The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-Occupation in Britain between the Wars

Abstract

he growth of owner-occupation is widely regarded as one of the most T important social changes to have taken place in twentieth-century Britain.From a position of relatively minor importance in the nineteenth century, it seems, owner-occupation has increased in scale progressively until it now accounts for over 60 per cent of the dwellings in England and Wales.* Yet while the importance of the phenomenon is undisputed, its precise dimensions and nature remain unclear. Particularly is this the case for the period between the two world wars, when owner-occupation experienced its most rapid phase of growth. What exactly was the level of owner-occupation prior to the First World War? Who were the owner-occupiers and where were they found? What was the level of owner-occupation on the eve of World War II? Was its geographical and social distribution similar to what it had been in 1914, or had it changed? To these questions there is currently no reliable answer in the literature.Lack of information on this score, however, has not prevented speculation as to the significance of the phenomenon. Both the causes and the consequences of the growth of the tenure have been debated freely, both at the time by those involved, such as building society leaders and politicians, and in retrospect by historians and economists seeking to relate it to other social and economic developments. Perhaps because so little has been known about its precise dimensions, the tendency has been to treat the growth of owneroccupation throughout the twentieth century as a single phenomenon for which one single explanation should be adduced. Thus, while the advocates of owner-occupation sometimes interpreted the growth of owner-occupation as evidence of the increasing virtue of the population, its critics, mutatis mutandis, have seen the growth of the tenure as proof of nothing less than a counter-revolutionary conspiracy, a "Tory drive towards a property-owning democracy . . . to maintain the cohesion of the social f~r m a t i o n " .~

The British Sense of Class

“…It is these 'deferent practices' that Runciman suggests 'cease[d] to be functional for either side' in the years after 1914 (154-5, also xv, 206-7). Here Runciman is concerned primarily with class as social behaviour; for him vernacular understandings of 'class' are about 'differences in the way English people can be seen to behave towards each other on account of life-style, education, inherited rank and conventionally defined prestige' (25). For Cannadine, in contrast, what matters are the competing representations (models) of the social world that are assumed to inform both social perception and social behaviour.…”

“…Nor was the new construction 'class as culture' much affected by the fact that some of those choosing to move out to live in 'suburbia' were manual workers in good, secure jobs. It seems likely that home-ownership among manual workers doubled between the wars (to about 19 per cent), 25 and that in prosperous southern cities, such as Bristol, at least 40 per cent of manual families were owner-occupiers by the late 1930s. 26 In turn, both government policy-makers and the New Survey of London Life and Labour continued to assume that 'artisans and the lower middle class' occupied the same types of houses, whether owned or rented.…”

The Poor and the Poorest, 50 years on: Evidence from British Household Expenditure Surveys of the 1950s and 1960s

“…According to Scott (), Table 2, page 104, citing a Ministry of Labour and National Service survey, on average just under 19% of working‐class households were buying their own homes in 1937–1938, but this average concealed wide differences by income (expenditure) group. Across all classes, the extent of owner‐occupation was about 35% in 1938 (Swenarton and Taylor (), page 377) and had increased to 50% by 1971. The increase in post‐war social housing provision after the Second World War may have also enabled older households to remain independent, especially after the death of a spouse, though under these circumstances these single‐person households are likely to have been poor by the Abel‐Smith and Townsend definition.…”

The Suburban Worker in the History of Labor

“…As a result suburbs are not just districts with low residential densities that lie at or close to the urban fringe-the way that they are usually defined almost everywhere-but are places with distinct political identities. 28 After World War One, local councils embarked on an ambitious and cumulatively significant program of house building. For decades, developers were able to write clauses into deeds that prohibited home buyers from later selling to specified ethnic minorities.…”