If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (45 page)

We’ll also experience the return of the shutter: it’s the best way of keeping heat out of a house. Along with a hotter climate, we’ll also experience water shortages. Many homes have been put onto meters already, but the daily water consumption per
person still runs in Britain today at an average of 160 litres. The government expects us to get down to eighty litres – the contents of just one deep bath – by the end of the decade, and that amount is to include toilet-flushing, cooking and cleaning, as well as washing the body. The simple earth or midden toilet has already been revived in the form of the ecologically sound composting loo. The reuse of ‘grey water’ (slightly dirty water) for jobs like flushing toilets will become standard, and water will become a much more valuable resource, just as it once was when you had to carry every drop into your house by hand. We’ll be growing as water-thrifty as the Victorians were with their average use of twenty litres a day.

There has already been a revival in the natural building materials of the past, breathable substances with low environmental footprints, like wood, wool insulation and lime mortar. In the last ten years, timber-framed houses have once again started to sprout up across Britain. We’ll likewise become more medieval in reusing, adapting and making additions to our houses. On an island short of space, it’s been calculated that we need to build 200,000 new homes each year to cope with population growth and family breakdown, and that’s not even taking possible net immigration into account. According to the Empty Homes Agency, there are currently 700,000 homes standing unused. One simple, indeed obvious, course of action would be to bring them up to date and get them back into occupation, just as people did in the past when resources were scarcer. Buildings today are seen almost as disposable and are not built to last. In the future much more importance will rightly be attached to the materials and energy invested in them.

Inside these new – or indeed old – homes, more time and effort will be spent on getting and keeping them clean. When antibiotics finally become ineffective, as seems likely in the next few decades, minor and indeed major illnesses could once again become things to be tolerated rather than avoided, and we won’t
be able to rely upon detergents to destroy dirt. Elbow grease will be more highly valued, the skills of growing and preparing food will have to be relearned, and old-fashioned housewifery like Mrs Panton’s will return to prominence. The Victorian cook was a terrific recycler and wasted nothing.

Today’s builders and town planners are also interested in the notion that people don’t just inhabit houses, they live in ‘places’. Tudor towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities, in which rich and poor live in close proximity. In their markets local, seasonal food was available, just as it is in the phenomenon of the farmer’s market today.

Many argue that the twentieth century’s council estates have had disastrous social consequences. People in poverty feel, and indeed actually grow, poorer if forced to live in a sink estate, while the middle classes flee to their own leafy ghettoes outside city centres. A successful ‘place’ mixes up the different groups in society, forcing them to mingle and to look out for each other. In this sense, a great mansion like Hardwick Hall was successful social housing: in it Bess of Hardwick lived within metres of the dozens of people under her care. It was a life of huge inequality, but people were part of a common endeavour.

This sounds conservative, but it’s radically so. Today we live lives of vastly varying levels of luxury without really being aware of the alternative experiences of those above and below us in terms of wealth. We’ve spent too long inside our own snug homes, looking smugly out through the window at the world. There’s a sense in which children are now prisoners of the home, kept indoors by distrustful parents. We don’t know enough about our neighbours, and the dwindling of the natural resources which have fuelled our way of life since the eighteenth century will force us to change and to share more fairly both the work and the reward.

But change should not be a frightening thing. Throughout
all the periods of history, people have thought their own age wildly novel, deeply violent and to be sinking into the utmost depravity; likely, in short, to herald the end of the world. It’s comforting to think that the world has not yet ended, and that the pleasures of home life are perennial:

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.

(Dr Johnson)

Acknowledgements

Although my name is on the cover of this book, I’ve written it as a mere dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. Not only must I acknowledge the historians who have gone before me, but also the researchers on the accompanying BBC TV series and the many experts I had the privilege of interviewing. As the work is based so much upon secondary sources, it seemed wiser to free the text of footnotes, yet it would be wrong to omit mentioning the works of other people upon which I have drawn. I wholeheartedly recommend the following books, of which full details are given in the bibliography below.

