Privacy and post-war housing in Britain

This talk will consider how ideas of privacy shaped housing design in post-war Britain, with particular reference to the evolution of courtyard/patio layouts and the work of the University of Edinburgh's Housing Research Unit in the 1960s.

The extent to which architecture and planning in post-war Britain were intended, at least in theory, to represent and encourage ideas of 'community' is well-known. This paper will explore a parallel interest in privacy, with reference to contemporary published and unpublished reports as well as actual projects. It will have three parts. The first will explore how privacy was understood between c. 1945 and 1975. The second part of the paper will discuss the evolution of the courtyard/patio house type in Britain as a particular response to these ideas of privacy. The final part of the paper will consider how this house type was received by its users, drawing on detailed investigations undertaken by the University of Edinburgh's Housing Research Unit during the 1960s.

The Unit's staff undertook several 'design in use' studies, and the results shed useful light on the lived experience of courtyard housing and residents' views of privacy. Overall, the paper is concerned not only with a specific housing type but more generally with the nature of the post-war state and its architectural manifestations.

A drive to accommodate ideas of privacy should not be seen as the harbinger of later neo-liberal individualism, but rather as evidence of the adaptability of a post-war social democracy in which planning for an idealised 'community' co-existed with increasing recognition of family-centred living.