IN THE 1920s the bungalow’s growing popularity led to use of a new term and it was not complimentary. Critics referred to ‘bungaloid’ growth as if it were a disease, spreading in ribbons along the expanding road network. There had been snobbery about the more makeshift form of bungalow before, but the growth of plotlands – and the lower income brackets of their inhabitants – revealed distinct class tensions. A fundamental transfer of land ownership from the few to the many occurred at this time, sustained by the sale of unprofitable agricultural holdings and the break-up of landed estates deprived of their heirs by the First World War. Speculators sold small plots of marginal land to people who could otherwise never have hoped to be property owners but now had the opportunity to build a bungalow, complete with garden. The speed of this democratisation may in part explain the backlash. In the end it led to new planning legislation that aimed to remove the prospect of bohemian escape previously associated with bungalow life.
Government controls over land use were almost non-existent until 1875, when urban authorities gained power to specify basic building standards on public health grounds. Rural councils were excluded from this policy, but by the turn of the century many had opted in through the use of by-laws, restricting new buildings to construction in brick, stone or other hard, incombustible materials. The result was to prohibit cheap bungalows in the places most favoured by city ‘back-to-the-landers’. The author calling himself ‘Home Counties’ described Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Berkshire as ‘comparatively by-laws ridden’. No-one was immune, as the wealthy landowner Wilfred Scawen Blunt discovered in 1904 when he was forced to demolish an iron and timber bungalow built for labourers on his Crabbet Park estate in Sussex. With three local builders serving on East Grinstead District Council it seems vested interests played their part, but rural areas were generally fearful of seeing their district ‘spoiled with a lot of rambling huts’.
In 1930 residents of villas near Box Hill in Surrey refused to pay their rates in protest at the ‘bungalow town’ that had begun creeping across their beauty spot. At issue was the insanitary nature of the accommodation in ‘broken-down omnibuses, caravans, ramshackle sheds, and tents’. There was also a social dimension inherent in criticism of the ‘behaviour of young people who come down from London at week-ends’. As the comments of one resident reported in The Times make clear, there were acceptable bungalows and unacceptable bungalows: ‘I came here six years ago, when the district was practically undeveloped. I fell in love with the beautiful views and excellent position, and bought a bungalow. At that time there were a few caravans occupied by country-lovers, but they have been succeeded by the ruffians who occupy these disgraceful erections.’ The ratepayers of East Grinstead took action against Mr Blunt to stave off any such future threat to their patch but councils were largely powerless to stop the inter-war spread of plotlands.
The most infamous of these was Peacehaven, near Brighton, advertised as a ‘Garden City by the Sea’. Having experience of land speculation in Canada, its promoter, Charles Neville, set out to create an entirely new seaside resort. His publicity tactics could not fail to attract attention and in 1916 some eighty thousand entries were received in a national newspaper competition to name his settlement. As well as a £100 first prize, fifty consolation prizes were offered in the form of building plots, each valued at £50. The dream he marketed was palpable but it was also dishonest. Following the naming of ‘New Anzac-on-Sea’, it transpired that Neville had awarded plots to 12,500 entrants, the legal fees for transfer of which would net him a substantial profit. He was sued for fraud and, following the tragic losses at Gallipoli, the resort’s name was changed to Peacehaven, a more welcoming prospect for the post-war inhabitants who bought into Neville’s promise of health and happiness, his ‘Care free and freehold happy land – LURELAND’. And they did buy into it; five years after the first bungalow was completed in 1921, the population had grown from twenty-four to three thousand. The problem was that development of this sensitive site on the edge of the South Downs was haphazard. Far from following a systematic infilling of the original grid, plots were taken up on an ad-hoc basis, leaving patches of wasteland between them. This made providing basic services very difficult and the local authority was so reluctant to be dragged into the expense that until the 1950s Peacehaven had more than 20 miles of unmade roads and an absence of mains drainage. This was not what Neville had intended but to critics he epitomised the dodgy speculator, and his town came to stand for all that was worst about this kind of unfettered development.
Float from Brighton Carnival, c. 1923. This was the idyllic vision of Peacehaven promoted by its founder and longed for by its inhabitants: the little bungalow complete with creepers up the wall, and a garden with a dovecote.
