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    Bungalows
    Bungalows
    Bungalows
    Ebook98 pages36 minutes

    Bungalows

    By Kathryn Ferry

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    About this ebook

    Now synonymous with the single storey home, when the bungalow was introduced to Britain in the late 1860s it had more elaborate connotations. Appropriated by colonial officials in Bengal, this humble dwelling was transformed upon its arrival on the Kent coastline into a new type of holiday home, complete with veranda and servant quarters. These first Western examples became very popular amongst the upper middle-class and the elderly,and crucially also attracted artistic inhabitants, setting the tone for the bungalow as a Bohemian escape well into the twentieth century. Focusing on the British bungalow up to the Second World War, Kathryn Ferry here explores its social, cultural and architectural development, revealing what the very earliest versions looked like and why at the peak of their popularity bungalows were so ubiquitous.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 10, 2014
    ISBN9781784420017
    Bungalows

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      Book preview

      Bungalows - Kathryn Ferry

      use.

      AN ELITE RETREAT

      THE FIRST BOOK specifically dedicated to bungalow design was published in 1891 by the architect Robert Alexander Briggs. Entitled Bungalows and Country Residences, it featured the following definition:

      A bungalow in England has come to mean neither the sun-proof squat house of India nor the rough log hut of colder regions. It is not necessarily a one-storied building, nor is it a country cottage. A bungalow essentially is a little ‘nook’ or ‘retreat’. A cottage is a little house in the country, but a bungalow is a little country house – a homely, cosy little place, with verandahs and balconies, and the plan so arranged as to ensure complete comfort with a feeling of rusticity and ease.

      As conceived by the Victorians, a bungalow was a building concerned with relaxation and recreation. This ensured that the earliest residents were necessarily wealthy, but rapid social change opened up the health benefits and bohemian lifestyle associated with bungalows to a wider population. The late-nineteenth-century invention of the ‘weekend’ provided more free time; improved transport infrastructure made escape possible; and mass-production of materials, and even of entire structures, enabled bungalows to be built on a budget. By 1910 the word could be applied to dwellings quite different in appearance, but nonetheless united by their usage. During the inter-war building boom the weekend or holiday bungalow began to be superseded by the self-consciously labour-saving suburban bungalow. This book uncovers the bungalow’s early popularity both as a structure and as an idea.

      The story begins on the Indian sub-continent with the Hindi and Mahratti term bangla, meaning ‘of or belonging to Bengal’. This was the basis for the words bangalla, bungelo and banggolo, in use by the seventeenth century to describe indigenous bamboo huts with mud walls, thatched roofs and verandahs, built upon raised platforms. When European traders began to settle in India, it was in this type of vernacular building that they lived. Adaption followed adoption and, as commercial interests gave way to increasing colonial control between 1770 and 1830, the Anglo-Indian bungalow emerged as a distinctive dwelling for European officials. Its prototype was clearly revealed in the similarity of design, not to mention its name, but the new purpose-built bungalow also came to be defined by a detached status within its own grounds or compound. After 1815 this type of dwelling was also erected in the newly created colonial ‘hill stations’ used as temporary refuges from the stifling summer heat. This less formal setting helped lend the bungalow an aura of freedom and relaxation that influenced its future transfer to Britain.

      Until the mid-eighteenth century familiarity with the term ‘bunglo’ was restricted to the European community in India, but knowledge gradually filtered back to Britain. The artists Thomas and William Daniell painted influential views of Indian landscapes and antiquities during the 1780s, and William Hodges published two volumes of drawings upon his return from a six-year residence. In Travels in India, 1780–3 (1793), Hodges described the ‘large bungelow’ of a senior East India Company officer at Lucknow, where he stayed in 1781:

      Bungalows are ... generally raised on a base of brick, one, two or three feet from the ground, and consist of only one storey; the plan of them usually is a large room in the centre for an eating and sleeping room, and rooms at each corner for sleeping; the whole is covered with one general thatch, which comes low to each side, the spaces between the angle rooms are viranders or open porticos to sit in during the evenings ... Sometimes the center viranders at each end are converted into rooms.

      The ‘virander’ began to appear in British architecture following its inclusion in John Plaw’s pattern book Sketches for Country Houses, Villas and Rural Dwellings, published in 1800. Many other Indian words and ideas found their way into the everyday discourse of Victorian Britons, especially after the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 and the subsequent extension of imperial power. By then the bungalow was not only understood as a concept; it was also emerging as a distinctive new type of building back in Britain.

      Early use of the word ‘bungalow’ can be traced in the pages of The Times newspaper. A digital search returns just five mentions during the 1860s, fifteen in the 1870s, and

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