THE GREAT INDOORS: At home in the modern British house - Softcover

HIGHMORE, BEN

3.68

47 ratings by Goodreads

9781846681912: THE GREAT INDOORS: At home in the modern British house

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184668191X ISBN 13: 9781846681912

Publisher: Profile Books, 2014

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'House' has long been synonymous with 'home': the significance of four walls and a roof lies far deeper than simply shelter from the elements. A house stands for sanctuary, family, belonging, privacy and our pasts: even when standardised as a 'Barratt Home' or modern housing estate, every house bears the stamp of the people who live in it, remaining a bastion of quirky individualism.

The Great Indoors is the first cultural history of the family home in the twentieth century, comparable to Rachel Hewitt's Map of a Nation or Joe Moran's Queuing for Beginners. As society has changed, so has the house: the hall - which had its finest hour during the middle ages, when families and their servants ate, slept and socialised there together - has now been relegated to a mere passageway, only useful for getting to other (more private) rooms. Highmore shows how houses display the currents of class, identity and social transformation that are displayed in the arrangement and use of the family home. And he also offers an engaging and stimulating peek through the curtains to explain why the fridge is used as a communication centre, how the loo (or toilet) inspired its very own literary genre and what your furniture arrangement reveals about how you function as a family.

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Product Description:

Great Indoors

Review:

Fascinating. A joyful portrait of how we live -- in all our eccentric glory. You'll never look at wallpaper in the same way again. (Matt Rudd)

The Great Indoors is an entertaining and welcome addition to a neglected field of social history. (Susan Flockhart Sunday Herald)

There is a great deal to be enjoyed in this book... a sprightly guide through the vicissitudes of the past 40 years in the British home. (Lucy Lethbridge The Observer 2014-01-05)

Brilliantly entertaining and rigorously researched book, Highmore explores our recent domestic past and asks what it says about the way we live now. (Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday 2014-01-05)

Thought-provoking little book. (Marcus Berkman Daily Mail 2014-01-09)

Entertaining and informative. (Alwyn Turner Daily Telegraph 2014-01-11)

Good solid stuff. (Rebecca Armstrong Independent on Sunday 2014-01-12)

The author... is a revelation. He is constantly informative, psychologically nuanced and charming. He's succeeded where so many others have failed. This is the book that amateur home anthropologists have been waiting for: a book that treats the evolution of home decoration and style with the ambition it deserves. (Alan de Botton The TImes 2014-01-11)

Highmore breezily picks our locks, throws open all our rooms, rifles through everything we've ever owned, and tells the story of our lives. (Iain Finlayson Saga 2014-02-01)

Highmore takes a captivatingly nosy look around the British home, exploring the roles played by such revolutionary instruments of social change as the duvet and the serving hatch. His range of reference is invigoratingly eclectic. (New Statesman 2014-03-06)

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