Taste

A cultural history of the home interior

Drew Plunkett

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859469255
• eBook ISBN: 9781000033656
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Democratic in intention and approach, the book will argue that the home interior, as independently created by the 'amateur' householder, offers a continuous informal critique of shifting architectural styles (most notably with the advent of Modernism) and the design mainstream. Indeed, it will suggest that the popular increasingly exerts an influence on the professional. Underpinned by academic rigour, but not in thrall to it, above all this book is an engaging attempt to identify the cultural drivers of aesthetic change in the home, extrapolating the wider influence of 'taste' to a broad audience – both professional and 'trade'. In so doing, it will explore enthralling territory – money, class, power and influence. Illustrated with contemporary drawings and cartoons as well as photos, the book will not only be an absorbing read, but an enticing and attractive object in itself.

CHAPTER 1
New Money, Old Ideas

‘In the 19^th century taste was a weapon in the war between the new mercantile middle and the old gentry.’

Simon Heffer, High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain, 2013¹

The late 18^th century had a taste for revolution. The American Revolutionary War set the stage for the French Revolution which, in turn, inspired a century and more of unrest across Europe. Less violent but every bit as seismic and systemic was Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which changed the country’s economic and social templates and gave the rest of the world a model for a post-agrarian society.

In the early 19^th century Britain ruled the waves and its collection of colonies and trading quangos provided the raw materials and the markets that underpinned its economic and political pre-eminence. That supremacy would not be challenged until the modest coastal strip, wrested from it by tax-phobic colonial rebels, grew to become the United States of America and to dominate the 20^th century.

The French Revolution worried Britain’s ruling classes. A few idealists, like William Wordsworth, pursued the chimera of liberty, equality and fraternity and visited the new French utopia, only to retreat before the brutalities of the revolutionaries’ reign of terror. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched the revolutionary rump, established the First Empire and, having awarded himself the title of Emperor, embarked, with his grand armée on his grand projet, on the conquest of Europe. Britain dispatched Wellington and Nelson to deal with him and their victories encouraged her presumption that she ruled the world.

France’s revolution had been partly precipitated by taxes levied on the peasantry but in Britain the relative prosperity of those deserting the uncertainties of agricultural labour for the meagre but reliable subsistence of factory work diffused the likelihood of rebellion. The last of Britain’s Hanoverian monarchs, ‘mad’ George III and the foppish Prince Regent (later George IV), were considered too absurd to be worth the trouble of hanging.

As more immediate Georgian heirs died without legitimate issue in 1837 the 18-year-old Princess Victoria ascended to the throne. Her youth and gender perhaps suggested a new beginning and her overt piety and enthusiasm for domestic bliss matched a change in the national mood. Her name came to embody the mores that defined the 19^th century in Britain and, perhaps curiously given its blossoming republicanism, in the United States. With the virtues of hindsight, the period is castigated as a time when the poor were mercilessly exploited but Simon Heffer offers a more nuanced perception: Although poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and injustice were far from eliminated, they were beaten back more in those 40 years or so years [1840–1880] than at any time in the previous history of Britain, a nation that might have been overwhelmed by industrial change, rapid expansion and social upheaval instead saw the challenges of modernism and embraced them.² While Britain’s creative entrepreneurs – like Isambard Kingdom Brunel who built railways and ships, bridges and tunnels and Joseph Bazalgette who designed and built the sewage system that rescued London from its own effluent – set about shaping the country’s future, her architects and artists were more inclined to shy away from unedifying modernity and to take refuge in the principles and practices of an idealised Middle Ages.

The Georgian Neo-Classicism of the late 18^th century was beginning to look a little too continental for the island race. France was happy to find architectural inspiration in the pagan models of Classical Greece and Rome but Britain turned to something Christian that might, just, be considered indigenous. Gothic architecture might have originated in 12^th-century France but England, in its Late Medieval churches and cathedrals, had evolved its own structurally and decoratively complex Gothic traditions which could and would be adapted to serve a diversity of secular functions that were exclusively of the 19^th century.

The ascension of the new queen encouraged an extraordinary enthusiasm for religious debate and practice. It was generally assumed that the success of the country, and its empire, was built on Christian values. In his painting The Secret of England’s Greatness, Thomas Jones Barker depicted Victoria handing a bible – the handbook for virtuous and civilised behaviour and the prosperity that would follow it – to a kneeling African. Anglicanism remained the state religion but in its internal doctrinal disputes a significant faction of its adherents veered towards more austere personal conduct while paradoxically advocating the more flamboyant ceremonial trappings that were closer to Roman Catholic practices. The Church of England acted as the arbiter of national mores but its primacy was challenged. As industry brought wealth and comparative prosperity to the provincial strongholds of non-conformity, a more proscriptive morality asserted itself, every bit as austere in matters of personal conduct but with a decidedly Protestant suspicion of ceremony. While bishops debated the origins of humankind with Darwin and his acolytes, itinerant evange-lists were drawing enormous and excited audiences across the country to rallies that were catalysts for the conversion of huge swathes of the population to a benign fundamentalism. Charismatic preachers expounded the finer points of doctrine, but they were also non-violent revolutionaries who condemned social injustices.

