [38.20]

Ana : I’d like to move on to a slightly different topic which is related to your most recent research, Jane, about emotions, homes and pets. Because during lockdown more people have been getting pets as domestic companions. So I think this is a rich topic to explore at the moment.

Jane:  Yeah so I’ve been, um, as part of the project I’ve been working on with, um, Julie-Marie Strange we’ve been looking at people’s emotional relationship with pet animals and how that’s changed over time, and I think one of the things we were expecting to find at the beginning of our project was that that bond, if you like, would increase over time, that people would become more emotionally engaged with pets. But I think what we’ve found is that actually the way people construct that relationship has changed and that is very much to do with the culture that surrounds them. But actually we’ve gone back to the beginning of the Victorian period, but actually what remains throughout the period and seems to be really continuous is a very strong emotional investment in pets. So we thought we were going to find that people became more emotionally invested in pets over time but I don’t think that has happened. I do think though that the current situation has, um, really highlighted people’s emotional investment in pets and has rendered that emotional investment more valuable. So we’re seeing lots of people, um, trying to adopt dogs which is also in some ways a bit problematic because obviously a dog is not just for the Covid crisis it’s for life.

Ana:Yeah.

Jane: You know that…that is a bit tricky but also, um, we’re seeing people really valuing their pets. So I’m seeing more pets…more and more pets on social media. On my road at the moment we’ve got a What’s App group and people are sort of very actively sharing pictures of, um, the doings of their pet cats during the day, um, so I’ve learned the names of quite a few pet cats on our road that I’ve…you know I’ve seen these animals from day to day for a number of years but now I know what they’re called because we’ve been communicating about them which has actually been…been great. But I do think, um, pets have a very important role to play in many people’s domestic lives and I do think the current situation has really, really highlighted that.

Trevor: One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about the lockdown period and having lots and lots of screen meetings is the point at which the pets invade. I–I have two dogs who, um, have…have taken a while actually to remember that I’m working at the top of the house and I’m not actually at work. And it’s just interesting when they kind of appear and the enjoyment is…is interesting. People like it when their pets show up and I think that’s an interesting indication of people wanting to share something of their domestic life. I think it’s, you know it’s…because the pet is a very, very personal thing and, er, you know it demonstrates that kind of…and it is a familial bond, you know the family dog or the family cat or… I think Jane’s point about, er, a pet not being just for Covid, I read an article at the very beginning of the lockdown and there were some people talking about how glad they were that they’d got this new puppy because it would preoccupy them and it would give the children something to do. And I just thought, oh my god they’re going to have a nightmare because that dog is going to grow up in puppyhood thinking people are around them all the time and…and, er, yeah you just…you can imagine the kind of horrors that are going to be in store for that…for those people when they start going to school and work and the puppy is chewing their house apart. But I think…I think that pets have become really central. And again I come back to the earlier point about comfort, I think our pets bringing us comfort.

Home Futures

Ana:  Brilliant, I think we’re coming to an end, but before we round off, I wanted to get some reflections from you both as to how the homes of the future might look like, given what we’ve been experiencing as individuals and collectively?

Jane:  Well I think it’s very difficult to know for anyone at the moment where all this is going to go. But I think one inevitable consequence will be that we are a bit more aware of our home environments actually, and I think some people might think more about where their homes are located, so if there’s been a lot of, you know sort of the position of people who are living in rural areas and the position of people who are living in cities is very different right now. And I think this will make people reflect more on the choices in terms of where they locate their home and what surrounds them, um, I mean, you know because it’s possible this kind of situation will occur again. So I think people are going to think a bit more about how they locate their homes. I also think, you know, slightly more light-heartedly, people are obviously paying a bit more attention to things like DIY and stuff so when we’re now seeing, you know garden centres opening up again, they’re absolutely packed out but when people are allowed to sort of go to DIY shops and buy things and that kind thing so I think we, you know, not to sort of overdraw the comparison with the post-War period but one of the things that, um, we saw in the 1950s was a DIY boom and I think we might see something similar after this too.

