United Kingdom

However, privacy was more apparent for the better-off in society than for the poor. Restrictions on privacy among the latter were apparent in what were by modern standards large households, in which space was often shared with those outside the immediate, conjugal family of the head of household, including relatives, servants, and lodgers. Privacy was also restricted by the small size of dwellings; for example, in Scotland in 1861, 26 percent of the population lived in single-room dwellings, 39 percent in two-room dwellings, and 57 percent lived more than two to a room. It was not until the 20th century that this situation changed dramatically. Nonetheless, differences within Britain were important, and flat living in a Glasgow tenement was very different from residence in a self-contained house characteristic of large parts of the north of England. This British kind of residential pattern as a whole was itself very different from continental Europe, and despite other differences between the classes, there were similarities among the British in terms of the house as the cradle of modern privacy. The suggestive term “social privacy” has been coined to describe the experience of domestic space prior to the intervention of the municipality and the state in the provision of housing, which occurred with increasing effect after mid-century. The older cellular structure of housing, evident in the tangle of courts and alleys in the old city centres, often with cellar habitations as well, resulted in the distinction between public and private taking extremely ambiguous form. In the municipal housing that was increasingly widespread after mid-century, this gave way to a more open layout in which single elements were connected to each other.

Among housing reformers there was a dislike of dead ends, courts, and the old situation where habitations were turned in upon themselves in their own social privacy. In the new order, space became neutral and connective, and, in the new “bylaw housing,” streets were regular in layout and width, with side streets at right angles and back alleys in parallel lines. The streets outside were (and remain) surprisingly wide in contrast to the narrow alleys behind. Such streets allowed a maximum of free passage. The street outside was public and communal. The alley or lane behind was less socially neutral than the street, still rather secret. It was not a traffic thoroughfare for the public at large, being reserved for the immediate inhabitants, for the hanging of washing, and perhaps for the playing of football (soccer). In between these public and semipublic spheres and the house within was the space of the yard at the back, which in contradistinction to the street was private and individual (if less so, potentially, than the house itself). In this fashion, municipal authorities sought to inculcate privacy in the lower classes. However, conditions worked against domestic privacy for them, and it was in the homes of the better-off that privacy was most developed.

Within the dwellings of the more privileged, there was a trend towards the specialization of rooms, the separation of the public from the private sides of life, and the development of distinct spheres for women and children. A society based on achieved status, as British society was slowly becoming, was very concerned to regulate and legitimize social relationships of gender and status, and the spaces of the home served as a means of doing this. From about the 1820s a family pattern developed that was conditioned by spatial environments that resulted from the new significance of home and domesticity. The home was to be a retreat from the stress of the world and a haven of security. This change in perspective was associated with other developments, namely the retreat from the centre of cities to the suburbs—evident in Manchester, for example, as early as the 1820s—along with a concomitant switch in housing style from the 18th-century terrace (row houses) to the detached or semidetached villa. In the move from the terrace, what was once the common garden of the square gave way to a separate, private garden. The common and more public rooms of the house, which were once for use by all members of the family, were relocated on the ground floor, with the other stories of the house being limited to the use of family members in a distinct domestic sphere. In terms of the development of working-class domesticity, by mid-century there was a clear gender division of labour between men and women (though it was often contradicted in practice by economic necessity and local employment conditions), based on the assumption that a man was to be the main and preferably sole breadwinner and head of the household. This pattern of gender relationships had profound influence on working-class institutions, not only on the trade union movement but also on the club and association life that was so central to the leisure activity of the less well-off.