The history of the fitted kitchen
This week, I go a bit Trad Wife
I’m thinking of making some improvements to my kitchen.
To be honest, this has now been the case for more than a year.
People keep saying, ‘surely, Lucy, those kitchen improvements you’ve talking about are finished?’
Oh dear, no. They haven’t even started. My fridge always has a mysterious lagoon of water in it. The cupboards are all black and smeary. The dishwasher’s defunct, and I have to wash up in a doll’s house sized tiny sink.
My fantasy is … a new fitted kitchen!
Like a good 1950s housewife.
It’s always been amazing to me that for most of British history, technology in the kitchen and home lagged way behind technology in industry, or warfare.
That’s what happens when domestic labour is cheap and feminised, as for centuries it was.
(Or should that read ‘is’? Discuss!)
It was really only after World War Two that kitchens took on a recognisably modern form.
There was lots to celebrate in the 1950s: rationing finally came to an end. Marriage rates were at their highest ever. The ‘Festival of Britain’ set a new tone of optimism. No wonder, upon the accession of a new and radiant young queen, people talked about a second Elizabethan Age.
But not everything was great: some foods were still in short supply, and the post-War housing shortage remained. There was a new and rebellious group in society: the teenager, complete with moody irresponsibility. And the return of the men from the war to the workplace meant that many women lost their jobs.
These women were expected instead to devote themselves to their homes. The middle class housewife, though, could no longer reply upon the cheap human help that her mother might just have been about still able to employ in the 1930s. The two World Wars had removed the huge infrastructure of servants who’d cooked and cleaned for the Victorians.
Lady Beveridge noted that not only were new houses desperately short in supply, but that existing homes had been ‘all too frequently designed for a social system which is a thing of the past’.
What the happy 1950s housewife needed instead was a rational, efficient, time-saving, fitted kitchen.
‘The kitchen of today’, wrote Picture Post in 1953, ‘is light, airy and highly equipped. Its separate components are carefully planned to make a complete working unit. It is gracious, comfortable and efficient. Or it should be!’
The modern and hygienic fitted kitchen was in fact a pre-War German invention, inspired by the narrow galley kitchens of railway trains. The so-called ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’ had work surfaces which pulled out like drawers and draining boards on hinges which could be folded away. You can see one in the new V&A outpost in East London.
In her Frankfurt kitchen, the housewife was thought of as an engineer, efficiently turning out meals. She would tread out a ‘golden triangle’, carefully calibrated to minimise the distance between cooker, sink and table.
One of the early home-grown British fitted kitchen designs was ‘The English Rose’ of 1948, intended to use up the aluminium which had been stockpiled for building Spitfires. You simply chose your whole kitchen from the standard range of units and cupboards. The work surfaces would be covered with coloured, wipe-clean melamine. After the dingy war years, it would look striking clean and bright.
Electricity was nationalised in 1947, and the post-War relaxation of the hire-purchase rules made gadgets and appliances suddenly became much more obtainable. ‘Choosing your cooking stove’, the housewife was advised, ‘is a momentous event second only to choosing your life partner’. By the mid-1960s, 61% of London households would have a refrigerator. No longer did people have to go to the shops every single day.
‘La dolce vita did not come packed with the detergent inside the new washing machine’, wrote Marilyn French in her classic feminist novel The Women’s Room of 1978, ‘but for women especially, the new washing machine or dryer or freezer really was a little release from slavery’.
The imaginary 1950s housewife of our clichéd imagination, sipping a mind-numbing afternoon martini while baking a cake for her absent husband, may not appeared to be especially liberated to us today.
But in this optimistic decade, her very kitchen appliances were going to give her the free time to think about demanding something more from life.
In one of the circles that history sometimes makes, I realise that in my case, the ‘something more’ I want from my own life is a new kitchen.
I’m curious about what you might remember about the kitchens of your childhoods. Do you recall your family getting anything exciting and new for the kitchen, ideally something weird that time has now forgotten?!
Perhaps you’d like to read more here at MY LIFE IN THE PAST about the curious history of the fork, or else if you’re a paid member, you can watch the discussion I had with BBC Radio Four’s Dr Annie Gray about the history of food.
We got a diswasher on roller that could hook on the sink. What a wonder. But my mother washed the dishes before she put them in the dishwasher.
I remember in the 60's mainly kitchen cabinets - not attached to the wall. The kitchen drop leaf table which 5 of us used to squash around. The twin tub washer which made life so much easier especially because it spun the clothes and no longer need the use of a mangle.
I loved tipping the egg timer upside down. Jelly molds were rather fun. To have an electric mixer was fantastically much easier to make cakes, or Angel delight or jelly whip (made with condensed milk).