Trevor:   I think you’re right; I think it’s interesting how, um, people have navigated the shops being closed, eBay and Amazon have done quite a bit of, um, sales in DIY materials, if they’re available because people are using the time that they have on their hands to…to, you know look at that paintwork or mend something or do something. And I think it is as you say Jane, you know people may feel more invested in their homes and start looking at them anew. I think the point about where people live is a really interesting one because I think a lot of people have realised you don’t necessarily have to be right in the centre of things, you can actually work at a distance. I think we may see, you know, some real geographic shifts happening, and of course we might not. Home is actually, it changes and it does change over time but it also remains incredibly consistent. One of the, er, things that designers love doing, and they’ve always loved doing, is imagining the homes of the future and they’re never quite as revolutionary or as innovative as we like to think they are.

We are probably more technologically enabled and equipped than we’ve ever been in our domestic lives previously, but the homes actually look quite similar, you know the homes actually feel and are styled in similar ways. They’re totally electronic and you can shout at your lights and put them on or shout at your fridge and turn it up, or do whatever but, you know the actual places themselves remain remarkably consistent. There are obviously, um, you know precedents, you know things like the emergence of television and large scale mass adoption of the television in the 1950s actually really shifts, reorients things like the sitting room or the lounge and takes away from the hearth in some cases, people have written about that the hearth actually shifts and the television becomes the focal point. But then of course as we move through the 20th century the television then migrates into a personalised object sitting in lots of different rooms. And I think, you know, we’re all kind of seeing more of that but at the heart of it I think the homes do remain quite consistent.

Ana: Well thank you very much Trevor and Jane it’s been truly fascinating to discuss with you all the histories and changes brought about by Covid in our homes so thank you very much.

Trevor: Thank you.

Jane:Thank you.

Ana: A huge thanks to my guests for this episode, Jane Hamlett from Royal Holloway University and Trevor Keeble from the University of Portsmouth for joining us in this engaging discussion around the histories of home as a concept and place, and for offering their personal reflections on the many changes that the pandemic has brought to domestic life. In this episode you also heard the voices of Matthew Pattenall, Rebecca Bell and Annelies Van de Ven, who lent their impressions of home life during lockdown, and we are very grateful for their contributions.

Further Reading

Barker, H. and Hamlett, J., 2010. Living above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English ‘‘Industrial Revolution’’. Journal of family history35(4), pp.311-328.

Baxter, R. and Brickell, K., 2014. For home unmaking. Home cultures11(2), pp.133-143.

Blunt, A. and R. Dowling. 2006. Home. London: Routledge.

Blunt, A. and Varley, A., 2004. Geographies of home. Cultural Geographies, 11. Sage, pp. 3-6.

Calder, A., 1992. The myth of the Blitz. Random House.

Hamlett, J., 2014. At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. Springer.

Hamlett, J. 2010. Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850-1910. Manchester University Press.

Hamlett, J., 2009. ‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man’s Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman’s’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910. Gender & History21(3), pp.576-591.

Floyd, J. and Bryden, I. eds., 1999. Domestic space: reading the nineteenth-century interior. Manchester University Press.

Keeble, T., 2000. Boundaries, Walls, Thresholds and Doors: Recent Studies into Domestic Spaces.

Langhamer, C., 2005. The meanings of home in postwar Britain. Journal of Contemporary History40(2), pp.341-362.

Long, V., 2011. Industrial homes, domestic factories: the convergence of public and private space in interwar Britain. Journal of British Studies50(2), pp.434-464.

Ponsonby, M., 2016. Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750–1850. Routledge.

Sparke, P., Massey, A., Keeble, T. and Martin, B., 2009. Designing the modern interior: from the Victorians to today. Berg.

Articles

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/commuted-sentence-covid-19-spares-the-japanese-salaryman-from-ritual-exhaustion

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2020/04/coronavirus-lockdown-has-shown-its-urbanites-who-truly-live-outdoors

Show Notes

Credits

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Jane Hamlett and Trevor Keeble

Editing by Zoë Hendon and Paul Ford Sound

Contributions from Matthew Patenall, Annelies Van de Ven and Rebecca Bell

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

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