How snobbery killed suburbia Britain needs more humble semis

The new Labour government’s day one commitment to a vast national housebuilding effort has been almost uniformly welcomed, yet there are some glaring exceptions. Naturally, the rump Corbynite Left is grouching on social media that plans to work with private building companies will do little to address rising prices, and that the state should take on a construction role itself to primarily build council homes for social rents. But for even the BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, to challenge Reeves directly that “in history, we’ve only had this level of housebuilding when the state has been involved,” highlights the strange lacuna in the national memory over what must be the most successful housing effort in Britain’s, and perhaps the world’s, history. The speculative property boom of the interwar period carpeted London’s near countryside in well-built family homes, and converted the slum-dwelling veterans of the trenches into a property-owning petit bourgeois democracy.

Following the First World War, London added two million people to its population in less than 20 years. To house its new middle-class population, over the Twenties an average of 150,000 houses a year were built on London’s rural fringes. The rate vastly increased over the course of the Thirties so that even at the height of the Depression, 200,000 were being built annually, reaching 350,000 a year by 1936, remaining above 300,000 until the outbreak of war forced workmen to down their tools, suddenly freezing London within its new Green Belt. It was, as the academic defenders of the suburban semi wrote in their classic 1981 polemic, Dunroamin, “a figure not attained again until the Sixties”, and thus markedly more successful than Attlee’s more celebrated postwar efforts.

Enough houses were built between the wars to house a third of England’s population, in hitherto unimaginable comfort and security. Many of these homes were built on landed estates given up by a newly-pinched gentry, and an argument could surely be made that this was a social revolution in prosperity, equivalent, in its uniquely English way, to the land reforms which, just a generation earlier, built a sturdy yeoman class from Ireland’s rent-wracked peasantry. Yet as the authors of Dunroamin noted, “It remains a mystery that none of the leaders of the New Architecture in Europe or England displayed any recognition whatsoever of the achievement of providing over four million homes in the space of just 22 years.” The same can be said of today’s Leftwing YIMBYs, studiously passing over the era’s successes in favour of Attlee’s more modest progress, in a willed act of national forgetting. The reasons are no doubt political: for this wildly productive mass housing project was undertaken without even the vaguest glimmering of reforming zeal, deriving purely from the relentless pursuit of profit by speculative builders.

Yet in this case, greed was a social good. So productive were the speculators — three quarters of homes were built by private companies — that by the mid-Thirties prices plummeted as supply exceeded demand and almost everyone desiring a home of their own had already acquired one. So keen were housebuilders — the very same big contractors of today, the Wimpeys and Taylor Woodrows which made their initial fortunes from the interwar boom — to offload their ever-increasing stock, that homes were put on sale with deposits of 1% or even no deposit at all. The speculators threw in free furniture, rail season tickets and even cars to attract buyers, drawn from tenuously middle class office workers in their twenties and early thirties: the very same class, in fact, which rails against the private builders today. Yet enthusiasts for an active state — including myself — should take comfort that the market flourishing of new housing was enabled by government intervention, namely the vast expansion of public transport routes through the woods and meadows of the Home Counties, creating the vital arteries from which the pebble-dashed capillaries of suburbia would soon branch. It was only the outbreak of war that prevented the Northern Line thrusting through the further reaches of Hertfordshire: among his other sins, Hitler deserves some blame for the Green Belt and today’s Housing Crisis.

For a time, state and market worked smoothly together to forge a historic social good. Yet as the grim spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Ceremony reminds us, our taste-making class remains in thrall to Attlee’s 1945 Labour government, and its well-meaning but decidedly mixed achievements. The socialist modernism of his postwar new town vision — like much socialist modernism, more appealing on the planning board than in lived reality — is surely granted unearned lustre by this generalised air of nostalgia. With New Towns new again, it is worth underscoring Attlee’s role as the under-sung villain of modern Britain’s housing crisis. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act froze London within its prewar boundaries, so that suddenly, as the architectural historian Alan A. Jackson observed, “A hundred years of uninhibited growth had come to an end.” The unintended consequences of the postwar enthusiasm for planning, almost a century later, still burden the young middle-class Londoner, as the new, artificially-induced shortage of building land wrought by the 1947 Act drastically increased land values and with it house prices. As a result, the authors of Dunroamin observed, “It became more and more difficult, particularly in the rapidly-developing South-East, to market semi-detached houses at prices which could be afforded by the kinds of middle and lower middle-class people who had bought them during the period between the wars.” This historic Labour error helped create Generation Rent today.

Yet who today will speak for the humble English semi, so ubiquitous as to appear invisible, still tarnished by a century of elite satire and contempt? To anyone who grew up in Metroland, the mock-Tudor semis of the period instil an instinctive Proustian rush, the bay-windowed living rooms and neatly tended gardens of Edgware, Stanmore, Pinner and Rickmansworth. Yet these quiet, leafy Drives and Avenues were mocked — detested — even as the speculators threw them up, with Betjeman famously wishing on the friendly bombs, and the architectural satirist Osbert Lancaster remarking in 1938 that their existence “does much to reconcile one to the prospect of aerial bombardment”. For Orwell, in Coming Up For Air, an Etonian snobbery against the rising middle class, in all its cultural and political conservatism, outweighed compassion for the lower orders in his sneering contempt at “the same long, long rows of little semi-detached houses . . . as much alike as council houses and generally uglier”.

