Flat Pack (Kitchens #4)
Prefabs – built to help counter the post war housing shortage - were actually some of the earliest examples of fitted kitchens in the UK, and came with built in fridges at time when this technology was unaffordable to most people. Jennie Thomas reflects on growing up in a post war prefab in Hackney, and Alice Wilson, whose academic work examines tiny houses, reflects on the movement as a reaction to the housing situation in contemporary Britain.
CREDITS
Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode, Jennie Thomas and Alice Wilson. Find out more about the OpHouse project.
Buy the Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations!
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
Additional guest research by Sarah Woolley.
Cover collage by Stephanie Hartman
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Hi, this is Lucy! Before this episode starts I just wanted to say thanks so much for all your lovely comments about Kitchens the series, I’m so glad you’re enjoying it. If you’d like to support the work that Lecker does - like this series -you can join as a patron for just £3 a month, which will help cover production costs. FInd out more at patreon.com/leckerpodcast
[Sound of gas hob clicking, then bursting into flame]
JT: Oh very traditional...roasts, sausages, chops, liver and bacon. [LAUGHS} Probably a bit unusually we ate macaroni cheese a lot. My mother started work as a teenager in an office, she was a clerical worker and she had macaroni cheese in a Lyons cafe and she didn't know how to make it so she guessed, and she made it like you make rice pudding. So she put milk, macaroni and cheese in a dish and put it in the oven to slowly cook and we loved it! I didn't know i didn't know how to make proper macaroni cheese until...and my mother said, oh i never knew that was how you're supposed to make it [LAUGHS]. It's still a family favorite meal.
Because she went to work, shopping was a bit different for us. We didn't shop daily. And we were quite a walk from shops. Because Hackney Downs wasn't a shopping area.
Food shopping in Britain changed hugely over the second half of the 20th century.
JT: So she would carry shopping on a Saturday back from Sainsbury's, which was about [exhales] probably three quarters of a mile walk to go to Sainsbury's or maybe a bit more - and it was a small store. There were other smaller local Jewish grocery stores. And we used to have a delivery on a Thursday evening from one of those.
I’m Jennie Thomas, I was born in Hackney, in London, E5.
With increasingly more women going to work outside of the home, the frequent trips to independent grocers were slowly being replaced by less frequent visits to the relatively new self service supermarkets. And this was facilitated by technology that had been around for a little while but hadn’t really been available yet.
JT: So that meant that food could be stored in our fridge for...we could buy meat, you know, not on a daily basis. It could be bought once, maybe twice a week, and kept in the fridge, which was perfect.
Having a fridge at home was actually pretty unusual at this time. As Helen Peavitt writes in the book Refrigerator: The Story of Cool In The Kitchen, “In Britain and Europe refrigerators were still largely the domain of higher income households, with ‘status symbol’ significance in the home well into the 1950s. Persuading the British public to buy into refrigeration was as much about disposable income as it was about marketing refrigeration in general.” And another issue with refrigerators - and appliances in general at this time - was that electricity supply in Britain wasn’t standardised yet. Though in Jennie’s kitchen, this wasn’t a problem.
JT: The adventure with the fridge was that it was gas fired, which was...I've never heard of since, I didn't even know! But if the money ran out in the meter, we had a gas meter and an electricity meter you had to put coins in. If the money ran out the gas went off. And if we'd forgotten to top up the meter - it wasn't that we were too poor, we will never poor. But if we'd forgotten to put enough money in the meter, the gas would go out and you'd have to relight the fridge. Well, you had to relight it with a pilot light, but the pilot light wasn't at the front of the fridge, it was at the back. And you had to lie down on the floor and you had a long rod with a flint and you had to flick this rod until it made a spark that lit the pilot light. Well, I wasn’t very old when it was my job to lie down on the floor and flick the pilot light to light the fridge. It was quite an adventure!
But it never occurred to me that other people didn't have a fridge. You know, I just thought it was what you did. And then I remember a school friend saying, Oh, we got a fridge. And I think I was probably subtle enough to keep my mouth shut, and say hasn't everybody got a fridge, because I’d begun to realize that a) not everybody had enough money to live as we lived and b) didn't have a house where everything came with the house.
It wasn’t just the fridge that was unusual amongst Jennie’s classmates. It was the whole kitchen.
