THE FIRST BOOK specifically dedicated to bungalow design was published in 1891 by the architect Robert Alexander Briggs. Entitled Bungalows and Country Residences, it featured the following definition:
A bungalow in England has come to mean neither the sun-proof squat house of India nor the rough log hut of colder regions. It is not necessarily a one-storied building, nor is it a country cottage. A bungalow essentially is a little ‘nook’ or ‘retreat’. A cottage is a little house in the country, but a bungalow is a little country house – a homely, cosy little place, with verandahs and balconies, and the plan so arranged as to ensure complete comfort with a feeling of rusticity and ease.
As conceived by the Victorians, a bungalow was a building concerned with relaxation and recreation. This ensured that the earliest residents were necessarily wealthy, but rapid social change opened up the health benefits and bohemian lifestyle associated with bungalows to a wider population. The late-nineteenth-century invention of the ‘weekend’ provided more free time; improved transport infrastructure made escape possible; and mass-production of materials, and even of entire structures, enabled bungalows to be built on a budget. By 1910 the word could be applied to dwellings quite different in appearance, but nonetheless united by their usage. During the inter-war building boom the weekend or holiday bungalow began to be superseded by the self-consciously labour-saving suburban bungalow. This book uncovers the bungalow’s early popularity both as a structure and as an idea.
The story begins on the Indian sub-continent with the Hindi and Mahratti term bangla, meaning ‘of or belonging to Bengal’. This was the basis for the words bangalla, bungelo and banggolo, in use by the seventeenth century to describe indigenous bamboo huts with mud walls, thatched roofs and verandahs, built upon raised platforms. When European traders began to settle in India, it was in this type of vernacular building that they lived. Adaption followed adoption and, as commercial interests gave way to increasing colonial control between 1770 and 1830, the Anglo-Indian bungalow emerged as a distinctive dwelling for European officials. Its prototype was clearly revealed in the similarity of design, not to mention its name, but the new purpose-built bungalow also came to be defined by a detached status within its own grounds or compound. After 1815 this type of dwelling was also erected in the newly created colonial ‘hill stations’ used as temporary refuges from the stifling summer heat. This less formal setting helped lend the bungalow an aura of freedom and relaxation that influenced its future transfer to Britain.
Until the mid-eighteenth century familiarity with the term ‘bunglo’ was restricted to the European community in India, but knowledge gradually filtered back to Britain. The artists Thomas and William Daniell painted influential views of Indian landscapes and antiquities during the 1780s, and William Hodges published two volumes of drawings upon his return from a six-year residence. In Travels in India, 1780–3 (1793), Hodges described the ‘large bungelow’ of a senior East India Company officer at Lucknow, where he stayed in 1781:
Bungalows are ... generally raised on a base of brick, one, two or three feet from the ground, and consist of only one storey; the plan of them usually is a large room in the centre for an eating and sleeping room, and rooms at each corner for sleeping; the whole is covered with one general thatch, which comes low to each side, the spaces between the angle rooms are viranders or open porticos to sit in during the evenings ... Sometimes the center viranders at each end are converted into rooms.
The ‘virander’ began to appear in British architecture following its inclusion in John Plaw’s pattern book Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, published in 1800. Many other Indian words and ideas found their way into the everyday discourse of Victorian Britons, especially after the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 and the subsequent extension of imperial power. By then the bungalow was not only understood as a concept; it was also emerging as a distinctive new type of building back in Britain.
Early use of the word ‘bungalow’ can be traced in the pages of The Times newspaper. A digital search returns just five mentions during the 1860s, fifteen in the 1870s, and then a massive leap to ninety-eight in the 1880s. The first time it appeared among the property advertisements was in 1862, when The Priory, near Douglas on the Isle of Man, was listed for sale as ‘a beautiful Residence, built like an Indian bungalow’. The rarity of the housing type ensured that references to Indian prototypes or the ‘bungalow style’ persisted for the next decade, although The Priory itself was constructed as early as 1850–1. Designed by a local architect, John Robinson, it was built for Elizabeth Stevens, widow of Major Francis John Stevens, perhaps inspired by experience of military service in the East.
