The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars

This title is a social, economic, and business history of the rise of modern suburbia during the 1920s and 1930s, when over four million new (and mainly suburban semi-detached) houses were built in Britain and buying a house on mortgage became a realistic prospect for working-class families for the first time. It explores the impacts on (particularly working-class) family life, of migration from cramped inner-urban accommodation to new suburban council or owner-occupied estates. Using personal testimonies and autobiographies, the first generation of working-class suburban migrants tell their own stories about how their lives were transformed by this process. The Making of the Modern British Home also constitutes a general history of the development of interwar suburbia, including the housing development process, housing and estate design, marketing owner-occupation to a mass market, furnishing the new suburban home, making ends meet, suburban gardens, and social conflict on the new estates.