I never knew that kitchens weren't fitted kitchens..really until I was, well I don’t know, 10, 11 whatever. It never occurred to me. I thought everybody had a kitchen like ours. In the 70s when people started to talk about fitted kitchens, it used to make my brother and I giggle because we thought, well everybody had a fitted kitchen when we were growing up but of course they didn't. But we did. Because a prefab kitchen is entirely fitted.
OPENER
[Hob clicks and bursts into flame again, the noises of the kitchen intensify; cupboard doors are shut, cutlery is rattled, pots are clashed, a collage of voices talking about kitchens begins to speak over jaunty lounge music. Each speaker is separated by a dash].
[5:00] You go in the back door - It’s a really small kitchen, it’s tiny - It’s like a tiny little box - Gas hob - So you have the stove - Worktop - Counter - Sink - A small fridge - Underneath the draining board was the gas fridge - If more than one person’s in there, everyone starts to get a bit flustered. That’s the general vibe.
This is kitchens, a podcast series by Lecker, about the most important room in the home. I’m Lucy Dearlove.
They left out any element of human emotion and emotional intelligence in what people needed from kitchens. - This kitchen is not, it’s not suitable for me, it doesn’t enable me to cook. - Kitchens are more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why? Why is that?
Episode 4: Flat Pack
JT: It was like a child's drawing of a house. The front door was in the middle, with windows to either side of it.
A quarter of British dwellings had been destroyed or severely damaged by the time the Second World War ended in 1945. Although the housebuilding efforts that started defining Britain as a nation of homeowners had begun in the interwar period - as discussed in episode 1 - it was towards the end of and after the second world war when - by necessity - the government’s housing programme was escalated.
JT: The window frames were all painted green and cream - council colours - and the slats that joined the wall partitions together on the outside were also painted green and our front door was green.
Some people launched out and painted the outsides different colors but my father was ever a conformist and he, he left it at green and cream he said it belonged to the council and if they wanted to paint it they could. Quite a convinced socialist, my dad, so he didn't, he didn't want to buy a house, he believed in paying rent to the council and he thought that was fine.
From 1942 onwards, the Burt Committee, a working party established by the wartime coalition government, were considering how to address the housing shortage caused by the Blitz, and also by unfinished slum clearance which had left many people in unsuitable and unsanitary housing. In 1944 the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was passed and the immediate solution that was decided on was temporary, pre-fabricated housing.
The Committee’s decision was influenced by many thing, including the effectiveness of mass production and economies of scale; and how armaments factories could be converted to house production. There was also a shortage of skilled construction workers and traditional construction material, and so any solution had to provide semi-skilled and unskilled jobs, which prefab construction did.
I live in South East London, where many prefabs were built after the Second World War. And it’s amazing how long many of them lasted, considering they were only ever meant to last 10 years. I moved here about 7 years ago, and can remember really clearly walking down Ivydale Road in Nunhead and being amazed to see two prefabs still standing, though they’ve since been demolished and new houses built on the site. Then there’s the famous Excalibur Estate in Catford, which consisted of 189 single story two bed prefabs made by UniSeco. It was only in the past 10 or so years that, amid protests, Lewisham council approved demolition of the prefabs - though six were listed by English Heritage. The dedication of the protestors trying to save the prefabs of the Excalibur estate seems characteristic of how positively many current and former prefab tenants feel about their homes.
Jennie Thomas’s memories of growing up in a prefab - where she lived until she was 16 - are impressively detailed.
JT: The prefab itself had two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen and sitting room. All the rooms had fitted cupboards: lots of wardrobes, cupboard space, even in the sitting room, there was a fitted cupboard. They were made of metal, and consequently got condensation on them a lot. So they were prone to grow mildew on your clothes [LAUGHS], if you weren't very careful. We had a coal fire with a back boiler and it heated the water and warmed a large airing cupboard. So yes, it was luxurious I realise now. Both my parents had grown up in very crowded households. They had seven brothers and sisters, and they probably appreciated the space. They married in 1940. But my father was away for the next six years. And they moved into the prefab during 1946, soon after he came home.
The prefab was one of 25 built on Hackney Downs. Like many boroughs, Hackney loaned land temporarily to London County Council for the construction of the prefabs. It was a triangular piece of land, and as Jennie’s family lived at number 1, they were in the point of the triangle, which meant that they had a degree of privacy that was unusual at the time.