Architecturally speaking, Orwell was wrong: the Tudorbethan affectations of the interwar semi, with its leaded windows and pointed gables, were a conscious rejection of the neo-Georgian style favoured for council housing, a mark of social distinction and independence harking back to the idealised sturdy yeoman of Merrie England, master of his humble plot. In his excellent, recent and sadly posthumous masterpiece, Interwar, the architectural critic Gavin Stamp attempts to reclaim the half-timbered semi of the Twenties and Thirties for the British cultural imagination, observing that “Architectural writers may have sneered at such houses, but as designs they are worth taking seriously,” and are, in any case, “no more monotonous… than the Georgian terraces that the Victorians found so intolerably boring.” Architecturally the unloved descendant of William Morris’s longing gaze back to the High Middle Ages, by way of the asymmetric, steeply-pitched and tile-hung Arts and Crafts villas of Voysey and Lutyens, the humble suburban semi, Stamp observes, democratised the pastoral dreams of the Edwardian upper classes. As he reminds us, “for millions of families, the spec-built suburban house, with its neo-Tudor details, its false half-timbering, tile-hung gables, bay-windows and rough-cast walls, represented an image of home, of freedom and domesticity, for millions of families able and willing to afford a down payment and the mortgage instalments”.

Striking against the taste-making grain while serving in Egypt in World War Two, the architectural writer J.M. Richards tried to weigh the strange hostility the suburban semi aroused among critics, architects and self-described progressives against “the appeal it holds for ninety out of a hundred Englishmen, an appeal which cannot be explained away as some strange instance of mass aberration.” Indeed, he wrote, after a lyrical passage extolling the virtues of the pram in the oak-panelled hallway, and the view of the tree-shaded garden enclosed by the leaded bay window,  this “is the picture the ordinary Englishman has in his mind when he is away at the war… It is each individual Englishman’s idea of his own home, except for the cosmopolitan rich, a minority of freaks and intellectuals” attracted instead to the concrete rationalism of Continental Modernism. It is an idyllic, inward-looking and cosily domestic image, Richards confesses, “but then the Englishman, being an optimist, thinks idyllically” — and is there anything wrong with that?

Yet at the time, architects and planners, enthralled by Corbusier’s visions of towering concrete edifices — which time proved better suited to the bright light of Provence than the lowering, rain-lashed skies of Hackney and Cumbernauld — found themselves exasperated at the unerring preference of working class tenants surveyed for suburban semis with gardens. Perhaps the political and aesthetic preferences of tastemakers were intertwined: if the Modernist apartment was, as Corbusier asserted, a machine for living in, then semi-detached suburbia was a giant sprawling factory for producing conservatives. The suburban dream is after all a profoundly conservative vision, centred on the small nuclear family — the basis of English social structure since records began — acquiring modern comforts while surrounding itself with echoes of an idealised past.

No wonder the great interwar housing boom was overseen by Stanley Baldwin, who consistently extolled to housebuilders and architects the virtues of the traditional English cottage as a model — as Stamp reminds us, “Baldwin had Arts and Crafts credentials —  his uncle, by marriage had been Edward Burne-Jones and his cousin was Rudyard Kipling” — for warring visions of the political and the aesthetic good were as intertwined then in housing as they are now. Unashamedly populist, marrying technological advance with bucolic nostalgia, the suburban semi of the interwar period was perhaps Anglofuturist rather than Modernist, enabling social and economic progress from the deepest conservative impulses.

Conservatives today, to their detriment, have lost this vision and have rightly suffered for it. Baldwin’s contemporary acolyte Lord Lexden terms him “Baldwin the Builder” like some semi-mythical Dark Age hero, and from the perspective of today’s Tories, he may as well be. Thatcher’s political career may have rested on the half-timbered conservatism of Finchley, yet she never saw fit to expand this worldview for future generations. Johnson’s contribution to Britain’s domestic architecture, the inner-city New London Vernacular shared-ownership flat, may be quietly tasteful — and interwar in its own, Stripped Classical way — but as a contribution to family formation and the creation of a conservative worldview it is rather lacking.

It is ironic, and perhaps heartening to instinctive conservatives, licking their wounds at a generation of Tory failure, that today’s heir to Baldwin’s vision may be Starmer himself, who after all lauds the three-bed pebble-dashed semi of his childhood, embedded in a peri-rural, deeply English landscape, as the building block of his worldview. As visions of social mobility go, there are worse outcomes than a new suburban renaissance. Sneered at by tastemakers, despised by radicals, perhaps, somewhere beneath the Green Belt, the spirit of Dunroamin still slumbers on like King Arthur, waiting to be reawakened in the nation’s service.

---

Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

arisroussinos