Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 20

(MacDonald and Porter 1990, 38), the CoID mobilised the media to 'democratise'
design. House and Garden and Ideal Home advocated modernist design, but in order
to out-reach a working-class audience the CoID enlisted the agency of Woman, a
publication which claimed by the 1950s to reach half the female population. The
design establishment created a project aimed at both manufacturers and consumers
and publications, exhibitions and events were designed with the specific aim of
educating women about the 'correct' principles of home layout, gardens and the
means to consume home durables in ways that signified 'good taste'. For example,
the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951 showcased 'open plan' room sets as a means
of advocating modernism; it also featured garden designs that drew on the geometric
abstract modernism of painters and sculptors such as Mondrian, Burra, Moore and
Hepworth. In this way, the gardens lauded by the design establishment drew on the
ideas of gardeners excited by the aesthetics of modernist painting. Note, for example,
the following description of a design by Jellicoe, who: 'designed an abstract rose
garden for Cliveden adapted from Paul Klee's The Fruit , expressing enclosure and
fecundity in a womb-like way' (Brown 1999, 235). The esoteric intellectualism
encased in these kinds of descriptions, illustrates the inaccessibility of modernist
aesthetics for working-class people: no wonder a gap appeared between what the
establishment wanted people to do and what people could actually achieve.
In this way, while the design establishment tried to train the working-class to adopt
modernist principles of 'good taste' and working-class women to make their living
rooms open plan, ordinary working-class people - as my portrait of my grandparents'
everyday gardening aesthetics illustrates - had their own means of making land-
plots into gardens and houses into homes. Judy Attfield's (1995) study of Harlow
'New Town' in the 1950s shows how architects' ideas about family life, which were
built into Harlow, were flouted by women who refused to consume domestic space
in the way in which the planners intended. Since the architects built houses which
had no relation to the residents' conception of what constituted 'home', residents
took aesthetic purchase of them and invested them with their own meanings. For
example, the Harlow women used furniture as a means to compartmentalise the
open plan living room back to the traditional parlour and private back room; and
windows, designed by planners to let in light, were shielded by nets and bedecked
with feminine ornaments (Attfield 1995, 228). In a similar way, as Figure 2.4 shows,
the windows at Bentley Avenue refused plain open glass because grandma had
them leaded, and the open-plan living room was divided by the use of the sofa.
What Attfield's work shows and what my grandparents' consumption of their home
illustrates was that, 'many chose to take possession … invest their own values,
often knowingly in contravention of the official line' (1995, 228). In the 1950s, the
working-class - most specifically women - consumed their homes as sites through
which to articulate classed and gendered identities.
Indeed, I believe that the will to impose middle-class tastes on to the working-
class 4 is still in stark evidence. The working-class aesthetic trope in Figure 2.1,
featured in the opening lines of this chapter, so valued by my family, neighbours and
4 Bourdieu (1990) terms this kind of cultural imposition 'symbolic violence'. The
terms of his theory will be dealt with in more detail in chapter 3.