For medieval England, Ian Mortimer’s
The Time Traveller’s Guide
(2008) was incredibly handy; equally so for the Tudor period was Alison Weir’s
Henry VIII: King and Court
(2002). For early modern women’s lives in the seventeenth century, I relied heavily upon Laura Gowing’s
Common Bodies
(2003) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s
Good Wives
(1983). Lisa Picard’s various books on the early modern period were vital; Don Herzog’s
Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders
was revelatory for the eighteenth century, as was Amanda Vickery’s
Behind Closed Doors
; and Judith Flanders’s excellent
The Victorian House
was absolutely essential.

For servants across all periods, Jeremy Musson’s
Up and Down Stairs
(2009) is the place to go, and for the topics of beds, bathrooms and heating you need Lawrence Wright’s three books first published in the 1960s. Emily Cockayne’s
Hubbub
(2007) is full of enjoyably disgusting details on dirt, and Julie Peakman on sex is to be highly recommended (
Lascivious Bodies
, 2004).

For particular chapters, Amanda Carson Banks on
Birth Chairs, Midwives and Medicine
(1999) was just as useful as Valerie Fildes on
Wet Nursing
(1988). A. Roger Ekirch’s 2001 theory about sleep,
published in the
American Historical Review
, was entirely new to me. Keith Thomas’s 1994 essay on cleanliness was essential, as was Mark Blackwell’s 2004 article on tooth transplantation. David Eveleigh’s was the most reliable book on toilets (
Bogs, Baths and Basins
, 2002). Of the many books I consulted, Sarah Paston-Williams’s
The Art of Dining
(1993) was perhaps the most useful on food, and James Nicholls’s article ‘Drink, the British Disease?’ (2010) deserves special mention. Details were provided by all the other books in the bibliography as well.

I must also thank everyone who provided interviews for the book or films, or shared their expertise in other ways: Amanda Vickery, Adrian Tinniswood, Judith Flanders, Jane Pettigrew, David Adshead, Sally Dixon-Smith, Leila Mauro, Issidora Petrovich, Professor David Morgan, Alison Sim, Lesley Parker, Hannah Tiplady, Cathy Flower Bond, Victoria Bradley, Phil Banner, Dr Lesley Hall, Deirdre Murphy, Ray Tye, Ann Lawton, Joanna Marschner, Beryl Evans, Kris Gough, Jean Alden, Val Sambrook, Joanne and Kevin Massey, Angela Lee, Dominic Sandbrook, Andrew Barber, Andy Swain, Patricia Whittington Farrell, Sebastian Edwards, David Milne, Richard Hewlings, Peter Yorke, Sparkle Moore, Jasia Boelhouwer, Ivan Day, Peter Brears, Reena Suleman, Dr John Goodall, Maureen Dillon, Clive Aslet, Alex Jones, Charlotte Woodman, Janet Bradshaw, Mick Ricketts, Simon McCormack, Helen Bratt-Wyton, Tom Betteridge and Katherine Ibbett.

At Silver River, I’m ever so grateful to Daisy Goodwin, Deborah O’Conner, Sam Lawrence and Beccy Green in the office, and then to the
If Walls Could Talk
team itself: Caterina Turroni, Eleanor Scoones, James Greig, Harry Garne, Brendan Easton, Adam Toy, Huw Martin, Simon Mitchell, Adam Jackson, Fred Hart, James Cooper, and above all, Emma Hindley and Hugo MacGregor, series producer and director respectively. At the BBC, Martin Davidson and Cassian Harrison saw us through stalwartly from start to finish. At Faber, Julian Loose (my much-valued three-time editor), Anne Owen, Rebecca Pearson and all their colleagues have done me proud.

At home, my dearest Mark’s expertise as an architect helped make this book better. Finally, I dedicate my work to Ned Worsley. Not only did she bring me up to be interested in history and houses, but she also did the picture research. Thanks, Mum.

PICTURE CREDITS

In-text Illustrations

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