HISTORIES OF HOME SSN
FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Friday 5 June 2009, London Transport Museum
ABSTRACTS
‘HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTH IS?’ EXPLORING THE USES AND
MEANINGS OF THE HEARTH IN RESTORATION & LATER STUART
LONDON
Sara Pennell, Roehampton University
Plotting spatial function(s) in domestic environments is a complex undertaking
in contemporary societies, let alone historic urban environments. The
domestic architectural development of pre-Great Fire London provides a
particularly difficult context to explore, not least because of the destruction
and subsequent redevelopment of substantial sections of the City and its
contiguous parishes; without the physical/archaeological evidence remaining
(or extensively investigated, in the case of the archaeology) one is left reliant
on documentary sources.
In this paper I propose to explore the permutations of multifunctional domestic
space - and especially the constraints upon developing physical distinctions
between ‘private’ and ‘public’, or rather ‘occupational’ and ‘non-occupational’
space and space use - in relation to non-elite metropolitan households,
especially in households that were also used for commercial ends (for
example baking, smallscale brewing or distilling, laundering, running a
cookshop, tavern or other drinking establishment). By
using data from the Hearth Tax returns for 1664, 1666 and 1674, as well as
probate records for the parishes of St Sepulchre and St Giles in the Fields,
Old Bailey Sessions papers, and architectural and material evidence, I will
consider how hearths (or their absence) contributed to the expansion of nondomestic eating practices; how their multiplication opened up possibilities for
new activities (both legal and illegal) centred on them; and how the material
cultures which surrounded and equipped them enabled householders to
construe, sustain but also adapt the use and as importantly, meanings, of the
spaces in which hearths were located.
Further reading
M. J. Braddick (1994) Parliamentary Taxation in 17th-Century England (Woodbridge:
Royal Historical Society)
Elizabeth McKellar (1999) The Birth of Modern London: the Development and Design
of the City 1660-1720 (Manchester, Manchester University Press)
Peter Guillery (2006), ‘London suburbs’, in P.S. Barnwell and Malcolm Airs, (eds)
(2006), Houses and the Hearth Tax: the Later Stuart House and Society (CBA 15:
York)
Miles Ogborn (1998) Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680-1780 (New
York: Guilford Press)
Margaret Spufford (2006) ‘Chimneys, wood and coal’, in P.S. Barnwell and Malcolm
Airs, (eds) (2006) Houses and the Hearth Tax: the Later Stuart House and Society
(CBA 15: York)
Nicholas Tosney (2007) ‘Women and ‘False Coining’ in Early Modern London’
London Journal, 32:2 pp.103-23
FABRICATING THE DOMESTIC INTERIOR?: THE CONVERSATION
PIECE IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND
Kate Retford, Birkbeck, London
Eighteenth-century conversation pieces have long attracted attention for their
detailed settings; for their meticulous rendering of drawing rooms, parlours,
libraries
and their contents. These diminutive portraits seem to provide a rich source of
historical evidence, bringing the Georgian domestic interior to life, proffering –
as George C. Williamson once averred – ‘a peep-show into the English
home’.
This paper will unpick the relationship between these representations and the
actual homes of the sitters depicted therein. Some conversation pieces do
indeed record particular environments and prized possessions with
extraordinary precision. Portraits by Joseph Francis Nollekens and William
Hogarth showing, respectively, the salon and ballroom of the Palladian
palace, Wanstead house, now long demolished, are invaluable records of the
interiors created for Sir Richard Child. However, in the Hogarth, certain
adjustments are apparent – some clearly for the enhancement of the
commission, others perhaps a subtle act of subversion. Adjustment becomes
complete fabrication in conversation pieces by Arthur Devis. This artist not
only entirely invented the spaces and objects depicted in many of his portraits,
but even replicated them for different patrons.
The paper will end by exploring some of the possible reasons for this wide
variety of
types of representation. It will also consider its implications for the way we
approach
the conversation piece both as an artistic genre, and as historical evidence for
the Georgian home.
