The history of British homes: everything you wanted to know
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historica conversation From the makers of BBC History Magazine. What was history's worst furnishing trend? Why in nineteen fifty three were you more likely to own a television than a fridge?
And how could you learn more about the history of your own house? Well for today's Everything You Want to Know episode, I'm putting your questions on the history of homes in Britain to Deborah Sug Ryan, a professor of design history. Deborah is also a series consultant and presenter on BBC Two's A House Through Time. Each series of which traces the story of one single house and its residents down the centuries. It's wonderful to have you on the History Extra podcast, Deborah, and I'm super excited to talk all about the history of the British home with you. This is something that I personally am really fascinated by. So we've got a lot to cover and not a lot of time to cover it in. Let's start with
A big question about why we're here. Why is it interesting to look at how people's homes have changed over time? What can it reveal? Yeah, well, I'm a design historian. So what I am really interested in is the design and what's called the material culture of the home. So all the stuff, not just how we decorate our homes and how they change, but the stuff we fill them with as well. And that says a lot about us and our identity. And I've got this particular kind of emphasis in the research I've done on how ordinary people live as well. I'm not just interested in elites, I'm much more interested in the working classes and the kind of aspirational lower middle classes. So
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