The location of this Indian bungalow is unknown but it was clearly judged to be a representative example of its type as its image appeared on mass-produced Edwardian postcards in sepia and colour versions.
Despite The Priory’s spacious accommodation – a 26- by 18-foot drawing room, a similarly proportioned dining room with conservatory, a library and ten bedrooms (including those for servants) – the building did have the hallmarks of a Victorian bungalow. It was a predominantly single-storey detached property in landscaped grounds, with beautiful views from its ‘rustic veranda’. Other such residences were rare enough in their own neighbourhoods for the word on its own to be sufficient identification, for example ‘The Bungalow’ at Torquay, listed in a local directory of 1859. In 1876–7 The Times carried references to further examples at Burghfield near Reading, Instow in Devon, Maidenhead on the River Thames and Worcester Park in Surrey.
Despite obvious climatic differences between India and Britain, the verandah remained a defining feature of what constituted a bungalow. This Edwardian example at Ditteridge in Wiltshire provides welcome shade on a sunny day but is less useful in gloomy weather.
This may well be the earliest so-called bungalow in the British Isles. A late-Victorian photograph shows a game of tennis taking place in the garden of The Priory, near Douglas on the Isle of Man.
In his groundbreaking book on the subject, Anthony D. King showed how the bungalow’s introduction to Britain was the result of combined social, economic and demographic factors. Industrialisation fed the expansion of the middle classes, whose greater disposable income allowed higher spending on leisure and specific locations, like the bungalow, where they could enjoy it. The efficient rail network enabled wealth creation in the city to be combined with a regular escape from urban overcrowding and chronic pollution. It is therefore no coincidence that there was a strong south-eastern bias in the location of bungalows advertised in The Times and that among the advantages most frequently touted were a healthy location alongside easy access to London. The first such listing, from 15 August 1867, is regrettably imprecise about geography but nonetheless sets the pattern for things to come:
In the HEALTHIEST LOCATION IN ENGLAND, within an hour of London – A BUNGALOW, with fifteen rooms on the ground floor, stabling for five horses ... kitchen gardens, wilderness &c. in all about two acres ... Here in this charming retreat the balmy breezes, which gently waft their spicy gales from the pine and purple heather ... refresh the wearied system of the valetudinarian ...
Since the mid-eighteenth century the ultimate health destination had been the seaside, famed for the medicinal benefits of sea-bathing, and still valued by the Victorians for its bracing air. The enervating climate of Thanet’s north coast was essential in publicising the pioneering bungalows built at Kent’s newest resorts of Westgate-on-Sea and Birchington-on-Sea from 1869. Sir Erasmus Wilson, an eminent physician and owner of ‘The Bungalow’ at Westgate, claimed the air there was unusually rich in oxygen, ensuring ‘... a person will consume, during a period of twenty-four hours, twice as much air at Birchington-on-Sea as he will in the same given time in London’. The chalk cliffs were opened up for development by the London, Chatham & Dover Railway’s new route to Margate, yet, far from emulating the brash and populist resort at the end of the line, Westgate and Birchington were designed for a select metropolitan clientele. According to The Building News in 1870, ‘the site [at Westgate] has nothing between it and the sea, and nothing but sea between it and the North Pole ...’ To maximise this bracing solitude, four unusual holiday homes were under construction by the London architect John Taylor, who has ‘given bungalows ... in which real comfort has been combined with pleasing rusticity’.
The following description of one Westgate bungalow was given as representative of them all:
There are eight rooms all on one floor. The two side rooms of the front elevations have doors into the garden, and are for dressing after bathing. There is a serving flap or buttery hatch from the kitchen in the dining room, to economise labour of service ... Indeed the whole arrangement is such as to require the least amount of household work. There is a double-bedded room in the attic. A verandah at front and back gives coolness in summer ... The basement is sunk into the chalk and contains a larder, wine, beer, coal and general cellars.