JT: So it was like living in a detached house. I never thought about it. I just thought it was what everybody did, until I started going to other people's houses. And I realized they didn't all live the way I did. And I didn't think of myself as...we weren't poor. My father was a skilled manual worker. So we had...and my mother went to work from when I was very small. So we had a comfortable living. And it suited us very well.
There were around 11 different types of prefabs among the 150,000 built after WW2 and a key feature of the vast majority of them was a ‘service unit’ or ‘heart unit’. This was entirely prefabricated: a single unit for the bathroom and a single unit for the kitchen, built along one wall, so they could be installed back to back, with the plumbing running through the wall between them
JT: The towel rail was heated with water which came...you lit the fire in the sitting room and that heated the water and on the back boiler and water...that warmed the airing cupboard and the water flowed through a towel rail in the bathroom.
LUCY: That’s amazing.
JT: So that we had a heated towel rail. It was an amazing feat of engineering, it was, it was beautiful.
The prefab kitchen was designed by George Féjer who was originally from Hungary, and who later went on to work for the kitchen company Hygena. Fejer was thought to have been inspired by the Frankfurt Kitchen. The Frankfurt kitchen is often named as a huge influence on the modern fitted kitchen, but I haven’t really touched on it yet as Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky, the Austria architect who designed the kitchen for the new frankfurt housing programme in the 1920s, was directly influenced by people like LIlian Gilbreth and Christine Frederick, so it made sense to focus on their work instead which I did in Episode 2 of this series. What was notable about the Frankfurt Kitchen in this context was that it was completely prefabricated and designed to be installed quickly and easily in mass housing, which explains why it was a useful influence for the prefab kitchen.
JT: It was one big metal unit.
You go in the back door and to your right...draining board, sink, gas hob, work top. And underneath the draining board was the gas fridge, and under the sink a cupboard for detergent and stuff. Moving on from there, an oven underneath the hob, and a grill and then above there, a plate warming rack above the hob, all built in. And then underneath the last part of the worktop were cupboards and drawers, for cutlery and whatever else you wanted to keep.
The worktops were cream enamel and the cupboards were green metal and the metal went up the wall and then set into it was a large saucepan rack. And then above the draining board was a cupboard where we kept medicines and those kinds of things. So out of the reach of children.
Then there was a door to the sitting room and then back down the other side was a pantry cupboard with a drop down flap that you could use for food preparation. And then a space where we had a dining table...Utility, the Utility brand, and for four chairs, it was an extendable table, but we kept it square and a treadle Singer sewing machine our mother had and then a larder cupboard with a cold shelf. So full length floor to ceiling larder cupbaord in the corner with a cold shelf. So everything you could possibly want in a kitchen, and room for four people to sit round a table comfortably.
This was different from the Frankfurt Kitchen, which didn’t leave any space for people to eat in their kitchens - George Féjer and the other people responsible for the prefab’s design must have decided this was an important thing to keep.
At the time the fitted kitchen was a novelty for Jennie’s family, though many of the people they knew managed perfectly fine without one. Likewise, the fridge made life easier, but at that time people lived without one, using cold shelves, and meat safes made of stone and metal that chilled food like meat and dairy for a limited amount of time. Regular deliveries, and the fact that many women still worked predominantly inside the home and had time to shop more frequently, meant that produce didn’t necessarily need to be kept for a long time.
For many people in the UK these days it’s incredibly difficult to imagine life now without a fridge. Our entire food system, pretty much, is built around refrigeration prolonging life and allowing freighting over great distances. As Helen Peavitt writes in Refrigerator: “In the modern world our domestic refrigerators are food hubs: the nexus from which we plan our meals, store foods and focus our food consumption. The refrigerator has made itself indispensable to modern lives and eating habits, with our dependency on them growing inexorably.”
It’s what makes appliance poverty such a huge issue. Research from the organisation Turn2Us in 2020 found that 2.8 million people were living without a freezer (1 in 10), and 900,000 people were living without a fridge (1 in 30). Katie Mather wrote an incredibly moving piece for the Kitchens zine published alongside this series describing her personal experience of appliance poverty, and in it she mentioned that Which? Magazine recommends spending between £200 and £500 on a new fridge freezer to benefit from energy saving technology (saving money in the long-run), and even second hand or refurbished models can still cost around £100 to £150. These amounts are just unaffordable to those on the poverty line - and so, these people are unable to participate in the food system in the way it’s set up. It means you can’t buy fresh food in advance, you can’t store fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish. You can’t plan ahead with your shopping and fit it around your working hours. And that’s what our lives today demand. Most people don’t have time to shop every day – although this is more common in cities like London with the proliferation of late night convenience stores and metro supermarkets around most corners. But the food system is designed around less frequent shopping in bulk and being able to store goods in the fridge until you’re ready to eat them.
