Britain: An official handbook > 1977

Housing
and
Environment
BRITAIN 1977: AN OFFICIAL HANDBOOK
their twenties (women in their early twenties and men in their middle twenties),
some 90 per cent being married by the time they are 30. There were approxi¬
mately 27-5 million married people at the time of the 1971 population census
and of these about 25 million were estimated to be married couples living to¬
gether in some 12-5 million separate families containing some 46 million people,
the remainder living either on their own or with other persons or families,
except for a small number living in institutions. Of the 12-5 million families,
nearly 8 million, comprising 32 million people, contained a married couple
and their children or grandchildren. There were, in addition, 1-2 million
families consisting of one parent living with children or grandchildren. About
half, mostly women, were bringing up between them about 1 million dependent
children; the rest were living with adult children or grandchildren.
The average size of households has continued to fall progressively, from over
four persons in 1911 to 3• 1 in 1961 and 2-8 in 1973. It is estimated that in 1973
19 per cent of households consisted of one person only, 32 per cent of two,
18 per cent of three, 18 per cent of four and 13 per cent of five or more. However,
about half of the small households (one or two persons) contained a person over
60 years old while the other half consisted largely of young, often recently
married, couples without children and of young people who had left home to
live on their own during the first years of their employment and increasingly
during the last stages of their education. Relatively few people in their middle
years lived in small families without children.
Houses are much more common than flats; four British households out of five
live in a house. In the centre and inner areas of large towns and the inner
streets of small towns and villages, terraced houses, most of them built in the
early years of the present century, still provide accommodation for a third of
all households. In urban areas, slum clearance and redevelopment have been
major features of post-1945 public housing policies. Although in the 1960s
high-rise blocks of flats were thought to offer a number of advantages, such
as economy in land use and speed of construction, their disadvantages from
certain points of view, including inhumanity of scale, have led to the current
preference for carefully planned low-rise, high density layouts, including
many houses with gardens or patios. With the help of improvement grants
from public funds, the modernisation and conversion of sub-standard housing
has increasingly been encouraged as an alternative to clearing and rebuilding,
as a way of preserving the social fabric and of making more economic use of
resources, including the skills of small building firms.
The main housing development of the past 50 to 60 years, however, has been
suburban. More than half Britain’s families now live in houses grouped in small
terraces, or semi-detached or detached, usually of two storeys with gardens,
and providing two main ground-floor living rooms, a kitchen, from two to four
bedrooms, a bathroom, and one or two lavatories. From 1919 to 1939 such
houses were often located along main roads, a pattern which became known as
‘ribbon development’. More recently the pattern has tended to change to one
of housing in estates set back from the main thoroughfares with more attention
given to amenities such as health centres and community centres which provide
for various activities, often run by associations of the residents. Standards of
new housing have improved considerably in recent years and many more houses
now have modern conveniences. In 1973 some 89 per cent of households in
Great Britain had exclusive use of a bath or shower, and 95 per cent had sole use
of a lavatory—high percentages by international standards. Most housing
built nowadays is centrally heated. At the same time improved housing