Labouring at Leisure: Aspects of Lifestyle and the Rise of Home Improvement

Abstract

Barely can British viewers turn on the television today without encountering scenes of domestic transformation, whether in the form of contemporary conduct guides to dress and health, or as manuals on how to do-it-yourself This essay explores home improvement as a material cultural practice with a history, one that is often distinctly national in character. The history of home improvement entails substantial shifts both in patterns of housing and in ideas about dwelling during the course of the twentieth century. The rise of do-it-yourself (DIY) provides us with an example of how houses are made homes through the interaction individuals and families have with material objects, social structures and aesthetic paradigms. DIY's fashioning of domestic space is seen to operate as a gendered and classed phenomenon, but it also the case that in current televisual formations, home improvement has come to operate within a wider aestheticization of everyday life. This is never clearer than in television house shows, ranging from the makeover format of the BBC’s Changing Rooms to the more acquisitional narrative of Channel 4 and Channel Five’s property shows such as Location, Location, Location. In their dramatisation of taste, style and location, these formats provide representations of home and inhabitation that extend beyond the domestic to the national home. Offering the audience new forms of intimacy, these shows mediate thefantasies, anxieties and rhythms of individual homes with the wider nations of which we are a part.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.