So all things considered it wasn’t surprising how popular the prefab kitchens were with their tenants, particularly women with jobs outside of the home like Jennie’s mother.
In a report presented at the International Scientific Management Congress in Brussels in July 1951, called The Effect of the Design of the Temporary Prefabricated Bungalow on Household Routines, it was acknowledged that the kitchen planning of the bungalow was extremely popular.
80 per cent of the housewives surveyed in a sample preferred the prefab kitchen arrangement to that in their new homes, and 98 per cent to that in pre-1939 dwellings.
The general conclusion of the report was that the layout of the prefabs made housework easier. It was assumed that the satisfaction expressed was partly due to the fact that for many people the prefab represented the first home of their own, but it was also clear that many design aspects of the prefab - including the kitchen and fridge - would have been beneficial additions or features of permanent housing.
LD: Are there any features from the kitchen like any little quirks of it that you still miss now that you thought in your own kitchen might Oh, I'd really like to have those.
JT: It was all very compact. And the way I live in my kitchen now, I think, is part of knowing that. I've planned mine...I had a new kitchen about five years ago and I planned it very carefully. I'm very good at working in an orderly space. And I think that's something to do with always having had enough worktop, proper worktop, you know? It was enameled, easy to keep clean, rounded edge, all that stuff had all been thought of. And I think that's probably influenced how I am about organizing things in a kitchen
[MUSIC STARTS]
Place where I lived is a field again now. It was a field before and it's a field now. It was only ever temporary and there were, you know, there were plenty of council flats around us with with tarmac playgrounds and you know no green space at all. So it was it's not a an answer for crowded, high density housing at all. But the inside design is definitely an example that could be followed. And when I see container houses now, I hope that they're as well designed...because it really was.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
I thought it was really interesting that Jennie drew a parallel between prefabs and what she called container housing, which is the increasingly reported event of people living in shipping. I guess the obvious parallels are that it’s relatively easy to install compact living, but the less obvious parallels are that container housing has sprung up as a temporary - if not slightly unsustainable - solution to a housing crisis. I don’t want to compare post war housing shortages with today’s unaffordability of housing, because they’re very different, but it’s worth noting how these solutions...maybe reactions would be a better description...present themselves.
In trying to learn more about container housing, I came across Alice Wilson, an activist and academic based in York whose work focuses on ‘tiny houses’.
AW: It's a very sociological answer. So I apologize in advance. But there isn't a standard definition of what a tiny house is. I want you to imagine it more like a Venn diagram, right. So in one circle, there's ‘off grid’. In another circle, there's ‘smaller than 50 meters square’ so that some tiny houses are quite big, actually. But the general sort of folk definition is 40 to 50 meters square. Another circle would be like, something to do with a deliberate attitude, or something to do with a value driven lifestyle, summat like that. So there's lots of overlap, say, with tiny house residents and veganism, they're not the same thing. Lots of people who are vegan don't live in tiny house, blah, blah, vice versa. But tiny houses sort of are a mixture of different amounts of overlapping of these circles.
For the purposes of my own research, I include converted vans I include narrowboats I include shipping containers, people who live in horseboxes, like the extreme end of tiny houses. I also include people who like secretly live in their artists' studios, you know, where they like renting it for a few 100 quid and no one knows they live there, but they just got a little mattress on the floor. Yeah, kind of thing. But the more sort of conventional definition, like social media-wise would always be the trailer based model.
My focus is specifically on women. Whenever you're interested in power, you have to be interested in gender as well really, because it's such a world-making system. There is no area in England – none – that is affordable to a woman on a median salary. So women need 12 times their average earnings to qualify for a mortgage, men need on average, eight, this is a bad situation for both groups, because banks tend to lend five times your earnings. So this isn't good for anyone, but it's worse for women. And of course, who is predominantly doing unpaid care work, raising children and so on? 67% of statutory homeless people are women. People think that that isn't the case. Because when they think of homelessness, they think of rough sleepers. Most rough sleepers are men because the streets are too dangerous for women to sleep rough on. So they'd rather take any any any other sofa, shelter or anything like that. But….so the housing crisis is bad for most people, it's especially aggressive to women.
