From a design point of view, the 1920s and 1930s semi was the combination of the earlier terrace plan on to which certain aspects of the Unwin ideas for the urban cottage had been grafted. The end result was a house built as cheaply as possible with the labour available, and using whatever bricks and mass-produced standard items of joinery were available at the time of construction. The speculative builder used whatever labour was available at the time, most of which was unskilled. The houses built used an eclectic selection of applied constructional finishes, which were easy to built and which could easily be varied to suit. For example, George Wimpey (Homes) provided up to 26 interchangeable elevations for each standard house plan.These happened to produce homes of a broadly neo-vernacular style, with bays and half-timbering to gables, pebble-dashing and rough rendering of external walls, all of which the builder blatantly used to disguise poor quality brickwork. The wide range of external finishes also served to distinguish the speculative house from the council house, which tended to use a much smaller range of integral elevational finishes, such as fair-faced brickwork. The standards of supervision were probably lower in the speculative house, and the use of piece-work and fixed-price work much more common than in the municipal house, this led to a different product; the house built by the speculative builder looked very different from the ones on the municipal estates. Although they did not make very much of an impact, the bungalow and the flat played a limited part in providing accommodation for the working classes.
As the speculative houses went up, abuse was heaped upon them because of their bogus architectural styles and the despoliation of the countryside that suburban spread entailed. One voice that was rarely heard in the debate was that of the people who chose to buy the houses. A typical contemporary view, expressed by the architect and historian George Trevelyan, was that ‘the people in these places are all alike’ (4). However, it is clear that the unspoken popularity of the houses meant that they expressed the tastes and aspirations of the new home-makers rather than the contemporary architects. The new home owners would have seen Trevelyan’s view as harsh and condescending. The home-buyers liked semi-detached houses and that was what the developers built. It was not just that the developer was hide-bound, or that the occupiers ‘thought they’ve got to live somewhere and living in these thousand villas is as good as living in a thousand villas elsewhere’. A thousand typical villa dwellers ‘were happy to walk up a thousand garden paths of the same length and breath and open the same front doors… they could live in the same back room all week and move into the same front room for Sunday’ (5).
Not only was the semi-detached the most popular form of construction, it epitomised the character and tone of the housing developments being built in the 1930s. It was a self-identifying item. When built in numbers on an estate, the semi clearly distinguished itself from other types of houses built in the early part of the twentieth century. For what the private builder and ‘ most local authorities desired above all was the ‘semi’; it was the ‘semi’ which fulfilled most popular aspirations’ (6). This was notwithstanding the claims made by Raymond Unwin in the Ministry of Health journal Housing that it was virtually impossible to achieve a good visual effect with semi-detached houses (7). Similarity Patrick Abercrombie, the author of the post-war Greater London Plan, expressed the view that ‘the semi-detached villa, perhaps the least satisfactory building unit in the world’. The Study Group on site planning and layout within the Dudley Committee heard evidence from the London County Council’s planning department that ‘The solution lies very largely in designing with terraces and squares’. The speculative builder ignored the educated views and built what the customers wished to buy.
(4) G. Trevelan,On Garden Cities,in R. Carr, Red Rags, Essays of Hate from Oxford,(Oxford, 1933), p. 12.
(5) From a letter to the Illustrated Carpenter and Builder on 21 February 1936 from Eugene Reid, an architect who was critical of the suburban house.
(6) M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: The Political and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London, 1981), p.144.
(7) Housing, vol II, (30 August 1920), pp. 42-43.