16 January 1926: Clinging to Victorian ideas,the standard of post-war building has been small housesIt is a curiosity of our time that a generation which repudiates so much that is Victorian should obstinately cling to the most Victorian of institutions, the villa. When we revive “The Doll’s House” we put it back into period dresses, and the modern young women proceed to sight at Nora as though she were a piece in a museum. Yet when the performance is over the audience will return to dolls’ houses of their own,not in the sense that they are going back into little prisons of the spirit, but that they are returning to houses built on the most diminutive scale. The average housing scheme of post-war times is simply a proliferation of petty villadom, and an age which is inclined to laugh at all the things for which Laburnum Avenue stood simply goes on building Laburnum Avenues. The more that the avenue is mocked the more does it multiply.
In the years before the war the women who were called “advanced” used to write books explaining that all this petty individualism of domesticity would own to proceed. The women,rebelling against domestic servitude, would see to that. Families would own separate premises in a semi-collegiate building wherein the main problems of cleaning, or heating,and cooking could, at the tenant’s choice, and be solved by communal service and supply. Writers like the late Miss Clementina Black used to reduce Laburnum Avenue to fragments with the artillery of their logic.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com