Further reading
Ellen G. D'Oench (1980) The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and His
Contemporaries, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art), introduction
Marcia Pointon (1993) Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press),
Chapter 6
Kate Retford (2007) ‘From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in
Georgian England’, Journal of Design History, 20, pp.291-307
Charles Saumarez Smith (1993) Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the
Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson)
David H. Solkin (1993) Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press),
Chapters
1-3
THE IMPORTANCE OF BIOGRAPHY AND CONNECTIONS IN
UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENT ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN,
1680-1720
Tim Richardson, independent garden historian
This contribution will focus on the powerful role of the home as the dynastic
headquarters of specific ambitious individuals and their families, notably its
surrounding landscape or garden, which was utilised as a means of personal
expression during a particularly piquant period of British history, when modern
parliamentary party politics was just beginning to take shape. The landscape
or garden emerged as a prime arena for personal and political expression at
this period for a number of reasons. In the run-up to the ‘Glorious Revolution’
of 1688, which saw William of Orange parachuted on to the English throne, a
group of Dutch and English diplomats, statesmen and aristocrats found
common cause in terms of their Protestantism and vision of a constitutional
monarchy, in the face of what they saw as the threat of James II’s
Catholicism.
The development of a powerful individual’s garden and wider estate had long
been established as a conventional way of expressing attitudes to the wider
world, and these Dutch and English ‘revolutionaries’ began to express a
sense of their political kinship across the water by making gardens containing
markedly similar features and tone. For example the overall atmosphere
became more bucolic, wooded and less ornamented with features such as
fountains and serpentine walks were introduced in some areas of the garden.
The garden was the ideal venue for the encoded expression of what were
potentially treasonous ideas at this time.
When William became king it became possible (and desirable) for landowners
to show open support for the new king, and his own chosen symbols - either
Hercules or Neptune - began to appear in English gardens alongside ‘AngloDutch’ features such as formal canals and decorative ironwork. The
landscape was also a suitable arena of expression because it was one of the
key political battlefields between the emergent Williamite Whig party and the
old Tory party - the two sides had different attitudes and each tried to wrest
control of the most fashionable garden vocabulary (the Whigs triumphing).
In the run-up to the Hanoverian Succession of 1714, hard-core Whigs such as
Robert Walpole and his spin doctor Joseph Addison (editor of the Spectator)
again used the landscape garden as a political metaphor, explicitly
associating the ‘freedom’ of more naturalistic landscapes with the Whig
political philosophy. By the 1730s the landscape-garden initiative had been
wrested away by dissident ‘back-bench’ Whigs led by Lord Cobham of Stowe,
who were revolted at what they saw as the nepotism and corruption of the
mainstream Whigs under Walpole, and disillusioned with the Hanoverian
monarchy. Again, since they were almost powerless in politics itself, they
resorted to using their own estates/landscapes as a powerful means of
political expression or satire. These distinct phases can be traced from the
1670s to the 1740s, the most openly politicised period of garden-making in
Britain.
Further reading
Charlesworth, Michael (1994) ‘Hercules, Apollo and the Hermit: Exploring
Stourhead’, in Eyres, Patrick (ed) (1994), Sons of the sea. Commerce, Empire and
theLandscape Garden, Part II: Representations of Hercules (and Neptune) in the
Culture and Garden of Augustan Britain. Part 2. (Leeds: New Arcadian Press)
de Jong, Erik (2001) Nature and art: Dutch garden and landscape architecture, 16501740 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press)
Eyres, Patrick (ed) (1997) The political temples of Stowe. (New Arcadian Press)
Halpern, Linda Cabe (2002) ‘Wrest Park 1686–1730s: exploring Dutch influences.’
