ABSTRACT
On the fringes of most towns in Britain, new houses are currently being constructed by speculative builders for private ownership. On the majority of sites there will be at least one fashionably decorated and fully furnished 'show home' for people to view. Unlike the rest of Europe and the United States, where home owners tend to have more control over the kind of house they intend to live in, most British homes are not built according to the taste and needs of an individual person or family. Instead, new homes are built by a relatively small number of construction companies which adopt a limited range of pattern book designs, so representing a remarkably uniform image of what the 'ideal home' should be. Britain has a long tradition of speculative house building, running back to the early eighteenth century in towns like Bath and in the West End of London (see Chapter 1). Each period has produced its own ideal image of home life as Hepworth and Brindley have shown in Chapters 2 and 3. This chapter is concerned with new homes in Britain and seeks to explore how design reflects and to some extent shapes expectations of home life.
