A Brief History of Scotland's Housing

by Miles Glendinning, Architectural Historian

Over the past five centuries, the 'modern Scottish home' has gradually come into being. In 1500, there were many 'houses', but no 'homes' as we know them today. The rich lived in imposing mansions whose grand facilities were used for a vast range of public activities, but lacked any 'privacy' in the modern sense. The poor lived in temporary hovels, which jumbled family life together with outsiders and animals. Nobody had the sharp division of a 'front door' as we do today, sharply distinguishing the private world from the great outdoors. As modern life, in all its diversity, came into being over centuries, the modern, private, self-contained 'home' began to emerge - a place occupied by only one family, a place used only for domestic life, a place from which the public and communal world was shut out.

All sorts of architectural settings and types of buildings were invented at various times to house this 'home' life, ranging from grand stone palace mansions to concrete tower block flats. In general, the pattern was for types of living invented first for the rich, to spread to ordinary people after a time lag of decades or centuries. These changes happened in different places at different times, a type of house that was on the way 'out' in one place might be only just coming 'in' somewhere else. But gradually, another factor began to emerge. The more that the self-contained home, with its own 'front door', became available to everyone, the more that the old muddle and mixture was got rid of, the more people began to feel that an incalculable 'community' spirit had been lost too.

So the story of the Scottish home, in a way, is the story of modern Scottish society in general: a struggle between people's conflicting yearnings for individual freedom and collective life.

What follows is a brief history of Scotland’s housing, identifying five key housing types from humble rural croft to stately castle, from the earliest settlement to urban tower blocks and the escape to suburbia.

Croft

In the Middle Ages, towns were few and far between, and almost everyone lived in houses built of temporary materials - turf, 'wattle' sticks, clay, and thatch. Everything happened in a single space with an open fire in the middle - cooking, sleeping, humans and animals together, all covered in smoke. Up to the 18th century, there was limitless local variation in these rural houses.

In the Lowlands, farming was revolutionised from the 18th century by the so-called 'Improvement' movement, which reorganised everything on commercial and scientific lines, and swept away all the old houses. Each farm was now a large self-contained unit with a farmhouse and separate steading at the centre, all built of stone. The formal, classical symmetry of the farmhouses emphasised their control over the land. Only the farmer lived in the farmhouse, with its separate facilities, the farm workers and the animals had their own quarters. In the Highlands, because the land was poorer, the new farms were not so large and self-contained as in the Lowlands. Instead, there were 'crofts': very small, modern farms whose tenants also had to work elsewhere to survive.

In the 20th century, the workers' houses built and owned by private landowners began to seem totally outmoded. Many lacked basic amenities like running water and toilets, and the only way of spreading 'homes' to all agricultural workers seemed to be massed building of council houses by the powerful county councils. This was the end of any 'mixed' types of rural building: houses were now completely separated from farms. The climax of this 'drive' was the wartime programme of factory built 'prefabs', identical in town or country, and each with a full range of urban 'Mod Cons' in its kitchen and bathroom. With the growing spread of affluence across the countryside, council prefabs were followed after the 1960s by individual 'kit houses', made by private firms to standard designs, with timber frame construction. The often-garish individualism of these houses has offended some architects, who have tried to evoke the 'togetherness' and mixed character of traditional dwellings in their new designs.

Castle

Whereas the poor had to share their huts with beasts and tools, landowners shared their living space with 'public affairs': defence, law enforcement, tax collecting, and politics in ‘great houses’ or ‘castles’. At first, even the largest living structures were used communally. In the prehistoric era, there is almost no archaeological evidence for 'domestic' use of buildings in Scotland. Larger freestanding buildings, like the Iron Age timber crannogs, shoreline structures built on an earth and rubble base, and the brochs, defensible stone towers, seem to have combined domestic, agricultural and storage accommodation. In the early Middle Ages, the pattern stayed basically the same, with fortress like towers ringed by temporary settlements. Inside the castles, communal life revolved around the vaulted 'great hall'. But after the 'Renaissance', a Europe wide movement, which stressed peaceful learning, landowners saw their tower houses mostly as ornamental symbols of heritage. In 16th/17th century great halls were retained, but augmented by specialised 'apartments', or groups of rooms, for grand public or intimate family life.

