IF BRITISH BUNGALOWS were originally designed for the wealthy, advances in prefabrication techniques and clever recycling of materials ensured this would not long remain the case. Again John Taylor was in the vanguard, building (and briefly living in) the country’s first prefabricated timber bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea. In keeping with its neighbours, this was a sizable structure with 100 feet of corridor for indoor exercise, double-height drawing room and ten best bedrooms. Notwithstanding its scale, the bungalow had a very different feel to Taylor’s other buildings, prompting the Art Journal of 1886 to record the following first impressions:
... a study in red and brown, low pitched ... [then] one is in the centre of a long corridor, lighted ship-fashion by swinging lamps, with doors opening on either side and at each end. Everything is of wood, match-boarded within and clinker-built without, and one’s first feeling is of surprise at the absence of snakes! Everything suggests the tropics, from the cool colour of the painted woodwork to the mild suffused light of the hanging lamps.
The foreignness was intentional, for Taylor declared in a letter to The Building News (28 March 1879) that, following the experiment at Birchington, ‘I am able to export to any country not a mere shell of a house, but a complete bungalow residence, furnished with the appropriate “chair furniture”, the whole safely packed in a small compass’. His vision of prefabrication covered every detail, hence his invention of modular ‘chair furniture’ that could be put together in many different permutations from a simple set of component parts. After this optimistic start, Taylor’s success as a bungalow exporter is unknown.
The export of other prefabricated timber structures had been a sophisticated industry since the 1850s. During the gold rushes in Australia, California and South Africa the immediate need for shelter created a lucrative market for British companies supplying corrugated-iron houses. For practical reasons these might take the form of single-storey dwellings with a verandah, but portable buildings specifically marketed as bungalows did not appear in trade catalogues until the 1880s. By this time the frenzy of foreign demand had settled and the bungalow represented a new opportunity for home sales.
Britain’s first prefabricated timber bungalow, designed by John Taylor (demolished c. 1952). It became more famous as the last home of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, taking the artist’s name after his death on 9 April 1882.
Rossetti Bungalow had a 30- by 20- foot drawing room leading to a conservatory and verandah. Set back from the main building, the substantial servants’ quarters (left) included two bedrooms, kitchen, scullery, pantry, laundry, cellar and yards.
Although Devan Haye in Dorset does not fit our modern vision of a bungalow, the polychrome encaustic tiles laid in the entrance hall make clear that this two-storey structure was always understood as such by its Victorian owners.
The Norwich manufacturers Boulton & Paul supplied every conceivable form of portable iron structure, offering four specific bungalow designs in their April 1889 catalogue, priced from £180 to £550, all structural parts delivered, carriage paid, to the nearest railway station. Another significant firm was William Cooper Ltd of 761 Old Kent Road, London. One of their two-storey bungalows, called Devan Haye, survives at Sherborne in Dorset, having been built for Mr Dalwood, a local chemist and property developer, in 1889. Humphrey’s Patent Iron Buildings also originated in London and were shipped around the globe from their factory in Knightsbridge. Among their satisfied customers was the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who, in 1899, ordered a bungalow that was put up for his own use in the New Forest. The estimated cost was £227 10s, but the unavoidable extra expenses of carriage from the station, foundations, chimneys, drainage and painting took the true figure up to £300. As the author of Country Cottages: How to Build, Buy and Fit Them Up (1905) remarked, ‘The fact ... that a corrugated iron building meets the taste and fancy of a cultivated man, a poet, a traveller, and a well-to-do owner of many houses like Mr Blunt, surely tends to show that a corrugated iron building is not necessarily a blot on the landscape.’
Devan Haye has wrap-around verandahs at ground- and first-floor level and was advertised in William Cooper’s catalogue as a ‘Picturesque erection ... for the Country or Seaside’. It probably cost around £350 when purchased in 1889.