Sea Tower (demolished 2006) was the last of Westgate-on-Sea’s four pioneering seaside bungalows to survive. ‘The Bungalow’, for Sir Erasmus Wilson, took two months to complete in 1869 and was followed by Sea Lawn, Sea Tower and Cliff Lodge.
In October 1870 Professor Wilson wrote to Taylor that ‘I find everybody charmed with my Bungalow, and I believe if there were many Bungalows, there would be many buyers. The house is a novelty, very convenient, fitted for a single family, and easy as to price.’ At £1,000 or more, this latter point was debatable but, as Wilson continued, ‘The idea of Bungalows seems to take people’s minds immensely. They are novel, quaint, pretty, and perfect as to sanitary qualities.’
From Westgate Taylor moved the second phase of his bungalow development 1½ miles west to Birchington. In the decade from 1871 he experimented with at least four different floor plans for brick buildings as well as the first ever prefabricated timber bungalow and bungalow hotel. Both his rectangular bungalow design based on room access via a central corridor and his square plan with rooms off a central dining room featured a tower with an upstairs smoking room or bedroom. Two bungalows had entire upper floors, Taylor having formulated his own definition of a bungalow based on its having ‘one span of roof of the most primitive and simple construction upon the lean-to principle ...’ The Building News later concluded that their real unifying characteristic was the use of materials devised by Taylor himself, ‘which treatment is unique and singularly well adapted to this class of building’.
Taylor’s bungalows were roofed with his own patent tiles, and the marine environment inspired him to construct damp-proof walls, ‘which will prove ... as valuable an invention, as his well-known one, now generally adopted, of the “damp-proof course”, the object of which is to prevent wet rising into the walls from beneath’. A layer of overlapping slates was used to separate the inner and outer wall faces, the latter having a textured surface of broken or knapped burr bricks. In a promotional brochure on Birchington-on-Sea and Its Bungalows (1881), Athol Mayhew even claimed that ‘To the inventive genius and constructive skill of Mr John Taylor, must be awarded the credit of the introduction of these modified Indian country-houses into England’. Whilst this was not strictly true, Taylor did seek to do something quite different with the structures he called bungalows, combining a new type of middle-class leisure retreat with new methods of construction.
One of John Taylor’s early Birchington bungalows as illustrated in The Building News of 1873. The corner details show Taylor’s patent interlocking roof tiles, which were easy to replace when damaged by North Sea winds.
Taylor’s ideology of simple buildings for simple pleasures was in keeping with the emerging Arts and Crafts philosophy of architecture and design. This extended to his interiors, which were unusually free of ornament. It also ensured that his bungalows attracted a disproportionately high number of artistic occupants. Most famous among them was the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived out his last few months in a Birchington bungalow at the behest of his friend the architect John Pollard Seddon. Taylor and Seddon shared the same London office address and were partners in development of the ‘West Cliff Estate’ along Birchington seafront. Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum show Seddon’s intention to create a resort around Taylor’s bungalows, featuring hotels, villas and the paradoxically named ‘Bungalow Terrace’. After Taylor’s involvement ceased in the early 1880s, the third phase of building was taken over by Seddon, whose group of four ‘Tower Bungalows’ and five service blocks survives (six of each were originally planned). J. P. Seddon’s greater repute as an Arts and Crafts practitioner has tended to overshadow Taylor’s pioneering work – unfairly, because Seddon added little to the fundamental bungalow design. Using Taylor’s patent materials and amending his corridor plan, he added Gothic details to the interiors, and panels of playful putti to the exterior walls.
This 1885 photograph of Taylor’s single-storey ‘Thor’ and two-storey ‘Haun’ shows them in their original Birchington setting. Ironically, they proved too simple for their owner, Major Bell, who linked them into a large rambling house soon after.
Taylor’s simple corridor plan (top) was adapted by Seddon for his Tower Bungalows (bottom) with an octagonal inner hall and bay windows, as well as a long verandah leading to the main side entrance.
