Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 24

which contributed to the popularity of gardening was the growth of house-building
in the inter-war years. Between 1919 and 1939, four million new homes were built
in Britain (Clapson 2000), and significantly, most had private gardens. Moreover, the
standard house design which had already proved successful on new private estates,
modelled on places such as Port Sunlight, which was low-density, semi-detached
and with private gardens to the front and rear, was extended to new working-class
housing. Clearly, planners were sentient of the arguments promulgated by urban
reformers such as Lever and Rowntree: sub-standard housing, they argued, led to
an ineffectual workforce, poor health, moral decline and class unrest. To these ends,
gardens were a key feature of the new houses: they produced estates with a visual
appeal, they offered sunlight and fresh air to occupants and, most significantly, they
provided the residents with the opportunity to occupy themselves with home-centred
recreation: gardening. As a result, many working-class people enjoyed the rising
standard of living provided by suburban and council-estate housing - as this oral
testimony of a man who moved to an inter-war London County Council cottage
estate reveals: 'Before we moved in we came to the house quite a few times. It was
semi-detached and had a small front garden and not a very big back garden. We
would sit on the stairs and have our picnic and then wander around. I thought it
was smashing really' (Clapson 2000, 155). In these ways, twentieth century urban
planning gave working-class people domestic frameworks which attempted to urge
them to take up morally respectable positions without the need to resort to visible,
rule-bound and punitive power. Skeggs (1997) uses Foucault (1977) to argue that
the 'civilising' inducements that working-class women have experienced to enjoy
domestic work and child care, 'shows how pleasure was used as a form of productive
power. By trying to teach working-class women to take pleasure from bourgeois
domesticity they could be induced to do it without direct, obvious control' (Skeggs
1997, 46). Similarly, providing recreational activities which people enjoy means that
the compliance of working-class subjects is achieved amenably and with gratification
on the part of the subjects themselves: gardening gave the middle-class precisely this
kind of positive power over the lower orders.
However, not everyone enjoyed gardening and not everyone was as willing to
offer their social compliance as conveniently as middle-class commentators would
have liked. As one historian, describing photographs from the period observed: 'the
newly built estate could appear bleak and forbidding … gardens grew willy-nilly,
and war with the incipient wilderness fore and aft of the house was perhaps accepted
as a necessary evil' (Constantine 1981, 397). By way of an attempt at more direct
social regulation, council estate tenants were given handbooks which gave firm
aesthetic stipulations on how the front garden should be tended. For example, the
1933 east London Becontree Council Estate handbook:
Neglect of the garden spoils the appearance of any house. It is of special importance that
the front garden should be neat and tidy throughout the year …strive to obtain a natural
look rather than an artificial effect. Bordered edging and concrete paths do not give the
restful effect of turf with neatly trimmed edges (Preston 1995, 86).