George Speight (Nuffield College, Oxford and the Bank of England)
Abstract
Although the high level of private house-building in the 1930s was an important episode in Britain’s economic and social development, the literature has not addressed adequately the nature of the demand for these houses. In particular, the class and income characteristics of their purchasers are poorly understood. The conventional wisdom in this area is due to Swenarton and Taylor, who have argued that the vast majority of house buyers were middle class and that few manual workers could afford to buy. In fact their argument contains several important flaws. This paper uses a broader and more reliable collection of evidence to show that ‘working-class’ households broadly construed bought a large proportion of new houses from 1932-3 onwards. (The six years 1933 to 1938 account for well over half of all houses built privately in the interwar period.)
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Maxine Collett).
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: