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The 20th century saw the sun set on the servanted opulence of the Edwardian high summer and reluctant householders faced the challenge of adaptation. The masses, however, welcomed the march of progress, explains Lucy Lethbridge
During the 1920s, postwar Britain saw an almost unprecedented building boom, a forest of villas, mansion blocks and service flats. London, wrote one commentator, Svitnessed the greatest amount of rebuilding all over the metropolis that has ever taken place within so short a period of time since the Great Fire of London'. It was the Second World War that finally put an end to traditional domestic service but nonetheless, the new dwellings of the 1920s were designed for a future without 'help': they had central heating, electricity, stainless-steel kitchens and eat-in kitchens. 'We are all busy now making the world anew,' wrote Randal Phillips, the author of The Seroantless House, in 1924. It would take longer than Phillips anticipated to create a new world - economic depression forced girls back into sendee in the interwar years in vast numbers-but the servanted opulence of the Edwardian era was disappearing and reluctant householders faced the challenge of adaptation.
Designers, architects and writers rallied to the call: in 1920, the Daily Mail, which had run the Ideal Home Exhibitions since 1908, offered £300 as a first prize in a competition to design a one-servant, coal-less house, costing no more than £2,500. The winning entry was a substantial five-bedroom villa which included a maid's room but which also had electric plugs on the landing for vacuum cleaners and polishers. The house had no polished surfaces or hard angles to attract dust; there were sleek fitted radiators and smut-free electric fires. There was also a primitive dishwasher - a wooden rack in which dishes were sprayed messily with a rubber hose.
Electricity was hailed as the domestic liberator of recently enfranchised middle-class women. No longer need they suffer from recalcitrant maids who needed constant supervision:...