Housing

There is a well-known adage that an Englishman’s home is his castle. The autobiographers needed housing, protection and shelter from the outside world, a place to rest and recuperate, socialise and be with family or friends. The history of housing in Britain has in of itself only comparatively recently received academic attention, with most of the scholarship focusing on the physical quality of housing. This is perhaps unsurprising as the consensus appears to be that up until the twentieth century, the vast majority of people lived in unsuitable conditions. However, the importance of the physical home as the centre of the family and domesticity has tended to be overlooked in such academic literature. The one hundred autobiographies studied here, therefore, offer a different insight; they were unconcerned with the development of housing styles over the century and instead discuss the items that furnished their homes, the ease at which they moved and the continued prevalence of renting accommodation rather than home ownership throughout the first half of the twentieth century.