Such a defence implies that prefabricated bungalows were not universally welcomed, but then neither, it seems, were the part-time bohemians who occupied them. The pseudonymous ‘Home Counties’ directed his book on Country Cottages at the ‘week-ender’, a social reproach in some circles but, to that writer’s mind, the ‘wise man of his day’. As he stated in his preface, ‘It is a simple fact that the man who spends his week-ends at his own cottage or bungalow will be a healthier man and a happier man than the town-stayer; and ... by his personal relationship ... with the land, will be a better citizen.’ The same must be true of his children, who ‘for two days out of seven, breathe pure air, eat wholesome food, take ideal exercise, and enter into the new joys of knowing at first hand bird and beast, tree and flower ...’ Such sentiments typified a growing, if minority, interest in recovering the simple life and getting ‘back to the land’. Its most influential manifestation came in the work of Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City movement. Home Counties’ book was born out of a series of articles in The World’s Work and Play, and proved popular enough to merit three reprints in its publication year, helping to inspire the Cheap Cottages Exhibition of 1905, which took place at Letchworth Garden City. The ostensible aim of this exhibition was to encourage the design of £150 cottages for rural labourers, who were suffering a serious dearth of housing in the wake of agricultural depression. The 119 exhibition dwellings attracted important publicity and some eighty thousand visitors, but also elicited suggestions from the press that the prefabricated structures looked more like middle-class weekend retreats.
William Cooper’s single-storey bungalows included a six-roomed 35- by 28-foot example surrounded by a 3-foot verandah that was ‘greatly in demand’. Colonial Cottage at Little Cawthorpe in Lincolnshire was supplied by the company c. 1910.
Wilfred Scawen Blunt outside his New Forest bungalow c. 1905. With six rooms and no passages, it took three weeks to erect. The iron walls and roof were painted light green ‘in the Russian fashion’, with white windows and end boards.
For the makers of portable bungalows the Cheap Cottages Exhibition was a valuable promotional exercise and, like the pages of Home Counties’ book, it showcased the increasing variety of new materials available. These included asbestos, concrete slabs and machine-made roof tiles. Calway’s system used white concrete slabs bound together by black bands; this was cheaper than conventional brick, and if ‘[you] train a few creepers up the walls ... or some pretty ivy to take away the newness ... you have the effect of the old half-timbered house’. Boulton & Paul offered weekend cottages of ferro-concrete and brick at between £134 and £345. Timber also retained a significant market share as prefabricated bungalows continued to grow in popularity through the inter-war period. Their appeal as economical and rapidly erected structures was clear, particularly on leasehold land, but their theoretical portability was probably tested in only a minority of cases. A rare surviving example can be found on the north Devon coast at Peppercombe, where, in 1926, Major Pine-Coffin re-sited the wooden boathouse from his nearby Portledge estate. The structure had been purchased from Boulton & Paul at the turn of the century and was dragged by horse in sections down the cliff so that the family could use it as a seaside bungalow.
A Wire Wove bungalow in course of erection. Since the early 1890s the company had been developing panels of expanded steel lathing covered with plaster to replace wooden laths, and in 1906 advertised a one-bedroom weekend bungalow for just £100.
The weatherboarded and timber-lined Castle Bungalow at Peppercombe, north Devon, was manufactured by Boulton & Paul. It is now owned and let for holidays by the Landmark Trust.
Despite his great wealth, Lord Leverhulme opted to buy a prefabricated bungalow for his moorland estate at Rivington Pike. The site, 1,000 feet above sea level, had been a favourite picnic place for him and his wife during their courtship.
Perhaps the grandest of all prefab bungalows was a wooden one supplied by the Portable Building Company of Manchester to William Hesketh Lever, Viscount Leverhulme, the ‘Sunlight Soap’ entrepreneur. Made of pitch pine, with a verandah and twin gables under a red corrugated-iron roof, it was erected in 1900 at Rivington Pike in Lancashire. Its 45-acre grounds were rapidly tamed with landscaped gardens, terraces, summerhouses and pergolas. The bungalow, known as Roynton Cottage, was extended and filled with lavish furnishings and works of art, but was burnt down in July 1913 by a suffragette. The replacement bungalow that rose from the ashes in 1914 was built of local stone designed to be fireproof. Damage caused by billeted wartime troops led to this luxurious bungalow’s demolition in 1947.
At the opposite end of the self-build scale were the summer and weekend bungalows built right on the beach at Shoreham in Sussex. If prefabricated buildings helped shape public attitudes to the building type, then so did this emerging ‘Bungalow Town’. As early as March 1895 The Building News stated that ‘Some people have an idea that a bungalow is of necessity a very temporary kind of structure – something like a dismantled railway carriage deprived of its wheels and fitted up as a residence ...’ Inspired by the example of Shoreham fishermen using old railway carriages to store their nets, an enterprising local had the money-making idea of letting out the beach in 66-foot square plots, for which he would secure a supply of carriages from the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway. The first of these was set up on railway sleepers and converted for residential use around 1884; by 1900 there were about 150 bungalows and the holiday settlement stretched for a mile and a half.