Garden History, Volume 30:2, Winter 2002, pp.131-152
Hayton, David [2001] The House of Commons 1690-1715 (Cambridge: CUP)
Helsinger, Elizabeth (1997) ‘Land and National Representation in Britain’, in Michael
Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (eds) (1997) Prospects for the nation:
recent essays in British landscape, 1750-1880 (New Haven & London: Yale
University Press)
Hoppit, Julian (2000) A land of liberty? England, 1689-1727 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press)
Hunt, John Dixon (ed) (1988) ‘The Anglo -Dutch Garden in the Age of William and
Mary’ Journal of Garden History, volume 8 nos 2 and 3 [combined], April-September
1988
Jacques, David, and Arend Jan van der Horst (eds) (1988) The Gardens of William
and Mary (London: Christopher Helm)
Richardson, Tim (2007) The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape
Garden (London: Bantam)
Williamson, Tom and Liz Bellamy (1987) Property and landscape: a social history of
land ownership and the English countryside (London: George Philip)
Williamson, Tom (2000) ‘Estate Management and Landscape Design’, in Christopher
Ridgway & Robert Williams (eds) (2000) Sir John Vanbrugh and landscape
architecture in Baroque England, 1690-1730 (Stroud: Sutton in association with The
National Trust)
Williamson, Tom (1995) Polite landscapes: gardens and society in eighteenthcentury England (Stroud: Alan Sutton)
FROM DRAWING ROOM TO DRESSING ROOM: MARITAL DYNAMICS
AND MIDDLE-CLASS DOMESTIC INTERIORS IN ENGLAND, 1850-1910
Dr Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway University of London
When Bedfordshire gentlewoman Frederica Orlebar arrived at her new marital
home, Hinwick House in 1861, she was distressed by the appearance of the
bedroom and drawing room. Of the bedroom she stated: “Then the dressing
table was a man’s table, with a place for boots underneath, not an elegant
muslin and glazed/glass calico affair covered with ivory backed brushes and
silver things as I wished to see….”.(1)The drawing room was little better. This
she described as: “exceptionally stiff and proper in its lines” with an effect that
was “aristocratic and old fashioned.”(2) During the first years of her marriage,
Orlebar worked hard to refashion these rooms. The bedroom was reworked to
accommodate feminine dressing, while the drawing room was completely rearranged and filled with wedding presents. Orlebar’s endeavours were
produced not just by an interest in style, but a concern with the practical and
emotional significance of the domestic interior, with the role it would play in
her everyday life, and in its significance for her relationship with her husband.
Most nineteenth-century homes were occupied by a husband and a wife. The
majority of adults over forty five in late nineteenth-century England were
married.(3) The relationship between husband and wife often had a key role to
play in the creation of the home. But the establishment of the home itself, and
the ordering and structuring of marital space also contributed to relations
between husband and wife.
Few historians of the nineteenth century have explored the relationship
between marriage and material culture.(4) Studies of the 1882 Married
Women’s Property Act have assessed the legal relationship between women
and goods on marriage.(5) But such work has focused on meanings that are
enshrined in law, rather than the relationship between married people and
goods in everyday life. The nature of nineteenth-century marriage itself has
attracted more attention, and historians have offered three principal definitions
marriage. Firstly, class, and in particular the distinction between middle and
working class, is considered to play a crucial role in structuring marital
experiences.(6) Secondly, the period has been associated with the rise of
'romantic' love. Judith Lewis argues of the British aristocracy that: “If being
“reasonably happy” was all that a young girl in 1780 expected of marriage, by
1860 she was in ardent pursuit of romantic love.”(7) A third story is the rise of
the ‘companionate marriage.’ Lawrence Stone famously argued in the 1970s
that the eighteenth century saw the beginning of companionate marriage,
when future spouses “began to put the prospects of emotional satisfaction
before the ambition for increased income or status.”(8) However, the argument
has been qualified since.(9)
This paper uses the material world to offer new ways of exploring of
nineteenth-century marriage, using the organisation of space in the middleclass home and to examine the fashioning of relationships and the experience
of intimacy. To achieve this, the paper analyses the layout and meaning of
two rooms in the middle-class home that were crucial to the experience of
marital intimacy: the drawing room and
the bedroom with dressing room attached.
