Chapter five of my thesis (s.p.b.s and section three of this website) dealing with ‘House Types and Costs’ mainly focusses on primary sourced evidence about Driffield Rural District Council because they actually built some 1920s/’30s council housing while Skirlaugh R.D.C. were just converting the ex-workhouse at Skirlaugh (s.p.b.s). However, listed below are some details of Holderness R.D.C.s council houses built in the late 1930s (s.p.b. and the villages in question).
The old Skirlaugh R.D.C. had decided that parlour cottages, that is houses with a ‘front room’, ‘were undesirable in agricultural districts’. This touches on an issue often discussed in housing history circles, the desirability or otherwise of a non-functional room, which, if included in a house plan considerably added to the cost of building. To include a ‘parlour’ meant that the ground-floor plan needed at least three rooms, parlour, living room (with cooking facilities, this usually being a simple form of ‘Yorkist range’) and a scullery (the water room for washing, cleaning and bathing). However, such houses made it simple to include three bedrooms in the house plan, as previously stated, this seen as a desirable set-up for family homes.
I grew-up in an ex-estate cottage that had a front room, by far the biggest room in the house but out of bounds except on Sundays. The ‘living room’ had an open staircase to the three bedrooms (two above the front room) and had initially had a yorkist range. The kitchen was a 1950s addition, the original copper and earth closet being located in outbuildings (see the article on The Old Post Office, Boughton in section three of this website). Like most 1870s estate cottages and like Driffield R.D.C.’s earliest council houses of the early 1920s our garden was a quarter acre in size.
(points about Holderness’s late 1930s house types to be continued).