As a child, we lived in a 1930s end-terraced house that my father (inspired by BBC's Barry Bucknall) modernised in the 1960s. My parents were sociable people and would often visit their friends, the majority of whom also lived in 1930s or Victorian houses. The latter made a different impression on the five-year-old me; they had higher ceilings, ornate carvings, ceramic floor tiles, stained glass and draughty corridors. By the mid-1960s, even the Victorian houses were starting to look different inside, with wall-to-wall carpets, brightly coloured curtains and patterned wallpaper. But the world I was born into was still somewhat drab and austere.
I remember two houses I visited with my parents that stood out and triggered anomalous familiarity. Memories of these two will flash back to me from time to time.
Both were newly built and served as harbingers of a new style of interior space. One was a maisonette in Hanwell, another was a terraced house in Hemel Hempstead New Town. This would have been sometime in the early 1960s; these new homes were quite unlike the fussy cosiness of pre-war or Victorian/Edwardian housing. We drove there in our Morris Minor along a short stretch of the newly opened M1 from Watford, my first ever motorway journey – very exciting, and futuristic.
I can't remember the people we were visiting. It could well have been a colleague of my father from work. I do remember, however, that he was keen to show off his new hi-fi, and that my father was very keen to see it. This was an entirely new concept to me, and when we saw it, at first I thought I was looking at a radiator or some form of domestic heating. Then the man took out a record and played some modern jazz. Whenever I hear Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, I get that vibe; maybe that's what he played.
The maisonette was also a new thing. The very word 'maisonette' smacked of modernity. On Lower Boston Road, it looked like a two-story semi-detached house from the outside, with large windows, white siding and brick, but you had to climb stairs on the side to get in and it was only on the upstairs. A Polish woman lived there, a friend of my mother's; we visited her during a weekday, so maybe school holidays, most likely before my brother was born.
I associate the this place with the new house in Hemel Hempstead; both were qualitatively different to the way most of my parents' friends (or indeed we) lived at the time; up-to-the-minute, spacious, clean lines, no clutter.
American style. That's what it was. Those two homes that felt instantly familiar; not from the sets of American black-and-white TV shows I watched (I Love Lucy etc), but a lifestyle that I felt I knew from before. The space age was entering the living room.
Below: I asked both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to illustrate the contrast between styles of homes. ChatGPT produced the result that resonated better with my childhood memories.
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