Throughout the 1920s anti-bungalow invective increased as part of a broader call to arms given focus by the establishment of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) in 1926. Middle-class standards of living rose throughout the inter-war years: while London’s population grew by 2 million, its area expanded fivefold as mortgages from new building societies helped populate suburban developments, and by 1931 there were one million private cars on the road. The very visible downside was an uncoordinated assault on the countryside. In his 1928 book England and the Octopus Clough Williams-Ellis decried the way London’s tentacles were stretching outward, scarring everything the recent war had been fought to preserve. In his Devil’s Dictionary, he stated that
There is clearly nothing intrinsically vile about one-storied dwellings ... No: hatred, ridicule and contempt do not attach to the bungalow merely because it is stair-less ... but because this perfectly reasonable type of building has been meanly exploited to its own degradation ... [and because] the intrusive impertinence of the bungalow knows no bounds.
Such denouncements were crucial in launching the CPRE as a pressure group, but, as Williams-Ellis was bound to concede, ‘Manifestly there must and will be bungalows if there is a demand for them ...’ Part of the CPRE’s mission became advising on how to locate and design them with thought to their surroundings.
In 1924 a seedier side to the bungalow’s unconventional reputation became apparent when the national press reported how Patrick Mahon had killed and dismembered his pregnant mistress in a rented bungalow on a lonely part of the Sussex coast. Mahon was subsequently hanged and the bungalow crime scene became Eastbourne’s premier tourist attraction, inspiring William Le Quex’s 1925 novel The Blue Bungalow, in which ‘a grim mystery surrounds a murder committed in a lonely bungalow on the West coast of England’. Even Agatha Christie, the doyenne of crime-writing, sent Miss Marple to solve the ‘Affair at the Bungalow’ in a short-story collection published in 1932.
Neither sensationalist headlines nor emotive pleas from preservationists halted bungalow building but they did contribute to the bungalow’s loss of glamour. Its early appeal as a novel building type could not be maintained against the proliferation of bungalow estates put up after the Second World War. From 1947 the creation of new plotlands was outlawed by planning legislation; those that remained were gradually tidied up, although many coastal settlements, including the original Bungalow Town at Shoreham, had already been forcibly cleared in the name of wartime security. Detached, single-storey residences now came to define the bungalow and, rather than being linked with labour-saving modernity, by the end of the twentieth century they were frequently viewed as a home most suited to elderly people.
An image of unplanned development in Cheshire used in CPRE campaign literature. As the caption noted, this type of ‘bungaloid’ growth, also referred to as a plotland or rural slum, ‘ran up a nice bill for the ratepayers’.
CPRE publications targeted vulnerable areas including the Peak District, rural Cheshire, Cornwall and the Thames Valley with annotated illustrations of ‘bad’ bungalows like this one. Many British towns and villages still have similar-looking buildings along their main roads.
For a while, however, the bungalow did represent something important to the British sense of place. In 1901 R. A. Briggs wrote that
... if the walls of the Bungalow be covered with creepers of jasmine and roses, and the little gardens filled with old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers, its owner may look round, and say with Herrick:
‘Here we rejoice, because no rent
We pay for our poore tenement;
And bless our fortunes when we see
Our own beloved privacie.’
He was not thinking of the makeshift buildings that critics came to despise and associate with the bungalow label, yet those same buildings, put up on the cheap, were a manifestation by poor people of the fashionable trend for a place in the country. A writer in The Times of 8 January 1936 encapsulated the problem as follows:
The English tend to see things through their names. They are apt ... to put things like ‘church’ and ‘cottage’ into the category of the beautiful and things like ‘bungalow’ and ‘pylon’ into the category of the ugly, irrespective of their actual appearance. It may be the same building whether it be called ‘cottage’ or ‘bungalow’, but the attitude to the thing is determined by the associations of the name applied.
Old bungalows, like this one along a quiet country road in Kent, represent prime redevelopment opportunities, and so they are disappearing fast. They are the last vestiges of the plotland ethic and the early-twentieth-century bungalow dream.
Ultimately, the bungalow has seen such a reversal in the fortunes of its name that the original romance has been completely obscured.