These two books, ostensibly vastly different, actually form a kind of weird odd-couple double act in articulating current attitudes to houses and housing. Note that houses are a different proposition than housing here. Aslet's book - The English House - is emphatically about the former while Hanley's is about the latter.
Houses are popularly characterised like people - as individuals with foibles, eccentricities, charm (or otherwise) and character. Housing on the other hand is usually characterised as faceless, bureaucratic and anonymous. While houses are supposed to foreground individual craft in construction housing reputedly employs the techniques of Fordist mass-production. Strangely the success of developers like Wimpey or Barratt over the last twenty to thirty years has been in promoting an image of the former while actually employing the latter. If modernism's dream of mass production has ever come close to fruition in architecture it is certainly not in the guise that we expected it.
Aslet's book positions the house at the heart of (English) social history and organisation. This is important because, for him, the history of the house reinforces a particular conception of Englishness. Not only is the (rightful) social order seen as mirroring the gradation of houses running from the grand country residence to the rural hovel, but this order is seen as strangely impervious to overhaul. Any attempt to change the natural order is viewed as both doomed and - in that great term used by all people trying to bury their ideological agenda below a layer of common sense bullshit - social engineering. So Aslet ignores most of the 20th century out of a mixture of political distaste and architectural disinterest. At the point at which modernism and large scale social housing arrives Aslet departs, only returning for a brief coda on, of all people, Laurie Chetwood. In between he leaves a great big hole.
Lynsey Hanley's book describes the hole. Estates is about housing; collective, large scale, repetitive housing. Good though it is it too seems trapped within a standard (if understandable in her case) aversion to modernist architecture and its supposed inhumanity, and a belief that personal identity can't be cultivated or inscribed within collective housing developments.
In some ways the values and attitudes prevalent in Aslet's book contaminate any conversation or approach to the issues highlighted in Hanley's. We cannot disassociate houses from their symbolic value within an economy. The success of houses is seen to lie almost exclusively in two areas: in their ability to articulate our social and economic aspiration and in their speculative value.
Posted below then is my review of Clive Aslet's book, slightly improbably to be found furtively loitering in last month's issue of Icon.
Houses are popularly characterised like people - as individuals with foibles, eccentricities, charm (or otherwise) and character. Housing on the other hand is usually characterised as faceless, bureaucratic and anonymous. While houses are supposed to foreground individual craft in construction housing reputedly employs the techniques of Fordist mass-production. Strangely the success of developers like Wimpey or Barratt over the last twenty to thirty years has been in promoting an image of the former while actually employing the latter. If modernism's dream of mass production has ever come close to fruition in architecture it is certainly not in the guise that we expected it.
Aslet's book positions the house at the heart of (English) social history and organisation. This is important because, for him, the history of the house reinforces a particular conception of Englishness. Not only is the (rightful) social order seen as mirroring the gradation of houses running from the grand country residence to the rural hovel, but this order is seen as strangely impervious to overhaul. Any attempt to change the natural order is viewed as both doomed and - in that great term used by all people trying to bury their ideological agenda below a layer of common sense bullshit - social engineering. So Aslet ignores most of the 20th century out of a mixture of political distaste and architectural disinterest. At the point at which modernism and large scale social housing arrives Aslet departs, only returning for a brief coda on, of all people, Laurie Chetwood. In between he leaves a great big hole.
Lynsey Hanley's book describes the hole. Estates is about housing; collective, large scale, repetitive housing. Good though it is it too seems trapped within a standard (if understandable in her case) aversion to modernist architecture and its supposed inhumanity, and a belief that personal identity can't be cultivated or inscribed within collective housing developments.
In some ways the values and attitudes prevalent in Aslet's book contaminate any conversation or approach to the issues highlighted in Hanley's. We cannot disassociate houses from their symbolic value within an economy. The success of houses is seen to lie almost exclusively in two areas: in their ability to articulate our social and economic aspiration and in their speculative value.
Posted below then is my review of Clive Aslet's book, slightly improbably to be found furtively loitering in last month's issue of Icon.
4 comments:
I reviewed Lynsey Hanley's book when it came out for Socialist Review, and I was a bit upset by it, for various reasons - a) as a former estate youth with an interest in architecture I wanted to write a book on estates, and this very different book rather means I can't, b) her aversion to modern architecture got up my nose rather and c) it was really very good, and there were so many times I felt myself nodding and going 'yes, that's exactly how it is/was'. On b) she actually gets her facts wrong on more than one occasion, but to be fair there's this thing on Bruno Taut which implies that there's more to life than Barratt or Ronan Point.
(oh, and Wimpey were the contractors on the latter - so that massive structural failure and much-mythologised failure of modernist collective housing is basically their fault)
I like the pairing here, though - there's definitely a mutual dependence between these two worlds. Which (shameless plug) I mention quite a bit in my book...
Looking at the cover designs, it's funny how two pretty similar sans-serif fonts are on opposite ideological poles...
'The English House': Gill Sans. The thirties (stretching to the fifties), British Racing Green, Jeeves and Wooster, 'Keep Calm and Carry on'
'Estates': Futura. None of the above.
Marc, you're right. I wish I had discussed the cover designs because the differences are quite instructive. The paperback version of Lynsey Hanley's book, for instance(pictured above), is quite different from the hardback, much sweeter and more charming. It's reminiscent of a Julian Opie painting, like something you might find on a St Etienne albmum cover, and in that respect quite at odds with the expereience of such places the author is trying to convey.
The English House is more straightforward but I like your reference points.....
...thinking about it, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' would have made an effective title for Clive Aslet's book.
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