The drawing room, or parlour, was a very common on middle-class homes in
nineteenth-century England. Usually paired with a dining room, this room was
viewed as a feminine space and often identified as the special concern of the
lady of the house. Following the aristocratic practice of the separation of the
sexes after dinner, the drawing room was the space where the ladies retired,
leaving the gentlemen to their port. The social function of this room is clear –
we know that it was an important location for middle-class entertaining and
sociability. It was often the most heavily decorated room in the house, and the
mid-Victorian drawing room in particular was clustered with objects and
ornamentation that have often been associated with the desire for social
display. But the role of this room in the intimate lives of families is less well
known. Advice writers were well aware of the public role of the drawing room,
but also constructed this as a space of everyday intimacy in marriage. The
drawing room – and the restrained behaviour entry into this room required –
was seen to set the stage for ‘polite’ marriage. Such sociability required
women support their husbands after a hard day’s work, but also required men
to conform to feminine standards of behaviour.
The bedroom was the heart of marital intimacy in the home – and the location
for sexual relations between husband and wife. During the second half of the
nineteenth-century, for upper middle class couples, the gentry and successful
businessmen, it was common for the marital bedroom to have a dressing
room attached. Advice writers make it clear that this room was intended to be
a male space. Indeed, certain writers suggest that this room was essential in
the creation of ‘fastidious’ marriages – as it allowed husband and wife to sleep
apart. The popularity of this room coincided with a shift in middle-class sexual
practices. The drop in the birth rate of children in middle-class families from
1870 onwards suggests that Victorian sexual behaviour may have been
shifting, which historians have associated with a growing culture of
abstinence. (10) The presence of additional beds in these rooms suggests that
for some families this may have been the case. However, it also seems likely
that the uses of this space were many, allowing a separate sleeping space
in times of illness, and perhaps during the wife’s ‘lying in’ period. Moreover,
the dressing room fundamentally altered the experience of marital intimacy,
as it meant that husband and wife would dress apart, preserving a sense of
privacy even within this most intimate marital space.
Notes
1 Diary of Frederica Orlebar, 17 Oct. 1861, Bedfordshire and Luton Local Archives Service, B&L,
OR2244/6.
2 28 May 1861, B&L, OR2244/5; 1 Oct. 1861, B&L, OR 2244/6.
3 During the second half of the nineteenth century, those who remained unmarried were in a minority.
Wrigley and Schofield note that according the census data, the proportion of those who never married at
age 45-54 in the censuses of 1851, 1861 and 1871 was 11.9, 11.2 and 10.9 per cent respectively. E.A.
Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The population history of England 1541-1871: a reconstruction (1981),
p.259.
4 Explorations of other places and periods: L. Purbrick, ‘Wedding presents: marriage gifts and the limits
of consumption, Britain 1945-2000,’ Journal of Design History, 16, 3 (2003), pp.215-227. Also see book.
A. Fine, ‘A consideration of the trousseau: a feminine culture?,’ in M. Perrot ed., Writing women’s history
(Oxford, 1992), pp.118-145.
5 L. Holcombe, ‘Victorian wives and property: reform of the married women’s property law 1857-1882,’
in M. Vicinus ed., A widening sphere: changing roles of Victorian women (1977), pp.3-28; L. Holcombe,
Wives and property: reform of the married women’s property law in nineteenth-century England (1983),
passim. The exchange of objects during engagement is discussed in Ginger Frost’s study of breaches of
marital promise. G.S. Frost, Promises broken: courtship, class and gender in Victorian England (1995).
6 Promises broken, p.9; A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and companionship: conflict in nineteenthcentury married life (1992), p.101.
7 J. Schneid Lewis, In the family way: childbearing in the British aristocracy 1760-1860 (New Brunswick,
1986), p.19. Barbara Caine also offers a nuanced view, arguing that the reception of the romantic ideal
varied from marriage to marriage. B. Caine, Destined to be wives: the sisters of Beatrice Webb (Oxford,
1986), p.92.
8 L. Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800 (1979), p.217.
9 Peterson argues that less well-off women were not as likely to experience companionate marriage,
Family, love and work, p.84; while Frost suggests that companionship in marriage was not new among
the lower classes. Promises broken, p.63; Jane Lewis, however, suggests that was only in the late
nineteenth century that the angel in the house ideal was superseded by companionate marriage. J.
Lewis, Women in England 1870-1950: sexual divisions and social change (Sussex, 1984), p.77.
Hammerton argues that patriarchal and companionate marriages existed side by side, and that “each
ideal embodied elements of the other”. Cruelty and companionship, p.169. Also see Destined to be
wives, p.92.