Press coverage of the bungalows at Birchington helped transform an old hamlet into a highly desirable resort and turned the buildings themselves into tourist attractions. This drawing is taken from a souvenir paper-knife made of treen.
Birchington’s fame made it a model for other upmarket seaside developments such as Totland Bay in the Isle of Wight, publicised in 1878 as a ‘new and charming watering place’. The architect John Norton (designer of Tyntesfield near Bristol) advertised a furnished villa and bungalow there, as well as building sites for more of the same. A similar speculation of summer residences was attempted at the Cliffe-Park Estate, Great Yarmouth (now Gorleston), where building plots and two ‘desirable freehold marine bungalow residences’ were auctioned in 1883. The extent of John Taylor’s architectural influence on such developments is unclear but evidence from other coastal locations, such as Cromer in Norfolk and Seabrook in Kent, confirms that the bungalow’s status as a retreat outweighed any structural definition.
Sgraffito decoration by the sculptor George Frampton on a stable block of J. P. Seddon’s Tower Bungalows. The technique involves scraping designs through a top coat of plaster to reveal a different-coloured layer beneath.
In August 1887 the York Herald reported on ‘a curious social movement [which] has of late been making rapid headway in the Home Counties’. The idea of ‘bungalow villages’ was designed to meet the ‘desire for a less conventional state of existence’ brought on by ‘the irksome restraints of town life’. As London’s population continued its inexorable rise, heavily depopulated rural areas hit by agricultural depression were re-imagined by the urban middle class as a new leisure outlet called ‘the countryside’. This coincided with the uniquely British phenomenon of the ‘weekend’, a temporal unit that appeared in the 1870s to mitigate the excessive demands industrialisation had placed on people’s time. The factory workers’ own habit of ‘keeping Saint Monday’ – tacking an unofficial day off on to the traditional day of rest – was too haphazard for employers, who preferred to regularise leisure time. In 1871 the Bank Holiday Act sanctioned – and rationed – the Monday custom, and three years later a law was passed reducing working hours on a Saturday throughout the nation’s large industries to six and a half. It took another sixty years for Saturday to expand into a full day off, but the upper-class fashion of arriving for a country house party on Friday evening and returning to the city on Monday became a potent aspiration for the middle classes.
‘The Bungalow’ at Seabrook, on the coast road between Folkestone and Hythe, in 1900. Its Swiss chalet look reflected the style of holiday homes built across the Channel at French resorts such as Deauville and Trouville.
The bungalow perfectly suited the urbanites’ notion of a weekend escape and, although the York Herald claimed to know of several temporary bungalow communities, it mentioned only one specifically, Bellaggio in Surrey, whose name drew upon the romantic associations of its Italian predecessor beside Lake Como. Near East Grinstead, on the new London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, Bellaggio was the brainchild of Arthur Burr, who bought over 200 acres of land in 1887. The Pall Mall Gazette reported from an open day the following July that one hundred lots had been sold and about sixteen bungalows erected amid the woodland. These were freehold properties costing upwards of £200. Residents also paid to become members of Bellaggio’s clubhouse, which provided meals, a social centre and guest bedrooms on the colonial model of Indian hill stations. Weekending gentlemen ‘of moderate fortune’ were promised two trout lakes, boating, bathing, cricket, tennis, hunting, and racing at Lingfield Park racecourse, created as part of the development.
As at Westgate and Birchington, Bellaggio benefited from the involvement of a metropolitan architect committed to the bungalow form. R. A. Briggs (1858– 1916) made his name with the publication of Bungalows and Country Residences, a book that sought to prove bungalows were both economical and artistic: ‘that it is not necessary that cheap houses should be distinctive only by their ugliness and vulgarity.’ The cheapest bungalow illustrated by Briggs was designed for Bellaggio and comprised a hall/sitting room with a verandah, a dining room with a corner turret, five bedrooms and servants’ offices. The hall/sitting room was something of a Briggs trademark, for this ‘very useful and economical arrangement ... does away with a great amount of passage space, and it should be borne in mind that passages, except for the purpose of giving access to rooms, are a waste’. Though this building has gone, three others attributed to Briggs survive on the Dormans Park Estate (as Bellaggio is now known), the least altered of which is Pleasaunce Cottage. Bellaggio took its current name following the bankruptcy of its original speculator in the 1890s but it had already made an impact because of Briggs, and the racy reputation it garnered by targeting city bachelors. Arthur Binstead’s 1899 novel Gal’s Gossip recounted the exploits of a West End chorus girl whose many different addresses included ‘The Sprouts, Bellagio’, a ‘delightful semi-detached bungalow between Horley and Crawley’, where she and Charlie (manifestly not her husband) had been enjoying country life.
