Class rules

The English obsession with home-improvements is not just about territorial marking, of course. It is also about self-expression in a wider sense: your home is not just your territory, it is your primary expression of your identity. Or at least that is how we like to think of it. Almost all of our DIY-temple sample saw themselves as exercising their creative talents, and other interviews with nestbuilders in furniture shops, department stores and homes confirm that although DIYing may be, for some, merely an economic necessity, we all see the arrangement, furnishing and decorating of our homes as an expression of our unique personal taste and artistic flair.

And it is, but only up to a point. The more closely I researched this question, the more it became clear that the way in which we arrange, furnish and decorate our homes is largely determined by social class. This has little or nothing to do with wealth. Upper-class and upper-middle-class homes tend to be shabby, frayed and unkempt in a way no middle-middle or lower-middle would tolerate, and the homes of the wealthiest working-class nouveaux-riches are full of extremely expensive items that the uppers and upper-middles regard as the height of vulgarity. The brand-new leather sofas and reproduction-antique dining chairs favoured by the middle-middles may cost ten times as much as the equivalent items in the houses of upper-middles, who despise leather and �repro’.

In the homes of the middle-middles and below, the �lounge’ (as they call it) is likely to have a fitted carpet (among the older working classes, this may be a patterned carpet; among nouveaux-riches, deep-pile). The higher castes prefer bare floorboards, often part-covered with old Persian carpets or rugs. The middle-middle �lounge’ might have a cocktail cabinet, and their dining room a hostess trolley. The contents of lower-middle and some upper-working �front rooms’ will often be obscured by net curtains (useful as a class-indicator, but otherwise something of an annoying obstacle to peeping-tom researchers) but they are likely to be dominated by large television sets and, among the older generations, may boast embroidered or lacy covers on the arms of chairs and carefully displayed �collections’ of small objects (spoons, glass animals, Spanish dolls, figurines) from package holidays or mail-order catalogues.

Younger lower-middles and upper-workings may have less fussy tastes – their �living rooms’ are often uncluttered to the point of dentist’s-waiting-room bleakness (perhaps aspiring to, but never approaching, stylish minimalism). They will compensate for this lack of visual interest with an even bigger wide-screen television, which they call the TV or telly and which is always the focal point of the room (and, incidentally, currently shows at least six programmes every week about homes and home-improvement) and a high-tech �music centre’ with big speakers. Many upper-middle homes also have big televisions and stereos, but they are usually hidden in another sitting room, sometimes called the �back room’ or �family room’ (not �music room’: when upper-middles say �music room’, they mean the one with the piano in it, not the stereo).

Coasters (little mats for putting drinks on to stop them damaging the tables) are another useful class-indicator: you are unlikely to find these in upper-middle or upper-class houses, nor will you often see them in lower-working-class homes. Coasters are the preserve of the middle-middle, lower-middle and upper-working classes – or rather, more specifically, those among the upper-workings who aspire to middle-class status.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06