10 Jeanne Peterson believes that family size declined partly because of the use of contraception,
Family, love and work, p.64. Michael Anderson argues that there is no substantial evidence to suggest
this before the midnineteenth-century, M. Anderson, ‘The social implications of demographic change’, in
F.M.L. Thompson ed., The Cambridge social history of Britain: people and their environment
(Cambridge, 1990), vol.2, p.42. Carole Dyhouse shows that 1890s feminists promoted the restriction of
the family through continence in marriage. C. Dyhouse, eminism and the family in England 1880-1939
(Oxford, 1989), p.170. Most recently, based on a new reading of population data, Simon Szreter has
argued for a culture of abstinence from 1870 onwards. S. Szreter, Fertility, class
and gender in Britain 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), passim.
BORDERS OF DISTINCTION:
WALLPAPERS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY TASMANIA
Dianne Lawrence, Lancaster University
In recent years there has been a deal of investigation - across a range of
disciplines – of how the subject reconstitutes itself in the face of the rupture of
migration. One area where valuable work has been done is on the importance
of the home in the process of re-settlement, and how it assumes heightened
importance both as a sanctuary from the new and often challenging alien
terrain, and as a site from and through which the migrant achieves literal and
psychological occupation of their new space.
The homes examined here were in Tasmania, colony of the British Empire,
during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Key space within the home
was the living-room, on which was lavished the most anxious care and
attention, for on the basis of its appointment the household would make clear
statements to their neighbours and peers regarding the standards they set
and the position they intended to occupy, or at least aspire to on the social
ladder.
To contemporaries all elements of the room had separate as well as
cumulative meaning. This paper focuses on one particular aspect of the
creation of the room, that of wallpapers. With the aid of contemporary and
modern photographs it is shown that in addition to various practical
advantages and aesthetic benefits, wall-coverings had complex cultural
meanings which carried far beyond their decorative value. It is apparent that
the wallpapers also conveyed ideas and were in themselves a form of
knowledge. By setting this aspect of domestic practice alongside broader
political events taking place in Australia at the close of the century it is
possible to isolate and identify ways in which wallpapers can be said to have
had political agency. Europeans were not of course the only peoples who had
migrated to Australia, and tensions between the various groups were a
recurrent feature of colonisation. In the case study approach adopted here
wallpapers emerge as material indicators of an area of conflict which
developed between the homes of European settlers and wider society. This in
turn serves to remind us that items of material culture are always situated
within a broad field, their use including factors which at first glance may seem
to be outside the arena of interest. Examination of the full field certainly
highlights the power and influence of domestic material culture but also
reveals that whilst home may have been a sanctuary it was also the nurturing
ground for attitudes a deal less cosy.
Further reading
S. Ardener (ed.) (1981) Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (London:
Croom Helm)
S. Forge and P. Murphy (1995) Wallpaper in Australia, 1870-1940 (Sydney: Historic
Houses Trust)
T. Lane and J. Searle (1990) Australians at Home: A Documentary History of
Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788-1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press)
J. M. Mackenzie (1995) Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester:
Manchester University Press)
C. Woods, (ed.). The Wallpaper History Review [triennial journal, Wallpaper History
Society]
SHINE, POLISH, CLASS, TASTE – SURFACE AESTHETICS IN THE
MATERIAL MAINTENANCE OF THE HOME
Victoria Kelley, University for the Creative Arts, Rochester
This paper will focus on the material interactions between people and objects
in middle and working class homes of the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-centuries. It will examine how furniture, furnishings and other
household objects were dirtied and worn with time and use: this wear could be
postponed and reversed by practices of maintenance and cleanliness,
practices that were played out across the physical surfaces of objects, and
through the contested ideologies of class and gender. Kelley argues that a
consideration of surface effects and surface processes is crucial for our
understanding of the materiality of home, and will suggest the ways in which
social and economic pressures shaped contrasting surface aesthetics in
