Selling owner-occupation to the working-classes in 1930's Britain

The 1930s witnessed Britain’s first major boom in working-class owner-occupation. Purchasers typically came from cramped, rented, inner-urban accommodation, and, only a few years previously, would not have considered the possibility of buying a new house. Such perceptions were transformed by an aggressive marketing campaign by the building societies and building industry, to create a new mass market for owner-occupation. During the 1930s they developed a number of extremely sophisticated marketing strategies, including strong elements of `lifestyle marketing’, to transform the popular image of a mortgage from `a millstone round your neck’ to a key element of a new, suburbanized, aspirational lifestyle. This both contributed to the fastest rate of growth in working-class owner-occupation during the twentieth century and had a substantial impact on consumption patterns for families who moved to the new estates. After briefly discussing the causes and dimensions of the housing boom and the extent of working-class participation, this article examines the marketing campaigns launched by the building societies and the building industry to entice working-class customers. The analysis draws both on supply-side evidence - advertising material and business archives - and demand-side data – a qualitative database of 58 accounts by working-class people who moved into owner-occupation during this period, assembled from oral history archives, published and unpublished autobiographies, and other sources (hereafter Life Histories Database) together with a quantitative database of working-class family budgets.ii The paper also examines the ways in which opportunistic marketing contributed to an eventual crisis in the sector. The 1930s