Soon, even this seemed old-fashioned. Influenced by the orderly ideals of the 18th century Improvement movement, people began to feel that the new, stately lifestyle could only be expressed properly in a symmetrical, classical exterior, emphasising its power by looking outwards, commanding a grand, symmetrical classical landscape of axes and avenues. In the 19th century, the architectural goalposts were rearranged slightly by the 'Romantic' movement, led by Sir Walter Scott. This inspired architects to reject extreme classical formality and go back to a turreted Baronial style and wilder landscaping. Internally, these neo-castles were planned in a complex way, ingeniously separating out 'private', 'public' and 'servants' quarters, and cramming them full of modern appliances and services which anticipated all the main 'Mod Cons' of the early 20th century, such as central heating, showers, telephones and electricity.

Only with the late 19th century agricultural depression did the power and prestige of the great country house go into terminal decline, at the same time as the elaborate historical styles of the Victorian era fell from fashion. After World War I, any new 'country houses' were far smaller in size, rather like big suburban villas, and were increasingly in 'Modern' styles that brought a new Modern freedom of construction, planning and landscape setting.

Settlement

Just as the individual country house was planned, through the centuries, on more and more orderly, stately lines, with all its different functions separated and spaced out like a small town, the same happened to the planning of new settlements in the countryside. The earliest complete excavated 'township', Skara Brae in Orkney, packed together a dense mixture of stone-built houses and other structures, interspersed with lanes: the houses retain the only surviving prehistoric remains of sleeping accommodation in Scotland.

During the Middle Ages, the most normal type of settlement was an informal group of turf houses and farm buildings, sometimes clustered round a castle, a church or a monastic centre. The most common Scottish villages today, however, are not picturesque medieval clusters, but almost the opposite: the so-called 'centrical' villages of the Improvement era. These are laid out with extreme rational order and symmetry: they have spacious, low-density layouts of straight street grids, low cottage houses of one or two storey’s, and generally very little 'sense of place' as such.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, these ideas of 'centrical' order, fresh air and greenery were applied by housing reformers to the fight against the urban squalor of the Industrial Revolution. Garden cities and council schemes of cottages were laid out to house new industrial communities. As urban areas spread and overlapped during the 20th century, and as completely new towns were built after 1945 the boundary between 'rural settlements' and 'suburbs' grew more and more confused.

Urban

So dominant are towns and cities in Scottish life today, it is difficult to imagine that for many centuries, there was almost no 'urban' housing in this country. Most medieval towns would have looked to us like country villages, with animals and crops mixed in with houses, built higgledy-piggledy in wood and thatch. In Edinburgh, by the 16th and 17th centuries, this situation began to change. Pressure of land forced the rich to build their houses higher and higher, and to change from timber construction to stone. By then, too, the pressure of population growth was encouraging a vertical subdivision of these big houses into flats. The 'tenement', shared by richer and poorer citizens, began to emerge. Eventually, this pressure-cooker situation led the rich, by the mid 18th century, to decide to escape by building a completely new city extension: the Edinburgh New Town. Planned in 1767 on a rigid grid layout, surrounded with gardens and fresh air, the New Town was a close cousin of the rural Improvement movement for 'centrical' settlements. Like country houses, these new city houses of the rich covered their stately interiors with formal stone facades, carefully lined up with each other in 'terrace' rows resembling grand palaces.

For most urbanites around 1900, 'home' was a flat in a tenement block, without a garden, but provided with a growing number of self-contained domestic amenities. By then, of course, many wealthier people had started to react against this collective, massive pattern of life by retreating to the new refuge of the detached 'suburban home'. And with the 20th century clearance of 'Victorian tenement slums', many working-class people were 'over spilled' right away from the city. For those who remained, the post-1945 Modern Movement stretched the tenement principle up into the sky, by building multi-storey tower blocks.

But by the 1960s, the formula of monumental grandeur combined with clean modernity started to seem cold and alienating. People began to feel that the mixed-together old areas had had more humanity. At first, efforts were made to encourage 'community' in new housing, such as the provision of communal drying balconies, but from the 1970s there was also a new emphasis on rehabilitating old tenements, with the 'participation' of the inhabitants themselves: here 'community' was something old, to be protected against change.

