The history of the 20th-century British home is also the history of shopping, advertising, fashion, technology and social aspiration. For anyone who was a child in the orange-coloured 1970s, nothing quite equals the roll call of that era's brand names for conjuring the spirit of place and time.
Certainly, Ben Highmore's book on the 20th-century home makes full use of the evocative mood music of well-known brands. He also draws a lot of his material from television, the medium that above all has brought the culture of mass advertising into the front room/lounge/sitting room/drawing room (of course, this is a subject riven with class calibrations) of the British home. Chapters dealing with the home's constituent parts have headings that are cosily suburban and redolent of the kindly, state-sponsored information pamphlets of the postwar years: "Put the Kettle on"; "Mind the Step"; "Do Come Again"; and "Now Wash Your Hands".
There is a great deal to be enjoyed in this book. Highmore, professor of cultural studies at the University of Sussex, is interested in how the ordinary home has become a vehicle for self-expression and what that, in turn, tells us about the wider context of the way we live now. He tells the reader that "the vast terrain of the more modest house is my concern and my muse" and he digs up some excellent details on architecture, household objects and the shifting mores of domestic life. And he manages to fit in a number of domestic objects – some still with us, others consigned to the antiques' graveyard of nostalgia: among them the duvet (once the continental quilt), the teasmade, the bidet, deodorant, electric blankets, Lincrusta wallpaper and those specially built cabinets in which primitive televisions were often concealed.
Along the way, there is an excellent snippet on how British surrealist artists used images of small rooms, staircases and interiors in their paintings. A tantalising paragraph tells us that in 1948 a Mass Observation survey found that of those correspondents who cared what colour their walls were, more than half preferred them painted green. Pleasingly, Highmore devotes a couple of pages to the airing cupboard, an endangered feature of the home since the advent of the combi boiler, but perfect, as he puts it, for "growing yoghurt, for germinating tomatoes and for the important business of growing copper sulphate crystals".
The book's weakness, however, lies in its lack of any serious exploration of that "profound social change" to which Highmore so often alludes. There are too many sweeping generalisations: the statement, for instance, that "children are now much more present in the home than they have ever been" is not backed by evidence. The extracts he has chosen, from a wide range of advice books, magazines, memoirs and Mass Observation, are often arresting and vivid, but they tend to illustrate change rather than to support any examination as to why the change occurred. As an example of aspiration as depicted in TV sitcoms, Highmore gives us a description of Bob and Thelma's new house in the 1970s sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, with its serving hatch and underfloor heating, but he does not support this with an explanation of the wider social and economic changes in working-class England that this kind of house would have represented to the show's viewers.
While Highmore is a sprightly guide through the vicissitudes of the past 40 years in the British home, I found him less persuasive on the world before the 1970s, which he tends simplistically to characterise as quaintly genteel and hidebound. This leads him to some startling conclusions. On pondering the wing-backed armchair, so popular in 19th- and early 20th-century sitting rooms, Highmore jests that the wings might be there to stop the head of some inebriated gentleman from lolling; becoming serious, he decides that their purpose was to force the sitter into a position that suggested "moral rectitude". The dull truth is that they were there to keep out the draught.