middle and working-class homes.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE PRIVATE GARDEN TO 20TH-CENTURY
DOMESTIC LIFE
Barbara Simms, independent garden historian
From the sixteenth-century eulogy of the garden writer Thomas Hill for an
‘odiferous garden plat’ (1) and poet Abraham Cowley’s delight in the following
century to be ‘master at last of a small house and a large garden’, (2)
literature, letters, diaries and paintings have provided evidence of the
Englishman’s pleasure in garden ownership. Excluding the primarily functional
purpose of the garden in providing vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers for
household consumption, it is not always easy to identify the underlying
motivation for a garden’s creation and its impact on daily life. The private
gardens of royalty and the nobility were often laid out as status symbols or as
statements of political allegiance and power, while other owners wanted a
place to grow and display new plant introductions. Such gardens have
provided a rich seam of study for garden historians, although the smaller
gardens of yeomen and city dwellers of the period have not been ignored. (3)
Similarly, the results of studies of the smaller, nineteenth-century gardens of
the nouveau riche and the increasing number of ‘workers’ able to afford
‘suburban villas … Tight boxes, neatly sash’d’ (4) have also proposed links to
perceived quality of life and social aspirations. The inwardlooking suburban
house and garden, screened from its neighbours by tall hedges paralleled the
strict moral code and sanctity of the home embraced by many middle-class
families desperate to escape the poverty, disease and moral decline of the
inner city. In contrast to the many studies of the multi-faceted Victorian and
Edwardian gardens, gardens of the interwar and postwar
decades of the twentieth century have received scant attention as similar
social, cultural or political indicators.
From the early decades of the twentieth century, ‘modernist’ thinking
espoused the belief that designers should be inspired by the age in which
they lived - following the Zeitgeist rather than being constrained by the past. A
new understanding of spatial organisation, and the use of materials such as
reinforced concrete, steel and glass in building, provided the opportunity to
design homes with unlimited, freely flowing, space allowed increasing contact
between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. (5) The concepts of garden layout and
features ‘designed for use’, (6) ‘gardens for people’ (7) and the ‘outdoor room’
were key to design in the post-war era. As expressed by landscape architect
Sylvia Crowe: ‘in some modern houses the garden forms an outdoor room
which is almost one with the glass-fronted living room, itself so lavishly set
with plants that it is hard to see where the house ends and the garden
begins’.(8) The outside room and the new lifestyle it embraced was just one
facet of the mood of optimism after the austerity of war – new towns, new
houses, daring fashions and music – a lifestyle revolution for a generation
determined to look forward rather than back. By the beginning of the 1970s,
stimulated by television gardening programmes, DIY books, show gardens,
easy access to garden centres (new in the 1960s), increased leisure time and
disposable income, and affordable package holidays, an increasing number of
people had acquired a taste for Mediterranean-style open-air living. By a
study of the writings of contemporary theorists and designers, popular
literature and culture, this paper reviews sources that provide an insight into
the meaning of gardens in modern domestic life and how
studies in garden history can contribute to our knowledge of the twentiethcentury home.
Notes
1 Thomas Hill, The Gardener’s Labyrinth [1590], ed. Richard Mabey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), p. 90.
2 Abraham Cowley, The Garden (1666).
3 See, for example, Judith Roberts, ‘The gardens of the gentry in the late Tudor period’, Garden History
27/1 (Summer 1999), pp. 88-108; and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden 1700-1840
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
4 William Cowper, ‘Retirement’, reproduced in The Poems of William Cowper (New York: C. Wells,
1835), p. 156.
5 See Le Corbusier, ‘Five Points of the New Architecture’ (1926); and Jan Woudsta, ‘The Corbusian
Landscape; Arcadia or No Man’s Land’, Garden History 28/1 (Summer 2000), pp. 135-151.
6 See Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: The Architectural Press,
1938), p. 67
7 See Thomas Church, Gardens are for a People (New York: Reingold, 1955); and Marc Treib (ed),
Thomas Church Landscape Architect. Designing a Modern California Landscape (San Francisco:
William Stout Publishers, 2003).
8 Sylvia Crowe, Garden Design [1958], Third edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Garden Art Press, 1994), pp.
200, 212.