Churches were the nuclei of social life. Governments, anxious about revolution amongst workers crammed into brutal factories and foul slums, financed the building and refurbishment of 2859 Anglican churches between 1841 and 1870 to strengthen the restraining hand of religion. Not attending church risked social exclusion at higher social levels and the chances of employment at the lowest. It could be a vicious circle: in his London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew cited a slum-dwelling labourer who said ‘my wife and children can go to chapel at certain times, when work is pretty good and our things are not in pawn’.³

Piety needed displays of decency and, for everyone other than the very poor, home furnishings represented tangible evidence of decency. In Turning Houses Into Homes Clive Edwards wrote: ‘The home is both an idea and a reality … a symbolic environment representing one’s identity through the things therein.^’4 If Christian doctrine is lukewarm about ostentation, even of hard work (‘… consider the lilies of the fields; how they grow; they toil not …’⁵) its followers were increasingly inclined to see conspicuous consumption as proof of piety and propriety. Sudden wealth, however modest, and the extravaganza of factory-produced ornaments that might crowd the mantelpieces and whatnots of homes great and small was too much for all but the stoutest spirits. The perfectly human instinct for virtuous prettification was too strong for all but the most abstemious anchorites.

Edwards also suggested that ‘as people moved from cottage industries to working in factories and offices, their homes became places of rest and recreation…’⁶ but he considers it ironic that it was the brutalities of manufacturing and commerce that provided the glut of objects that the Victorian householder found irresistible. The home he said was a place where an individual or a family could, through their interiors and their contents, make public expressions of their identity, expressions that also served to ‘remind the owners of themselves and their position’.⁷ The furniture designer and maker Thomas Sheraton however advised upholsterers to discourage customers from aiming above their station, because to try too hard or to fall too short would bring ridicule.⁸ The exercise of taste is a delicate matter.

The architectural historian Mark Girouard saw the accumulation of ornaments as a national psychosis because there was more money in more pockets – the surfeit was being spent on what were, strictly speaking, non-essentials. However, the appetite for ornament might suggest that, when shelter and food are secured, ornament becomes a necessity and the relentless churning out of inexpensive, mass-produced decorative objects puts temptation in householders’ way. He concluded that ‘collecting something or other became a nineteenth century craze, not just one confined to the dilettanti.’⁹ The nature of objects accumulated was presumed to confirm that one was serious about one’s taste: the more one accumulated, in emulation of the myriad monkeys who might type a Shakespearean phrase or two, the more likely one was by default to offer some evidence of deserving one’s place in the social order.

Change of ownership

With industrial progress and an expanding Empire during the 19^th century there was a partial but still distinct shift of power and influence from the upper classes to the middle classes.

The old rich, the aristocracy, were put out by the entrepreneurial middle class who bought the houses and land they could no longer afford. The gentry absorbed the flourishes of manners and the grace notes of taste with their wet nurses’ milk instinctively and they weaponised those enigmas against the upstarts who could never quite convince – even themselves – that they had mastered the finer points of social interaction. The arrivistes could send their sons to the best schools and on to university but they ‘did so with imperfect manners and taste’.¹⁰ The crudely benevolent, essentially feudal, interdependence of landowners and their workers limped on for another century but industrialists and their managers were less inclined to sense a symbiotic connection with the lumpen masses who were too many, too anonymous and little more than functionaries of the machines they attended.

As inhabitants of country, village and small town followed the opportunities offered in the manufacturing and trading cities to become wealthy, well-off or modestly prosperous they installed themselves in terraced houses, of varying degrees of grandeur, offered by the speculative builders who were subsuming the fields and villages that surrounded ancient civic cores. An example was the Pimlico area on the periphery of central London where market gardens that had served the Georgian city were developed for housing by the Cubitt Brothers. The Cubitts were responsible for a number of major bouts of housebuilding across early 19^th-century London.

The increasingly popular but complex Neo-Gothic detail was inevitably more expensive

The stuccoed terraces and streets of Pimlico in 1973.

to build than flat Georgian facades and geometric decorative motifs. The speculators who were providing dwellings for the representatives of every social strata congregating in the centres of towns and cities continued to favour exteriors that were decidedly more Georgian, and therefore cheaper to build, over Neo-Gothic. If exteriors, grand and not so grand, remained expediently Georgian, the interiors, despite a light dusting of what were essentially Classical mouldings, offered householders empty spaces in which to indulge their penchants for Gothic furniture and fittings. Appetites for ornament might be satisfied in interiors where the economics of mass production made intricately worked Gothic artefacts affordable.

In 2008 Clive Aslet, an architectural writer and broadcaster, described his own terraced house in Pimlico built in 1851: The front door opens into a narrow hallway, from the side of the hallway rises the staircase; there are two rooms to each floor, a precipitous (open) area (at basement level) and an umbrageous yard at the back. Each house front along Tachbrook Street is about the same as the next. But not quite … The interiors are broadly similar but not identical; quirky details make each house slightly different from its neighbour. This is how the English like their houses: individuality keeps bubbling to the surface.¹¹ Despite that paean to independent thinking, Aslet conceded: ‘Our house belongs to a standard London type.’¹² And it does but it is little different from the medium-sized spec-built houses that were appearing in flourishing cities and towns throughout the country.

Detailing might have been ‘quirky’ but not too quirky – much housing remained Georgian in essence. Developers offered minor variations on a base template that would speak to and tweak the aspirations of buyers. The furnishings and fittings with which householders itched to pack their empty rooms would be distinctly similar to those of their neigh-bours. Even if they were itching to express risky individuality, choice was limited. Retailers determined what artefacts were available and were as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1: New Money, Old Ideas
• 2: Disapproving Dilletantes
• 3: New Century, New Style
• 4: The People Decorate
• 5: Post-War Populism
• 6: 1951 and All That
• 7: The Empire Strikes Back
• 8: Carrying on Regardless
• 9: Back to the Future
• 10: Having it and Having it More Abundantly
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Image Credits