The New Normal: Seeking Household Experiences of Inter-war Public Housing

Summary

The 1920s and 1930s saw the renewal of large parts of Britain’s housing stock. In Birmingham, England, new housing projects were constructed in the suburbs, each home having three bedrooms, bathroom, indoor lavatory, garden, and local amenities – a contrast to the back-to-back housing in the centre of Birmingham that new suburban homes sought to replace. The back-to-backs were seen as crowded and insanitary, children sharing bedrooms with adults and non-family lodgers.

The form and fabric of new housing was a response to such sensitivities and designed for the nuclear family, but not all households conformed to this ideal. This paper looks at the strategies that households and the Birmingham City Corporation put in place to manage the gap between the expectation of life in new, modern housing projects, and the lived reality, and how these can be seen through adaptations made to homes and in oral history testimonies of residents.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Workers’ Housing   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 475