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Bring back bungalows! Snobs hate them. No one builds them any more.



Bungalows have been the butt of derision for decades. But the irony is that the British, in their modest, understated way, would actually prefer to live in a bungalow more than any other type of building.

Survey after survey shows that the bungalow always comes out on top. ‘The Bungalow’ even remains the third most popular name for our homes, after The Cottage and Rose Cottage.

Older people are particularly keen on them — they are so much easier to clean, so much more convenient for security measures and, of course, easier to get around in, without all those stairs to negotiate.


Low level living: The popularity of the bungalow, like this show house in Maidstone in Kent, soared in the 1930s and 40s but just 300-a-year are now built



Bunging high: The bungalow may not be favoured by the property snobs, but it is the home Brits prefer

And yet no one seems to be catering for the legions of bungalow lovers. In 2009, only 300 bungalows, out of 100,000 new properties, were built in the whole country and many more were demolished. Just 2 per cent of our national housing stock is taken up by bungalows — even though 30 per cent of the nation are longing to live in one.

Now Policy Exchange, a Right-of-centre think tank much favoured by the Prime Minister, is determined to remedy the situation. In a new report, it suggests that, with an ageing population and a third of us keen to move into bungalows, they could help solve the current housing crisis.


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‘Older people, currently living in large family homes, might want to downsize to a bungalow, which is smaller and easier to maintain, as well as being on one floor and offering outside space,’ says the report’s author Alex Morton.

‘There are huge numbers of spare rooms in homes older people are currently living in. What are needed are the homes that older people like and so would like to move into. But planning policy prevents these homes from being built.’


Almost a third of people say they would prefer to live in a bungalow but very few have been built since the boom in the 1940s when prefabricated homes went up quickly






Bungalows are still popular on the Norfolk Broads and in large parts of Wales





The style of bungalows has been updated over the years, with many designed by owners as self-build projects

The trouble is that the Coalition, which is of course desperate to expand the number of homes in our crowded little island, insists on new developments cramming in at least 30 houses per hectare.

Bungalows — spreading horizontally, eating up all that lovely space — don’t fit the bill. As a result, half of all newly built homes are one-bedroom or two-bedroom flats.

EXPORT FROM INDIA: UK'S FIRST BUNGALOW BUILT IN THE 1860S




The idea of using bungalows to solve a housing problem is not new.

The term is thought to date back to 1659, an anglicised version of a single-storey Indian hut called a 'bangala' used to house English sailors.

Britain's first bungalow was built by Colonel Bragg who erected a lodge with Indian features in Norwood in London in the 1860s.

In 1882 pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti became one of the first people in England to die in a bungalow.


They took off in the early 20th century in the UK and America when they were adopted by the Arts and Crafts movement.

Fashionable for much of the first half of the century, they featured widely in the Ideal Home Exhibition.

Bungalows became more popular in Britain after the First World War, with thousands of prefabricated properties built during and after the Second World War to house returning soldiers and their families.

They were updated with more stylish designs in the 1960s and 1970s, which have not dated well.

A best-selling book in the 1970s was Bungalow Bliss, a self-build guide by Frank MacDonald.

Bungalows are said to be most popular in Wales, where up to 35 per cent of people say it is their dream home of choice.


At the height of the 2007 financial crash it emerged that bungalows had held their value better than conventional houses.

By June 2008 detached homes had dropped by 1.5 per cent and flats 2.9 per cent, but bungalows were down by only 0.6 per cent.

If we did come to our senses and started building bungalows instead, we would be reviving a British craze that has been going strong, here and abroad, for more than three centuries.

Our taste for the bungalow began in the 17th century, when British expats in India, working for the East India Company, fell for the local one-storey thatched houses, built in the Bengali style — thus the name bungalow, derived from the Hindi word ‘bangla’, meaning Bengali.

These banglas also had verandahs, itself another Hindi word, meaning balustrade or balcony.

The housing style caught on quickly in colonial India, as a 1676 entry in the diary of the splendidly named Streynsham Master, working in the India Office, reveals: ‘It was thought fitt to sett up Bungales or Hovells for all such English in the Company’s service.’

Still, it took several centuries for the style to be brought back to these shores by returning colonial servants.

Of course, there had been one-storey houses in Britain, ever since prehistoric man first threw a primitive roof over a few rough stone walls. But the crucial thing about the first British bungalows of the late 19th century was that they were a positive style choice from the beginning.