Alice’s personal interest in the tiny house movement came in a roundabout way.
AW: I don't know how I got to tiny houses, I don't want to make something up and lie to you. I just I think it was just housing seems to be one of the things that really keeps people trapped. How are people getting out of this trap? Tiny houses is one of the ways that get out of the trap. That's it.
When I'd finished my undergraduate degree, I got another full time job. I was working the whole time through my degree, and got a job because I wanted to buy a house with a partner and I needed to have so many payslips to prove that I could keep earning minimum wage for the foreseeable future. And I thought this feels like a bit of a scam. I don't know about you, but this feels like a bit...bit of a racket. And it got me thinking about housing, and how that seems to be one of the centrifugal forces that catch and trap people into the places that they're in. So the single most powerful predictor of if you are going to be wealthy...it's got nothing to do with how hard you work and where you live, and all that the most powerful predictor is if your parents are wealthy, that's it. Most wealth is inherited.
There’s a slight economic and social conundrum when it comes to the demographics of tiny house residents that Alice has encountered in her research.
AW: People choose tiny houses overwhelmingly because of economic constraints. But of course, that choice is only available to people with a certain amount of financial and or social capital already, right? Because the average house price in the UK now is something like £280,000, something like that, the average cost of a tiny house by comparison, microscopic about 40 grand, nothing in comparison with that, do you have 40 Grand? i don't! I couldn’t just rustle...it's cheap in the context, but that's just because the context is appalling. That doesn't mean that tiny houses are actually affordable, you know, but they are more affordable.
So taking a pragmatic view, it's gonna be more achievable to you to save up say 10 grand and get the rest on a personal loan than it is….if you saved up 10 grand, you wouldn't be able to get a mortgage because of it's not enough of a deposit. And maybe you don't earn enough that they'd feel comfortable to guarantee you a mortgage loan and that kind of thing. So it does offer more flexibility and welcomes more people in to the type of security that you can enjoy when you own the place that you live in. This is counterbalanced by the fact that most tiny houses are illegal, they're not given residential status, right? So people who are living in them are living in them in this liminal zone, like technically, it's illegal. But if nobody finds out, or if nobody complains, or you know, like, we just grow the bushes really high around the...which of course, means that people who have a grandma or their like dog walker’s cousin has got a massive house with a massive garden that's completely private and not overlooked. They're again protected. So it just really highlights all the different ways in which these different forms of capital: financial, social, cultural, add layers, like a cocoon to protect certain people and, you know, conversely, expose others who don't have those protections, to much, much more instability.
One of the big draws for people interested in tiny house living seems to be the flexibility to customise your space exactly how you want. And also the act itself of customising that space can be really beneficial.
AW There's a lot of evidence to show already that some of the reason that things like exercising or gaining a new skill, for example, how to use a drill, how to clad the outside of a tiny house, is good for your mental health, because it gives you evidence to show that you are effective at stuff. And one of the core things that we can do to make ourselves feel great or terrible is to feel in control or not in control of our lives, which is part of the reason why contemporary working practices can be so harmful because most people are not given control over what they do in their day, who they report to, the content of their work life. And of course, the content of their work life is really the content of their life, because they spend a majority of their waking hours there, right? So building a tiny house, especially for women, because construction is such a masculinized industry, loads of the women I've spoken to, didn't even know what a drill was, how to differentiate it between, you know, a monkey wrench or spanner, any of that stuff. And proving to themselves how much they can do, has been transformative in their self esteem.
I don’t know specifically what it is about tiny houses that might encourage women to take more control over their space. Perhaps it’s the lower stakes in terms of how much the property is worth compared to traditional housing. Or perhaps it’s a product of this slightly counter cultural aspect of living that Alice has touched on.
She’s encountered some real rethinking of traditional domestic roles and identities.
AW: I spoke to one woman we'll call her Sarah, I anonymize the names of all the people I've spoken to, she's early 30s living in South Africa. They live in their tiny house with three kids. And a big part of what we were talking about was how the design of her house helps her to parent in a much more stress free way. So this is in the design component in that she can wash the dishes whilst the kids are in the bath, and she can see what's going on at all times, they’re like so close to each other, you could never do that in a traditional home, completely separate rooms and downstairs miles away from each other. She can wash the dishes and feed her kids whilst she's cooking. It's all in like a contained area.
