THE WORD ‘bungalow’ enjoyed a unique cachet from the 1890s to the 1920s. Popularly associated with Indian exoticism, leisure retreats and healthy living, the name was applied to a variety of non-domestic spaces, including hotels, cafés and tea gardens, beach huts and sanatoriums. Some had the expected look of a bungalow; others did not. In 1891 a horse called Bungalow ran at several race meetings around the country.
The first hotel to bear the name was built by John Taylor at Birchington in c. 1877–9, using the same construction method of prefabricated timber panels pioneered in his Rossetti Bungalow. Grand Gothic hotels were also projected for the resort but Taylor’s venture was a logical extension of his bungalow development, providing a temporary retreat for visitors who were attracted to – but could not afford – this alternative form of seaside residence. An advertisement from the 1960s described the accommodation for forty-two guests as ‘well-planned and solidly constructed, with lofty spacious rooms and wide windows, centrally heated ... warm in winter and pleasantly cool on hot summer days’.
Another Victorian prefab known as the Bungalow Hotel, was located at the halfway point of the Snaefell Mountain Railway in the Isle of Man. Also built of wood, it was erected for the Isle of Man Tramway & Electrical Power Company and opened in 1896. In July the following year, a cyclist, writing in the Manxman, recalled a pleasant ride to Laxey, where he placed his bike ‘on a truck attached to the electric car going skywards to Snaefell. At the Bungalow Hotel, which is the Hut under a more fin de siècle title, I sought a refresher and then started homewards.’ This reference to the renaming of the Snaefell Hut shows the railway company’s desire to attract customers and emphasises the fashionable status of the bungalow name. The designation ‘hotel’ was more questionable since the fare of luncheons, teas and refreshments appears never to have extended to overnight stays. Although the original bungalow was demolished in 1958, its name lives on, marking the thirty-first milestone on the Snaefell Mountain Course of the Manx TT Race.
The original Bungalow Hotel at Birchington, Kent, photographed c. 1924. It welcomed guests for more than a century, much of that time bearing a sign on the wall proclaiming ‘NO STAIRS’. It was demolished in 1984.
Two further bungalow hotels suggest evolving notions of the concept during the early twentieth century. The Bungalow Hotel and Café at Weston-super-Mare was designed by architects S. J. Wilde & Fry. Opened in 1909, it had an Art Nouveau feel ‘quite new to Weston’ and, according to a local press report, ‘no expense has been spared in order to ensure everything [is] ... thoroughly up-to-date’. The building had three storeys plus a half-basement, was cement-rendered on the first floor, and decorated with glazed tiles and faience below. An Edwardian advertisement declared it to be a ‘High-Class Residential Hotel’ with a ground-floor café where ‘dainty dinners and tasty teas’ were served ‘in a spacious Salon draped in green tapestry, furnished in fumed oak old-style settees and cosy corners’. At a date when the Queen and the Prime Minister were building their own bungalows, this Somerset hotel was trading on its name’s elite connotations. In the case of the 1920s-built Bungalow Hotel at Bracklesham Bay near Chichester, the name was more architecturally descriptive; the main building shared the character of contemporary residential bungalows whilst bedrooms were in separate prefabricated blocks. Pairs of rooms were given individual stepped entrances via gabled verandahs that looked like rows of beach huts or chalets. The style of these bungalow rooms was probably not dissimilar to the sort that inspired the uniquely named Seacroft Bungalow Holiday Camp at Hemsby in Norfolk.
The Snaefell Bungalow Hotel was a prefabricated wooden structure with a corrugated-iron roof. It provided a refreshment stop for patrons of the mountain railway and was also a popular destination on charabanc trips, as seen here.
Hotels elsewhere took the name because they were converted from existing bungalows, a reminder of the substantial scale of some early examples. Such was the case at Torquay and Cromer, where the Victorian bungalows described on pages 8 and 13 had ceased to be private holiday homes by the 1920s. The Bungalow Hotel at Sandsend, near Whitby, was built in 1906 as a six-roomed residence for Dr Tinley and became a guesthouse in 1911. Demand for more accommodation necessitated large-scale alterations, a rather fitting element of which was the acquisition of two North Eastern Railway carriages in 1918.
