Kitchen, bathroom, laundry: two cultures divided by a common language

[ellarien]

There's been a fascinating culture-clash discussion going on lately, in certain newsgroups. It kicked off when a British poster mentioned having a tumble dryer in the kitchen, and an American poster expressed bogglement and incredulity at the very idea, whereas all the Brits think this is a perfectly normal and obvious arrangement. (I'm actually surprised that most of the Brits seem to have embraced tumble dryers or at least combination washer-dryers by now; they don't figure much in my experience of British homes, though my sister has one.)



My own data points come from seven houses and one flat in which I lived between 1964 and 1997, all in British cities or the suburbs thereof, all built, I'd guess, between 1890 and 1970. In all but one of these dwellings, the laundry equipment (usually an automatic front-loading washing machine) lived in the kitchen and; the exception was also the largest house I ever lived in, a late-Victorian place with four bedrooms and two reception rooms, which had a 'utility room' containing a washer-dryer (but use of the dryer function was frowned on, as it was horribly inefficient), a toilet, and a bathroom-style sink. (In American terms, that might make it some kind of bathroom, but we certainly didn't think of it as such.) Usually the washing machine attached to the plumbing under the sink, in much the same way as the dishwasher does in my Tucson apartment; in the flat in London I had to haul it out from under the counter, attach the inlet hoses to the sink taps, and hook the drain hose over the side of the sink -- a wrinkle that I didn't notice until I moved in. None of those kitchens (except the one in the four-bedroom house) was remotely large enough to accommodate a table; the places that didn't have a separate dining room had a dining area at one end of the living room.

American culture, I deduce as a semi-outsider, strongly feels the need to segregate clothes-washing from food preparation, a need which seems to have dropped out of the working and lower-middle class British mindset round about the time that domestic appliances were becoming popular. (I note in passing that this happened later in the UK than the US, maybe by as much as a generation.) The difficulty that people are having in wrapping their minds around the opposing sides of this difference might well be instructive to those wishing to describe contact with alien cultures. It's almost as baffling to all concerned as the British liking for crisp (even if cold) toast is to Americans and the American preference for hot (but soggy) toast to Brits, and it's rooted, as far as I can tell, in generations of the interplay of differences in habit, relative age and size of housing stock, building and electrical codes, and cultural priorities.

Speaking of priorities, another branch of the thread has gone off to discuss the respective usefulness of the 'den' (which as far as I can tell, from the examples I've seen in American homes, is a sort of second-best, not-for-public-display living room) versus the dining room. Now, as a middle-class Brit with working-class roots, I can actually grok the idea of having a 'best' living room and an everyday one. My grandparents lived in a four-room terraced house without a bathroom; they cooked, ate and lived -- and no doubt bathed and did laundry, though I wasn't around to witness those functions -- in the back downstairs room, and the front one was a rarely-used formal parlour. Somehow, though, the next rung up on the urban British housing ladder, the 1920's three-bed semi, invariably came with two reception rooms, one of which was invariably designated as the dining room. Later developments were more varied, but the dining room stayed, by and large, and the idea of the little-used formal sitting room withered or was merged into the less formal living room. (When my parents moved into the house my mother still occupies, the dining room was open to the living room through an archway. They promptly had it blocked off, creating a room where my father could play with his toys and grade papers when we weren't eating in it. Sometimes we had to eat in the living room because his Meccano model couldn't be moved off the table for dinner.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The additional connotation of "den" in my opinion, which I suspect may be important here, is that it used to be explicitly a man's space. The family is allowed into Dad's den to watch TV or sometimes to play games, but two generations ago it was firmly Dad's as much as the kitchen was firmly Mom's (albeit with less useful work associated).

[ellarien]

Ah. Filling the same niche as the English gentleman's library/gun room/smoking room, and the working class bloke's garden shed, then?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's the less intellectual version of "Father's study." Most people who have a den that is their territory also have a garage that's their territory, though.