This semi-detached pair called ‘The Bungalows’ was built at Cromer in Norfolk, c. 1890. With half-basements and dormer windows, they are unique for their Japanese-style iron verandah. They originally also had roof-top conservatories.
The future Prime Minister David Lloyd George commissioned his bungalow ‘Brynawelon’ (‘Hill of Breezes’) at Criccieth, Gwynedd, in 1908. Designed by Rowland Lloyd of Caernarfon, it had a verandah off the ground-floor study and dining room, and six upstairs bedrooms.
From the outset popular culture portrayed the bungalow as a venue for unconventional goings-on. In October 1889 ‘a new farcical comedy’ called The Bungalow opened in London. The Times complained about the ‘nauseous plot ... assigning a transparently inadequate set of motives to people who are brought together under compromising circumstances, the bungalow of the title being a river-side retreat employed as a rendez-vous by different couples ...’
‘Design for a Bungalow in a free Greek style’ by R. A. ‘Bungalow’ Briggs. The time was right for his 1891 publication Bungalows and Country Residences, which went through five editions in the space of ten years.
The Crest was one of three Bellaggio bungalows visited by the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1888. Built of concrete and wood, it had a ‘picturesque roof of ecclesiastic cut’. This 1910 photograph already shows partial enclosure of the verandah.
Just as the countryside was being transformed by the Victorians’ new-found leisure, so too were rivers, especially the Thames, whose commercial traffic was gradually replaced by pleasure boats from the 1870s. As Londoners took to the water at weekends, the demand for riverside accommodation grew and as early as May 1877 a bungalow to let was advertised in The Times, 300 yards from the Thames at Maidenhead, ‘commanding a splendid view of Cliveden and woods from the verandah’. The Berkshire riverside near Boulter’s Lock proved especially desirable and bungalow owners there included Earl Russell, grandson of the former Prime Minister Lord John Russell. Celebrated residents enhanced the perception of riverside bohemianism, among them the music-hall star Vesta Tilley, who was pictured in front of her home, ‘Dorothy’s Bungalow’ at Bray, in the August 1905 Tatler. Such was the fashionable appeal of bungalows by the Edwardian period that one writer referred to the onset of warmer weather as heralding the ‘bungalow-inhabiting season’.
The Pleasaunce Cottage hall/sitting room is remarkably unaltered from the design illustrated by Briggs in his book. It retains the false beams, minstrels’ gallery, window seat and inglenook fireplace so indicative of an 1880s Vernacular Revival interior.
The garden elevation of Pleasaunce Cottage, designed as ‘a bachelor’s summer residence’, as illustrated by Briggs. The original reed thatch has long since been replaced with tiles. Briggs raised the ground floor 8 feet to maximise views and create cellar space.
The fashion for weekend pleasure boating was documented by Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 book Three Men in a Boat. Large riverside bungalows like these at Henley-on-Thames boasted integral boathouses, whereas humbler examples were often raised on stilts to avoid flooding.
Pleasaunce Cottage in 2013. Though most of the wrap-around verandah has been infilled, sliding doors on the garden elevation enable the original open space to be enjoyed still.
Specifications for a simple inter-war bungalow made by Sutcliffe’s Sectional Buildings of Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, and Oxford Street, London. ‘Sutcliffe’s build this bungalow so nicely all your friends will be attracted by it.’