When the Frankfurt Kitchens, and other similar separate kitchen designs across Europe, were installed in the 1920s and 30s, it’s reported that one of the difficulties women had with this new design was looking after their babies and children while cooking, as the separate, fitted kitchen design meant there was no extra room for a table or play area. And this design still persists in homes across the UK. Even though I’m not a parent, I totally get the appeal of what Alice is relaying here. If you can multitask supervising your kids in the bath while you cook dinner or do laundry, that’s definitely freeing up time for you to do much more enjoyable things.
AW: They moved into this tiny house because it would be so much cheaper and allow them both to work part time so they could equally parent their kids. That was a real priority for them, you know that the parenting would be totally shared. And that wouldn't have been possible in a traditional home because it would have been too expensive. And the higher earner who is usually the male would have feel a logical obligation to work, to provide money for the family. And that just perpetuates that gender, you know archetype. So I think tiny houses are likely to be correlated with heterosexual couples, sharing more and being more...the whole thing about tiny houses that that you kind of picking a bit more what's really important to you rather than just recycling what you've inherited is normal, right? And gender norms are what we inherit. So it makes sense to me logically that if you're critically interrogating, how do we live? then your relationship norms would also fall into that bucket of stuff that you're critically engaging with, right?
Another aspect of tiny house living that I was really keen to talk to Alice about was the fridge. There’s been such a move towards towards bigger and bigger fridges. Go back even a couple of decades int eh UK and the majority of people would have a fridge that fitted under their kitchen counter. I guess we would now call it a half size fridge. But now more and more people have a fridge that is tall, it might combine a freezer, or it might be an american style one with double doors. In a piece for the site Treehugger, the writer Lloyd Alter muses on the changing role - and proportions - of the fridge over the past few decades. He writes: “The big fridge, the big car, and the big grocery store were all part of one economic machine; in a sense, you cannot have one without the other two.”
But for most tiny house residents, the nature of their home means that a big fridge – or even an average size fridge – is impossible. Although there are exceptions
AW: So say for example, one one woman, she's in her early 20s, she bought and moved into a tiny house next to her sister, it's quite cool, they live together as neighbors now. But she really loves to cook, she loves it. She loves to entertain, she loves food, she spends a lot of time in the kitchen. And it's quite unusual for tiny houses to have a full full full size fridge. But she designed the whole house around the full size fridge, like how to get it in through the door, how to make it so that you could open the double doors...like a big American style fridge, right? And be able to have everything else all around it. This isn't the usual way to do it. But that's one of the great things that tiny houses can offer is that level of bespoke-ness. Right? And most tiny houses have the kind of fridge that's sort of like a 50 litre one, you know, so it's not like a camper van, little one. It's like a half size one. The thing that people complain about the most is that a fridge that small, there's no freezer space ice cream for nobody! Zero
But that it does encourage them to buy more often and a smaller amount of produce. Yeah, you can't save loads of leftovers and stuff like that. So you you're eating what you're making, like as you go. And people do a lot of batch cooking, it seems like so they'll do one big pan of like pasta, quinoa, potatoes, whatever and have that as the base and then put a bit of salad one day a bit chickpeas, a bit of chicken the next day or whatever and like make the meals like that, because it's really easy to make a mess in a small space. Anyone who's been in a small if you've ever been camping, you know that everything just looks a state all the time. Everywhere you go, you're hit with the decision that you made three minutes ago. And this is this is great.
The cooling industry, which includes air conditioning, as these units use similar refrigerants to those found in fridges, accounts for around 10% of CO2 emissions worldwide. That’s more than aviation and shipping combined. The conscious choice to live...smaller makes sense in the context of what Alice said earlier about many tiny house residents leading a value driven lifestyle. Alice says that the tiny house residents she’s spoken to as a general rule think a lot about the environment and their relationship with it.