Bungalows may have often been mocked by supposed sophisticates like Prince Charles, who has called them ‘homogenised boxes’.


But the people who really matter — the people who live in them — have always loved them; in stark contrast to the high-density tower blocks that crazily misguided planners commissioned by the thousand from the Fifties onwards.

Bungalows satisfied the national desire for home ownership on a limited budget, provided a pleasant touch of exotic history and met our island taste for things with a seaside flavour: the first British bungalows were built at Westgate-on-Sea and Birchington, both on the Kent coast, in 1869.

They soon became a popular form of seaside architecture all around our coast; not least because they’re less likely to block the sea view of the bungalow behind you.


Even bungalows that aren’t by the sea have that same advantage over high-rise new developments — they don’t block the neighbours’ light in the way those ‘streets-in-the-sky’ do.

That original seaside connection also gave bungalows a helpful association with the Victorian faith in the health-giving properties of the seaside. The Victorian artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, came to one of those first bungalows in Birchington to recuperate from an acute kidney disease. He died in the bungalow in 1882.

Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fashion for bungalows took off — in 1922 housebuyers were snapping up The Daily Mail Bunglow Book in their droves. This was a collection of the best designs from that year’s Daily Mail Architects Competition for Labour-Saving Bungalows.



True British homes: Bungalows satisfied the national desire for home ownership on a limited budget and became popular in the late 19th century

The bigger homes in the book offered considerable floor space, with the option of both ‘lounge-halls’ and ‘dining-lounges’ — these were the days before the lounge was a room, and a word, in its own right.

Those years between the wars were the golden days of British house-building — and British bungalow-building — in the new, spreading suburbs.

The growth of the suburbs changed the face of the country. Four million houses were built, three quarters of them private sales.

In 1914, only 10 per cent of the 7.75 million British households belonged to owner-occupiers; the rest were owned by private landlords. By 1938, there were 3.75 million owner-occupiers out of 11.75 million households.







Not fans: Prince Charles called bungalows 'homogenised boxes' while writer GK Chesterton called Surrey with all its bungalows 'the debatable land between London and England'




By the time of World War II, the popularity of the bungalow had been strongly rooted in the British heart.

In 1943, the Mass Observation social report recorded the housing wishes of the British population: ‘There can be no doubt that flats are unpopular with the great majority of English people. In the present survey, for every one person who said that she would like to live in a flat, ten said that they would like to live in a small house or bungalow.’

But the very popularity of the bungalow gave rise to the snobbish dislike of them.


As is so often in the case in our class-obsessed country, things that were popular among the rising lower-middle classes were attacked by their supposed social superiors.

In 1927, the word ‘bungaloid’ was coined as an insult; the Daily Express talked of how ‘hideous allotments and bungaloid growth make the approaches to any city repulsive’.

The new land of bungaloid suburbia — neither city nor country, but on the fringes of both — sparked a passionate snobbery.



This Hallmark 'Sussex Bungalow' from 1963 was designed to recast the bungalow as being at the cutting edge of modern living





The Policy Exchange think tank believes a new wave of bungalows could help to solve the housing crisis, by encouraging older people who live in large family homes to downsize

G.K. Chesterton called bungalow-rich Surrey ‘the debatable land between London and England. It is not a county but a border; it is there that South London meets and makes war on Sussex’.

The snobbery continues into the modern age, with the patronising suggestion of a connection between suburban, bungaloid values and a safe, twee, chintzy dullness.

The word became an insult in its own right — Joan Collins’s intellectually unpretentious beau, Bill Wiggins, was nicknamed Bungalow Bill because, it was said, he ‘had nothing much up top but a hell of a lot down below’.

That snobbery lives on in the current opposition by the Government, and by developers, to bungalows, the homes people actually want to live in.

The new Policy Exchange report has at last suggested that people should live how they like to live: by removing planning powers from local councils, and instead letting local homeowners vote on proposed new developments.

Given half a chance, local people wouldn’t vote for more tower blocks, packed with tiny flats, but for their favourite sort of building instead — the bungalow.

How wonderful if the Government passed the legislation that allowed this to go ahead — there’s never been a better time for the Bungalow Bill.Harry Mount is the author of How England Made The English, published by Viking.

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