With bungalow cafés the link back to India was certainly an intended association. Some of the earliest refreshment bungalows appeared in the imperialist context of demonstrating Indian life to British people. In 1886 an exhibition called ‘India in London’ opened off Regent Street, where visitors could stroll among Indian shops ‘peopled by native sandal-wood carvers ... brass workers [and] embroiderers’ or watch dancing and snake-charming. As a break from these delights, ‘Tiffin and afternoon tea [are] served in the bungalow.’ Two years later, the Royal Bungalow Restaurant, an impressive two-storey wooden structure with double verandahs and a tower topped with an onion dome, opened at Glasgow’s International Exhibition. Its Lucknow and Delhi Rooms served a selection of curries prepared by Indian cooks. It was tea, however, that proved a more enduring Indian connection, with bungalow tea gardens and cafés providing a teetotal choice that appealed to the middle classes. Public houses were notoriously both male and working-class, whereas the more genteel air of bungalows situated in parks and beauty spots made them acceptable places for women to meet.
Guests pose outside Seacroft Bungalow Holiday Camp at Hemsby in Norfolk, c. 1930. Here the bungalow name probably refers to the wooden chalet accommodation that made holiday camps such an attractive alternative to traditional boarding houses during the inter-war period.
Souvenir view of the Indian Tea Manager’s Bungalow erected by Lyons to promote their Indian tea at the Festival of Empire, 1911. Such displays affirmed the association between bungalows and tea-drinking that made bungalow tearooms seem so appropriate.
The bicycle leaning against the fence at Marton Bungalow near Middlesbrough hints at its popularity with hikers and cycling clubs. Its once rural location has now been supplanted by one of the busiest road junctions in Teesside.
The Bungalow Tea Rooms at Newton Mearns near Glasgow. Verandahs were an important part of what made these buildings distinctive as bungalows; they were also highly practical for the extra semi-open space they provided for patrons in Britain’s notoriously changeable climate.
From the late nineteenth century increased transport options allowed town-dwellers to spend their leisure hours in rural or semi-rural locations, where a well-placed bungalow café could do good business. Middlesbrough was probably quite typical in having several in surrounding villages that profited from the end-of-century passion for cycling. North-west of the town the Norton Oriental Refreshment Bungalow offered cyclists a rest stop, complete with pagodas and coloured lights in the garden. It proved so popular that a new Norton Bungalow tearoom was built in 1912 after the first one burnt down. To the south-east of Middlesbrough, wooden roadside bungalows could be found at Marton and Ormesby. The latter’s tearoom was built above a petrol garage, an indication of how rising car ownership, not to mention charabanc and motor-coach travel, opened up the countryside and its picturesque natural attractions. That longest-established of all tourism destinations, the seaside, was also an obvious home for refreshment bungalows, with examples at Cliftonville in Kent, Bridlington in Yorkshire and Minehead in Somerset.
Two 1920s holidaymakers enter the Bungalow Verandah Tea Gardens at Cliftonville near Margate. The word ‘Bungalow’ can be seen in reverse between the wooden-lattice cupolas.
The idea of taking afternoon tea in a bungalow appealed even to Queen Alexandra, who had her own two-room structure built in 1908 on the beach at Snettisham in Norfolk. Its design, by Mr Riches of Dersingham, was conspicuously rustic, with an irregular exterior of local coursed carrstone. Inside, the queen’s private apartment measured 12 by 14 feet. Under its open roof of ‘rough-sawn dark stained timber’, stones and shells decorated the upper part of the walls. The brick fireplace was surmounted by a beam of rough oak from a tree grown on the neighbouring royal estate of Sandringham. The second room, for Queen Alexandra’s servants, was equipped with a small kitchen range and a dado of blue and white Dutch tiles showing scenes of Holland.