The beginning of a beach bungalow at Shoreham in Sussex. Passenger carriages like these, with numerous windows and doors, cost £10–12, but a milk van, guard’s carriage or luggage van could be had for just £4 to £4 10s.
The commonest configuration was to place two carriages 10 or 12 feet apart for use as bedrooms, the space in between being floored and roofed over with corrugated iron to make a sitting room. Service spaces were located at the back of the bungalow, often in a third carriage arranged on a Π plan. It is an indicator of the social status of early Shoreham residents that space was routinely made for a servant’s bedroom. At the front of the bungalow it was typical to find a verandah, but some owners went way beyond this with towers, mock timber framing and second-floor balconies. In keeping with, and indeed enhancing, the bungalow’s bohemian reputation, Shoreham attracted a socially adventurous, avant-garde community, which, because of the rail link to London, included many West End theatre people, among them the music-hall singer Marie Loftus and the comedian Will Evans.
Inside a Shoreham bungalow in 1900. The space has been made homely with fabrics and knick-knacks typical of the period but also still has its railway lamp and ventilators.
This postcard, sent from Shoreham in 1907, clearly did not represent the reality of staying in a bungalow on the beach but the devil-may-care attitude of its happy occupants did fit the perception of unconventional bohemian life at Bungalow Town.
A bungalow community on the Shoreham model at Heacham Beach in Norfolk. Note the large verandah of the bungalow in the foreground. Similar East Anglian settlements could be found at Canvey Island and Point Clear in Essex.
Shoreham became famous as a pioneer but many similar bungalow settlements sprang up on marginal land where property rights were uncertain. These came to be known as ‘plotlands’ because of the way plots were portioned off. Since railway companies across the country had redundant rolling stock to dispose of, bungalow conversions could be found everywhere from Braystones in Cumbria to Polzeath in Cornwall. Also in Sussex, there were temporary communities at Lancing Beach, Pagham Beach, East Wittering and Rock Point at Felpham. Plotlands proliferated between the two world wars and inland beauty spots were also colonised by the less well-off in a mixture of prefabricated and converted weekend homes.
After the First World War a severe housing shortage was exacerbated by lack of building materials and labour. A pragmatic stopgap was provided by conversions, not least of the many sectional wooden buildings erected to help the war effort. In July 1919 the government unveiled a ‘model bungalow’ on Horse Guards Parade in London, transformed from a standard wooden army hut by the architect E. Vincent Harris. Asbestos-lined, it measured 66 by 15 feet and was about 8 feet high. The average price of the unconverted shell was £100, and to convert it along the lines of the ‘model bungalow’ would cost a further £300 for an estimated lifespan of fifteen to twenty years. At this price, there were concerns it would appeal more to the rich man in search of a weekend bungalow than to the young married officers, clerks and artisans actually in need of homes. According to the Ramsey Courier, army bungalows on the Isle of Man were 30 per cent cheaper than on the mainland, perhaps as a result of their abundance. Some fifty thousand alien internees had been held there during the First World War and when the Knockaloe Detention Camp was sold in spring 1919 its 570 sectional huts were available to buy lined out ready for bungalow use. ‘Knockaloe bungalows’, as they became known, were relatively easy to find in the 1980s but have since suffered from rising land values. In Sussex, Seaford army camp provided the new community of Peacehaven with its first six buildings in 1920. The wooden framed bungalows on Seaview Avenue were re-covered with flat asbestos sheeting and roofed with diagonal asbestos tiles, that material proving a crucial component of many cheap bungalows during the early twentieth century.
A group of three 1901 bungalows built at Sutton-on-Sea in Lincolnshire using Great Eastern railway carriages. Each design is unique, with an especially unusual arrangement of carriages used to make a second floor at Wavelands (far right).
A government-sponsored plan for converting an army hut. Twelve large windows lit the bungalow interior, which was partitioned using coke-breeze blocks floated with plaster. There was a cooking range and 18-gallon farm boiler, plus stoves in every bedroom.
Shoe manufacturers C & J Clark acquired two prefabricated army huts in 1921 to convert into housing for workers at their factory in Street, Somerset. Each was divided into three bungalows, as seen here.
The male singer of this 1906 ditty tries to charm ‘the sweetest Hindoo maiden in Bengal’ with the promise of ‘a Bamboo Bungalow for you, Big enough for two’. He gives up upon finding out that she charms snakes.