Suburban

Suburbia began in the 18th century, when the rich felt that they needed to get away from urban squalor to a setting that was more rural, yet conveniently close to the city. During the 19th century, the middle class joined in the flight from the disease ridden city to the suburb, and a century long quest began for ways of fitting more houses into suburban settings, while preserving the illusion of villa privacy. 'Greek' Thomson's Double Villa in Langside (1856-7) disguised two houses as one creating the template for the semi-detached house, while 1930s house builders tried to cram small two-storey houses into curved, garden suburb layouts. Inside these, the old middle-class stately sequences of public rooms were replaced by a simple living room and parlour.

But when the drive to the suburbs spread eventually to include the working class, then the ideal of the suburb as a redoubt of individuality and privacy could no longer be kept up at all. The most typical mid 20th century Scottish suburb is not a low-density estate of private villas but a council scheme of tenements or tower blocks. The buildings became monumental and city-like, but the garden suburb emphasis on greenery and space was preserved and accentuated: these areas were neither 'urban' nor 'suburban'. For ambitious working class Glaswegians, there was after 1945 an alternative: to flee the city altogether, to planned 'new towns' built by the state. New towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld were, in many ways, the most successful Scottish 'suburbs' of the 20th century, with their green open space and low densities but individual, high-quality designs.

But with the fall of council housing, grand projects like these could no longer be afforded. The universal private-built suburb of small separate houses became completely dominant in Scotland too, their kitchens now the unchallenged focus for the new intense family life. Where the council schemes had sacrificed the separate villa while preserving a landscaped spaciousness, these new estates lost any sense of space and place in a sea of repetitive 'Clone City' brick boxes. Today, the suburb is the front line in the battle for the soul of the 'Scottish home'. It is in the suburb, that hybrid modern invention, that the problems of balancing the private family refuge with collective urban life are at their most difficult, but also most urgent.

Future

In this exhibition, we have glimpsed the bewildering variety of approaches to the 'home' in Scotland, and have teased out a number of longer-term, gradual trends over the centuries. In the physical substance of the dwelling, what we have seen is a gradual ironing out of previously sharp differences, like those between different social classes or between town and country. Where, 300 years ago, only the wealthiest Scots had a permanent, solid, self-contained 'home', now almost everyone does. And whereas in the past grand country houses could have swallowed up hundreds of working class tenement flats, today the size differential between social housing and rich people's houses is far smaller.

At first glance, this merging of the 'real', urgent, material differences among Scottish dwellings has stimulated a new diversity in the parallel world of ideas and ideals about domestic life. It has freed people to develop a range of differing, even conflicting visions of the 'ideal home', ranging from the extreme privacy of low-density suburbia to the urban togetherness of the social mixed community ideal. Today the ideal home, like so many other areas of society, has become a matter of lifestyle choice.

But what is not clear is how meaningful this 'choice' can be, given the ever-increasing pervasiveness of today's market capitalism. To begin with, poverty has not gone away, even if it has been detached from its old physical context of 'the slum'. And for those who can afford to choose, do visions such as the city apartment block or the rural longhouse represent any kind of real, rooted social vision? Or are they just up-market lifestyle images of heritage or chic futurism, niche brands that unintentionally complement the mass-produced brick house boxes of the 'spec' builder? In 1969, Robert Matthew, Scotland's foremost Modern architect-planner, argued that handing over control of development to private builders would be a 'disastrous' blow to the Scottish tradition of planned urban and rural settlement. And so it has proved, with the fragmentation of our communities into competing enclaves of heritage and privatism, and the destruction of collective enterprises such as the post-war New Towns.

Remodelling Home: Claystation at Scotland’s Housing Expo is a timely opportunity for visitors to the Expo to take control and collectively reshape Scotland’s homes, and propose a new participatory model of housing for Scotland in the 21st Century.

Miles Glendinning
Miles is Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and Reader in Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He has published extensively on the history of 20th century architecture and housing, and Scottish housing: books include the award winning ‘Tower Block’ and ‘A History of Scottish Architecture’.