In British urban areas we can of course see many similar features in our towns, especially when they are close to one another and use the same local materials; but we can also see great diversity of structures, styles, materials and layout. As we walk about our streets it is possible to trace the old streets of six or eight hundred years ago which lie beneath them. We are walking on the bones of our country.
Chapter 3. Houses and Homes: How We Build Them, Buy Them and Care For Them
From towns and cities let us turn to the houses of Britain. The most important point is to understand that most of us do not live in flats. Every country has its typical housing so that if you cross from England into France or Germany or Spain, you will know instantly that you are in another country. The differences are partly architectural, partly aspects of the way people choose to domesticate their immediate surroundings. But there are also similarities. If you travel from Russia across Europe to western France you will observe that almost all cities have a centre with old buildings of three or four even five storeys, but that these centres are surrounded by modem blocks of high-rise flats. The details will vary, but all countries have found that the obvious solution to cheap new housing in order to accommodate families moving from the countryside or needing improved conditions is to build blocks of flats. They are rarely beautiful or spacious, but they are convenient and efficient. The problems are similar: noise, cramped public areas, unpredictable water supplies, broken lifts... but they are homes for millions of people who prefer them to the more primitive conditions they have left.
In England, however, our cities are not encircled by these high-rise buildings. We resist living in flats; we prefer to live in rows of small brick houses. Of course some English people enjoy living in flats, but for the vast majority of us, the basic idea of home is a brick house with rooms upstairs and downstairs and with a garden, even if it is a very small garden. If you fly into London from Russia and the weather is clear, you will see the difference immediately. Below you will be all those small roads I have described, each road consisting of neat rows of houses. You will be able to see the individual houses quite clearly, and also the gardens. These houses stretch out from the centre of the cities to the edge where it meets the countryside.
At first sight our preference for little houses makes no sense. If England is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, why don't we seize on the obvious solution and build upwards? Even in Scotland people often live in flats although there is far more land per person available. Why is England different not just from Russia but from most of continental Europe? The answer is in our history.
The brick house is a legacy of the English - the earliest -Industrial Revolution. Employers at the beginning of the nineteenth century had to build accommodation for the millions of workers pouring into the cities and at that time they did not have the materials or technology for cheap building upwards. For them the cheapest solution was to build rows of small houses joined together (terraces), each with two small rooms downstairs and two small rooms upstairs. The rooms were small because they were heated by open fires, not by stoves, and families tended to huddle in one room (the kitchen). Bedrooms were unheated, and to this day many English people find it impossible to sleep except in a cold room with the windows wide open.
Most of our housing schemes thereafter are logical improvements to this working-class pattern. Houses became larger; millions of us live in houses with two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and two or three small rooms plus bathroom-and-toilet upstairs. Before the First World War someone invented the 'semi-detached house' which was still cheap to build but which allowed each family to reach the back of their house down a narrow side passage. This enabled men to carry sacks of coal to the back yard where it could be stored and used for the boiler and open fires. Since the nineteen-sixties, such houses have regularly been built with garages. Richer people kept to the same pattern. The later Victorians at the end of the nineteenth century built three-storey houses, but rarely higher. Such a house was intended for one large family with servants. Houses for richer people in the twentieth century had larger rooms and more land in the garden, but kept to the two- or three-storey pattern.
Today, with central heating built into all new homes, the 'two downstairs rooms' have often been knocked into one because we no longer need to keep a small space warm with an open fire. Sometimes the kitchen area is open to this large room. We have small entrance halls (the climate means that we rarely wear heavy winter coats and in any case we do not wrap ourselves up as Russians do, so we don't need much cloakroom space). Bedrooms have changed. They used to be used exclusively for sleeping. When I was growing up, my parents bought me a small oil heater so that I could do my homework in my bedroom without freezing to death while my brother and sister played downstairs. Nowadays, with central heating warming the whole house, bedrooms have been converted to bedroom-playroom-television looms, since the open-plan downstairs means less privacy.
All individual houses, whether joined in rows or standing detached, have their own back garden. However tiny, this is much preferred to communal land. We like to have our own fences, our own little garden shed and, preferably, our own strip of land outside our own front door. (This is one objection to flats by a nation of gardeners.) In the nineteen sixties, architects went against the instincts of the English, pulled down many rows of old Victorian houses and put up new shining blocks of flats. Within a few years many of these blocks had become slums, hated by the people who had been moved from the terraces. Many of these tower blocks have since been demolished and few blocks have been built since. Architects have gone back to semidetached and terrace houses, grouped in interesting patterns, each one emphasizing privacy.
Russians have a habit of describing anything built before about 1955 as 'old'. (So do Californians, and no doubt many other people.) In England a house does not qualify as old unless it was built at least a hundred years ago. We still have tens of thousands of really old houses, built between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries scattered throughout the country. They may be inconvenient but richer people love to live in them so they become very expensive, even when they are quite small. Thousands of these older houses are strikingly beautiful and protected by law. At the other end of the scale are 'bungalows', small brick houses of only one storey, built especially for the elderly. Many older people move from a house into a bungalow.
I have written that we do not live in flats. To be more precise, most of us do not live in flats unless we are young or old or poor. Students and young people who are renting accommodation will often find a converted flat constructed inside one of the many houses built for a single family with their servants a hundred years or more ago. These houses are too big for today's family (with no servants!) so they are converted into three or four separate flats. The arrangement and size of rooms is often odd, but they have the advantages of ordinary family houses such as a garden. In many towns special housing is built for older people in three-storey flats. Nobody is very far from the ground and gardens, the styles are still intimate, but lifts and carefully designed doorways and so forth make these flats ideal for those who cannot move around easily. Those poorer people who live in council housing (municipal housing) are normally provided with a small house. If they are offered a flat, it will be in a building rarely higher than five storeys, and more likely four or three storeys.