The Estate We're In

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.

The House Of The Past

Just what is it that makes yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? Over 30 million people visit stately homes annually in the UK. The National Trust has grown to 3.5 million members in recent years, making it by far the biggest conservation group in Europe. Countless period dramas further sate our seemingly endless appetite for gazing at the sumptuous interiors of historic homes. Clive Aslet’s book The English House is very much a part of this nostalgia industry.

The English House is a pretty loaded title for a start. It suggests something innately distinctive and valuable in both England and its houses. Immediately it puts us in the realm of a highly mythologised Englishness where country estates and the families that own them are seen as an organic part of our heritage.

Aslet is the former editor of Country Life a magazine so this should be no surprise. Country Life occupies a very particular place in British culture as the in-house journal for the land-owning classes. It’s the place to look if you are planning to purchase a few acres outside Cheltenham, or want to announce the forthcoming marriage of your daughter, accompanied by a picture of her fondling a horse. Only the former editor of Country Life for example could describe Milton Keynes as “occupying 22,000 acres of formerly good hunting country". As a sentence it’s hard to top for sheer beside-the-point snobbism.

From this lofty vantage point the author uses a gently novelistic style to tell the stories of a number of individual houses in the manner of an invigorating country ramble. He begins in the 12th Century with a Norman Manor and strides on, flat cap on and walking stick in hand, past a Tudor mansion, a castle by Vanbrugh, a Georgian townhouse, a worker's terrace in an industrial mill town, Edwin Lutyen's Marshcourt, an early 20th century semi and a post war pre-fab.

It sounds on the face of it a plausibly eclectic selection. But there are just two entries from the 20th Century: the suburban semi is from 1905 and the pre-fab is a curiosity within the wider scheme of things. There is a gaping hole in this book and it is modernism. Its high points are mentioned only in passing, almost as an aberrant phase when England became temporarily influenced by obscure continental notions. Aslet dismisses a vast swathe of the history of houses, as they don't fit into his quaint geneology of "Englishness". It's a shame because I would like to see one of the book's delightful pencil sketches depicting a nice bit of Brutalism.

"Little about the English House was colourful in the 1950's, ‘60's and ‘70's" Aslet declares, sweepingly. It is Thatcherism that, according to him, brings the colour back to England's cheeks. The percentage of home ownership in the UK went from 54% to 65% during the 1980's as a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy policy. Aslet suggests that this policy together with our obsession with home ownership is the logical end point of the English love of houses.

The English House is more an example of this obsession than an analysis of it. The final chapter is entitled Whatever Next?, a phrase epitomising a very English penchant for mocking innovation. Nothing in this book is allowed to be in the least bit disagreeable. Instead, the author remains in thrall to a self-perpetuating myth of loveable English eccentrics and their charming houses. This amiable conservatism hides an ideologically driven fear of change though. In that sense, the books startling lack of interest in the architecture of the last century is entirely consistent. It is a lament for a lost England.

Ornament is Fine: Neon Houses, Electronic Cottages and Instant Architecture

I spent Christmas in Kent by the sea. On New Years day we walked along the sea front and then up through the quiet dark streets of the town. Lights blinked in the windows of the houses. Occasionally we came across one completely covered in lights, their roofs, walls and chimneys picked out in pulsing fibre-optic light, like a glowing, coloured drawing rather than the real thing.

Here was Archigram's electronic cottage made manifest, an instant electronic architecture sitting in a cartoon winter landscape populated by mythical creatures and flickering messages of peace and love. On one lawn a family of fibre-optic reindeer nodded their heads in unison. Two more skulked below a window in an adjacent garden with some glowing miniature bearded men for company. It's only not weird because we have seen it so many times before.



I'm a sucker for coloured lights just as I am for the flashing bulbs and painted signs of the seaside pier. It may be futile but I admire the effort and every now and again it looks like magic. Here the banal architecture is transformed into a bizarre pageant of signs, sentiment and nostalgia as sinisterly saccarine but sweetly perfect as Disney. Ordinary suburban houses aiming for the romantic uplift of Bollywood.



A single tree stood glowing in the dark, lighting up the pavement, more beautiful than any number of public art installations or other official improvements to the urban landscape.

And the next day they were all gone.

Happy new year people!