Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 19

and she took that sensuous relationship with traditionally feminine objects out to the
garden.
In these ways, the garden where I grew up was expressive of an ordinary, yet
distinctive collection of classed and gendered garden aesthetics 3 which contravened
the legitimised modernist principles of the 1950s design establishment.
My First Garden in Context: Ordinary People's Appropriation of 1950s
Establishment Aesthetics
Grandma and grandad moved to their council house, which had been built in 1947, in
1951; in this way, they lived in the context of the 1945 Labour government's post-war
reconstruction plan to provide minimum housing standards for all citizens (MacDonald
and Porter 1990). During this period, the government renewed its subsidies to local
authority house-building programmes. Post-war re-building began with the 1946
New Towns Act which gave towns and cities 'expanded town' development: this
amounted to new estates - like the Stoney Lane estate my grandparents lived at - on
the town edges (Clapson 2000). The design establishment in this period was heavily
influenced by the tenets of modernism and the reconstruction plan aimed to make
modernity accessible to all citizens (Attfield 1999). For modernists, urban planning
could bring order and rationality to the built environment and it was believed that
'good design' was under-girded by functional, utilitarian values. For modernists the
form of housing determined its use. Modernism has been identified as a 'classed
and gendered practice' (Hollows 2000, 125), reflecting masculine rationalism and
upper-class privilege by valuing form over function. Its aims were to encourage
the public to reject traditional decor and superfluous 'feminine' ornament, and take
up a minimalist aesthetic. For example, domestic interiors were designed to reflect
the embrace of modernism through the use of 'open plan', which was based on the
removal of walls to reveal 'open' democratic living spaces with an emphasis on ease
and use of maintenance (Attfield 1999; MacDonald and Porter 1990). In similar vein,
modernist landscape architects Geoffrey Jellicoe, Russell Page and John Brookes
used geometric, modern art to influence their garden designs that utilised modernist
sculpture in minimalist setting. More specifically however, post-war housing was
also shot through with ideas about family life and women's role in it (Hollows 2000).
Feminist research on architecture explores the ways in which the physical layout of
post-war housing served to organise and mediate familial gender roles (Madigan
and Monroe 1990), in ways which acted to legitimate an image of 'appropriate'
working-class family life (Boys 1995). Yet while urban planning and material culture
might be produced with class and gender 'written-in' (Kirkham 1997), this does not
necessarily hold sway over their consumption.
In 1944 the Council of Industrial Design was established by the Board of Trade. Its
aims were principally to re-stimulate the growth of British industry by the promotion
of 'good design'. Using 'propaganda strategies the Government had used in wartime'
3 I am aware that garden aesthetics are also raced. Another rich possibility for further
work might be concerned to trace how the racial category of 'whiteness' (Dyer 1997) impacts
on aesthetic choices.