Further reading
John Brookes (1969) Room Outside. A New Approach to Garden Design (London:
Thames & Hudson)
Thomas Church (1955) Gardens are for a People (New York: Reingold)
Geoffrey Collens and Wendy Powell (1999) Sylvia Crowe (London: Landscape
Design Trust)
Sylvia Crowe (1994) Garden Design (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Garden Art Press), [Third
edition, first published 1958.]
Annabel Downs (ed) (2004) Peter Shepheard (London: Landscape Design Trust)
Sheila Harvey (ed) (1998) Geoffrey Jellicoe (London: Landscape Design Trust)
Lady Allen of Hurtwood and Susan Jellicoe (1953) The Things We See 7: Gardens
(Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books Ltd.)
Susan and Geoffrey Jellicoe (1968) Modern Private Gardens (London: AbelardSchumann Ltd.)
Peter Shepheard (1953) Modern Gardens (London: The Architectural Press)
Barbara Simms (2005), ‘Rooms Outside: 1960s London Gardens by John Brookes’,
The London Gardener 10, pp. 79-88
Barbara Simms (ed) (2006) Eric Lyons and Span (London, RIBA Publishing)
Marc Treib (ed) (2003) Thomas Church Landscape Architect. Designing a Modern
California Landscape (San Francisco: William Stout Publishers)
Christopher Tunnard (1938) Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: The
Architectural Press)
DIASPORIC MEMORY-HISTORY: EXPLORING MOBILE HERITAGE IN
THE HOMELY MUSEUM
Dr. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Durham University
In this paper I examine the material and mobile, racialised South-Asian postcolonial identity, within Britain. The sites of diasporic homes are places where
there is constituted a truly post-national space of living, feeling, being and
belonging. Here I explore post-national attachment to citizenship, nature and
landscape through objects in the home. By examining their power in
sustaining a sense of belonging and citizenship, a methodology of materials
and their artefactual nature emerges. One aspect of exploration seeks to
unravel the ways in which cosmopolitanism is a lived phenomenon for postcolonial, migrant communities living in Britain. Mobility and fluidity
characterise the nature of memory-objects in the home, situated here as
artefacts of cosmopolitan living. Objects become collaged into a museum-like
space, which orchestrates a narrative of heritage and history. These material
objects both refigure ‘diasporic’ registers of material, sensual, affective and
visual, and challenge traditional definitions of cosmopolitan communities.
THE HOME AS PROCESS: EXPLORING BIOGRAPHIES OF STYLE
Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna
In 1943, the Mass Observation social research archive published ‘People’s
Homes’, a groundbreaking study of Britons and their housing aspirations from
the positioning of
lavatories to the arrangement of parlour furnishings. Most significantly, in
preparation
for Post-War rebuilding policies, the survey explored the respondents’
fantasies for ‘dream homes of the future’ eliciting ideals for everything from
built-in storage through to modern stylistic preferences.
What insights might a similar survey of the contemporary home interior in the
early 21st century offer? What is the relation of fantasy to the construction of
the Domestic interior and the fluidity of styles and designs that has come to
define much
of contemporary home consumption? How have contemporary biographies
become integrally tied to housing and interior histories? What are the
implications of the shift in the materiality of the contemporary interior from the
durable to the transient?
Looking at specific examples of contemporary British homes, this paper
focuses on the ways in which homes present, absent, imagined and
remembered are brought together through life-long aesthetic schemes in
which style is inseparable from broader constructs of kinship and memory.
Building on a growing body of academic literature critiquing the notion of the
home as static, stabilising and a visually constructed entity, this paper
explores, through ethnographic and Mass Observation survey examples, how
the domestic interior has become the key process in the making of modern
subjectivities and social relations in the 21st century.
Further reading
Daniel Miller (ed.) (2001) Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors
(Oxford, New York: Berg)
Nicky Gregson (2007) Living with Things: Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling
(Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing)
Colin Painter (ed.) (2002) Contemporary Art in the Home (Oxford, New York: Berg)
Nicolette Makovicky (2007) ‘Closet and Clutter; Clutter as Cosmology’, Home
Cultures 4 (3), pp287-309
Trevor Keeble et al. (eds.) (2009) Designing the Modern Interior (Oxford, New York:
Berg)