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    The 1960s Home
    The 1960s Home
    The 1960s Home
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    The 1960s Home

    By Paul Evans

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    The 1960s witnessed a sustained period of economic growth, consumer spending and stable employment. This hitherto unknown prosperity enabled a market growth in levels of owner occupation and a subsequent boom in the sale of household furnishings and luxury goods. The 1960s Home looks at the styles and fashions in domestic housing and interiors between 1960 and 1970. Although this period has received increasing attention in recent years, much of it has been concentrated on progressive and exclusive design rather than on the furniture and furnishing of the 'average' home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 20, 2011
    ISBN9780747811596
    The 1960s Home
    Author

    Paul Evans

    Paul S. Evans (PhD, University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto) is assistant professor of Old Testament at McMaster Divinity College.

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      Book preview

      The 1960s Home - Paul Evans

      INTRODUCTION

      OF ALL the post-war decades, the 1960s have continued to fascinate subsequent generations above all others. Its fashions are endlessly revisited, its music revived and restyled and its home styles copied. For many the 1960s are also seen as a particularly ‘British’ decade – that of the Beatles, the Mini and the mini skirt, Twiggy and the 1966 World Cup. Of course the Swinging London of Carnaby Street would have seemed hopelessly remote to the majority of the British public at the time – yet the outward confidence of Britain in the 1960s did indeed have a profound effect on British society as a whole.

      Although the British economy had failed to grow as spectacularly as that of some of its near neighbours during the late 1940s and 1950s, and the loss of Britain’s imperial assets and prestige was at times a painful process, the period between 1945 and 1973 nevertheless saw sustained economic growth without major recession. That the then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan could famously state with some justification in 1957, ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, was evidence that British consumers were finally free of the long legacy of wartime exigencies and shortages. Yet MacMillan’s famous statement contained also a warning of the threat that inflation posed during such a period of growth and increased consumption. Average wages between 1955 and 1960 rose by 34 per cent whilst the cost of many consumer items had, in real terms, fallen. Car ownership increased massively and the possession of a television or refrigerator – luxuries available to the privileged few in 1950 – had, by 1960, become the norm. The class divisions of British society, so marked in previous generations, had been greatly, although not entirely, eroded with the advent of universal state-funded education, and figures such as the Old Etonian MacMillan were increasingly seen as anachronisms, emblematic of pre-war institutional privilege. Increased social mobility and wealth encouraged far greater aspirations than previously, most markedly amongst young people, the ‘baby boomer’ generation born during and after the war.

      British design had been one of the great hopes for post-war reconstruction as economists and planners argued that exportable, high-quality goods of superior design would help the British economy overcome its yawning trade deficit. The Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946 and Festival of Britain of 1951 had sought to promote British design to overseas buyers, but, despite the quality of many British goods, by 1960 it was Scandinavia, Italy and the USA that led the world in design excellence, with the strong influence of Scandinavia becoming increasingly evident in British homes. The accepted conventions of most post-war design thinking were, however, to be consistently challenged through the 1960s. Fitness for purpose and honesty of materials were of course laudable aims and the general standard of manufactured goods for the home had never been higher, yet this was increasingly no longer enough to satisfy consumers – relatively wealthy by the standards of the 1940s and 1950s – for whom novelty and style were of equal importance to durability and functionality. This trend would become ever more apparent as the 1960s progressed. Above all other considerations though, it was the type and availability of housing that remained the paramount priority for most people.

      A late 1960s ‘country style’ kitchen. This would be a popular style for many years to come.

      DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE

      House in Buckinghamshire, Peter J. Aldington.

      SOCIAL HOUSING

      In 1960 the great majority of British housing stock had been built during the great housing booms of the late Victorian era and the inter-war period between 1918 and 1939. The Labour Government elected in 1945 had been faced with severe housing shortages

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