The royal beach bungalow’s construction was reported by the press and images of it appeared on postcards, providing a clear precedent for the new type of ‘bathing bungalow’ that began to appear at smart seaside resorts soon after. In 1909 Bournemouth Corporation erected a row of detached wooden buildings with canvas awnings along its Undercliff Drive, pricing – and naming – them, to appeal to wealthy visitors staying for the season. The following year an innovative terrace of thirteen bathing bungalows appeared at North Bay, Scarborough, where the prosaic need to protect the town’s main drain had resulted in the creation of a new promenade. To enhance this engineering work, the Borough Surveyor, Harry W. Smith, proposed to ‘make a block of buildings of as picturesque design as possible, [to] provide them with their own little veranda and a bit of pavement, and elevate them so that parents could keep a watchful eye on their youngsters on the sands below’. The concept proved so successful that by 1927 the resort’s two bays had 145 of them, and the bungalow name was used elsewhere around the coast to describe what we would now call beach huts.
Queen Alexandra’s Norfolk beach bungalow featured a front verandah that looked towards The Wash, with a seat at one end made from the bow half of a rowing boat. It was demolished after the queen’s death in 1925.
In 1909 Bournemouth Corporation built the country’s first bathing bungalows, aimed at well-to-do visitors. Along with the private changing accommodation they provided, these bungalows were marketed as a little ‘home-from-home’.
Blocks of bungalows as built at Scarborough from 1910. Each individual room came with corner cupboards, a table, two chairs and a large storage space over the verandah. Their novelty made them such an attraction that they even appeared on souvenir china.
Though the early health imperative that led to seaside bungalow building had abated, the idea was taken up in another, more formal, medical context. In 1896 a charity-funded boys’ school at Bisley in Surrey erected a red-brick ‘Bungalow Hospital’ with beds for twelve of its boarders. The nomenclature seems to have been unique – and certainly no rival to the numerous ‘cottage’ hospitals around Britain – but bungalows did find a place as patient accommodation at tuberculosis sanatoriums. Dr Pruen’s Cotswold Sanatorium was established near Stroud in 1898, its bungalow-style wards allowing patients maximum exposure to fresh air on their verandahs. In Somerset, patients at Nordrach upon Mendip Sanatorium recuperated in small wooden bungalows, following the open-air treatment regime pioneered by Dr Otto Walther at Nordrach in the Black Forest. The two British doctors behind this venture, Rowland Thurman and Neville Gwynn, had both been successfully treated in Germany and in 1899 acquired the former Willoughby’s Farm at Charterhouse, giving the main house over to consultation and staff rooms, and the grounds to bungalows for the patients.
The bungalow name was used in other situations to describe communal living quarters. Between 1903 and 1921 the grounds of Queen Victoria’s former holiday residence on the Isle of Wight were transformed into the Osborne Royal Naval College. Here junior officers were accommodated in rows of dormitory bungalows connected by long wooden verandahs. When construction began on Rosyth Naval Base, Fife, in 1913, the contractors bought enough second-hand corrugated-iron huts to house one thousand people – the navvies along with their families. The following year a second set of purpose-built family huts was erected to the east and the settlement took the grand title of Bungalow City, otherwise known as Tin Town. Amenities included a church, tearoom, grocery store, football pitches and children’s play area. Food was cheap, rents were low, and, though new permanent housing was built, many residents were happy to stay in their bungalows. This was not to be; the original huts were demolished in 1924 and within a few years the entire bungalow community was gone.
Note the deep verandahs designed to take patient beds at Dr Pruen’s Cotswold Sanatorium. Whilst suffering from tuberculosis in 1949, the novelist George Orwell was a patient here, correcting the proofs of 1984 from his bed.
A temporary bungalow community was set up for the workmen building Scotland’s newest dockyard at Rosyth. Provision was made for whole families, and significantly it is the women and children who can be seen at the doors here.
Patient bungalows at Nordrach upon Mendip Sanatorium. Despite the weekly charge of £20, demand was high and the doctors in charge were able to report a 35.9 per cent cure rate in the British Medical Journal for January 1905.
This 1920s photograph is inscribed on the back ‘Bill painting bungalow, part of flower garden, Biggin Hill’. Whatever critics thought about the bungalows beloved by their social inferiors, for the owners of such buildings they signified independence and self-determination.