AW: We all have this insane idea that when we put things in the bin, we're throwing them away, as if there is an away that we can throw it to...the earth is one place, one ecosystem that...there isn't an away, you might as well chuck it in your back garden. It's a fantasy. But that fantasy enables us to keep consuming and throwing away, which is vital to sustain the type of economic setup that we have. And tiny houses...that isn't so much the case, you know, you're more aware of, of what you create, and what you waste because many of them are off grid, or at least partially off grid. Right? Yeah. And because so many of them don't have, like legal residential status. They don't have rubbish collection, you know, there's no bin people come in to get so they have to sort out all their own waste all the time. And you can only have a small bin right. So you're constantly confronted with your food, your waste, your mess, your everything. A lot of the women say that they end up tidying up and cleaning up a lot more often, like multiple times a day, but that the overall amount of time in their lives that they spend cleaning is significantly less.
Like prefabs, tiny houses aren’t a permanent, perfect solution to a broken housing system. But they are a solution that some people have embraced, with extremely positive results for those involved. This isn’t the cramped unsanitary housing that resulted in legal minimum space standards being enforced in the early to mid 20th cdentury, this is a relatively affordable flexible way of living that allows people to take control of the space they exit in. And I think - like prefabs- - there’s a lot to be learned from how people approach kitchen design from within these constraints. It forces you to consider what is really important to you - and what you can afford to leave behind.
AW: So one example that comes to my mind straightaway is a woman in 60s, who is disabled, she periodically needs to use a wheelchair and like walking aids and stuff like that. And so her whole house is like longer, wider and shorter. So she’s got more space to move around in her kitchen, everything is accessible from when she’s sitting down, she doesn't always need to be sat down. But so her fridge is like a drawer system, rather than an opening one. It's two drawers. One is a fridge one is freezer, the whole thing completely customized, really good. It's perfect for her. She started crying when she told me moving into her house. She was like I never ever thought that I would be able to cook the way I want to and live the way I want to and move around a house that didn't constantly remind me that I'm disabled, and now she doesn’t even think about it any more.
[PENSIVE MUSIC STARTS]
AW: At the moment, we're looking at retrofitting a decommissioned commercial property into units of self finish, one and two bedroom, tiny house flats.
Alice is actually in the process of building her own tiny house community in the increasingly expensive city of York where she lives.
AW: So well, we'll provide the shell and really awesome community spaces, we've got a big kitchen, co-working spaces, a sauna on the go, a cafe where we can do like blues nights and open mic nights and stuff like really, really awesome. Big gardens and that, And then you decide you want to come and live with us. So you come in and you finish off the walls, the kitchen, the bathroom, the fitting, like where things are partitioned as to where your bedroom wants to be, if it's open plan or like as much autonomy as we can conceivably give you within the parameters of the planning permission that we have to get legally in order to carry the project through sure you know that there's lots of like juggling going on with trying to keep everyone happy and still keep the heart of the project true.
Her and her co-directors Rebecca and Helen want to offer genuinely affordable housing to people shut out of the current property market.
AW: The most important thing is that it's radically affordable, like more affordable than any, any anything else being offered. So we are willing to make compromises in order to provide that thing, that's the most important thing. A community of people who can really afford - properly afford not just nominally afford, you know. Like the definition of affordable housing is 80% of market rent prices. But market rent prices are not attached to anything. They're not linked to income, they're not linked to anything. So to say that 80% of that is affordable is a nonsense? Yeah, ludicrous. Yeah. So we're working on a model of affordability that's directly related to the local housing benefit amount.
The OpHouse project is in its early days, but Alice is incredibly positive about where it has the potential to end up.
LD What do you envisage it to be like in that community?
AW: Really, really good. Really friendly, really dignified and very beautiful. It's such an untruth, it's such a robbery that you know, working class and poor people have no aesthetic sensibilities, that they don't care what stuff looks like that they're not also infatuated with beauty and design like the rest of us are, that's not something that should just belong to people with money. So what I imagine it's like to be there is really beautiful, and a happy, happy mixture of individual private space and shared community space, where you can have whatever wacky designs you feel like inside and that people participate in a shared life there together. That seems to be what a lot of people are asking us for, you know, unlike our list of people who want to live on the project, and It kind of speaks to what everyone fundamentally is looking for, right, which is meaningful connection to other human beings essentially. Right. That's why we do all the stuff we do. So I hope that that's what it provides.
Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.
Thanks to my contributors on this episode, Jennie Thomas and Alice Wilson
There’s also a print zine featuring original essays and illustrations about kitchens released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com
Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music also by Jeremy, and by Blue Dot Sessions
Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.
Additional guest research by Sarah Woolley.
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