Net Curtains

Net curtains are an imperfect solution to the real problem of negotiating privacy and light in houses whose interiors can be seen quite easily by passers-by. Terraced houses come in many different forms but the smallest of them have no front garden or wall to separate the front window from the pavement. It is not that the pavements of Britain and elsewhere are thick with dedicated nosey-parkers and irrepressible sticky beaks, it is just that it is almost impossible not to be drawn into taking a quick peak into someone’s front room when you are so close and it is un-netted.

Yet while something like a net curtain must surely be essential for these cottage-style terraces (the ones down the road from my house were built for railway workers) the net curtain of popular culture is often associated with more substantial properties, in areas of suburban splendour. Here the net curtain isn’t so much a protection from the nosey but an aid to nosiness. Here the net curtain is forever ‘twitching’ (usually from a first floor bedroom window) as moral arbiters look on and record the goings-on of wannabe libertines or fun seeking youngsters. This net curtain doesn't hide private joys and pleasure but the polar opposite – frustrations, bitterness and repressions.   

Net curtains seem to belong to a Victorian age, and usually their patterns, when they aren't simply plain, seems to follow the patterning of other Victorian era textile items like antimacassars. I was interested that Terence Conran in his early years as a designer, a decade before he started Habitat, designed net curtains. The net curtains he designed are from 1953 and are interestingly asymmetrical and favour spiky, irregular patterns that evoke the harsher aspects of the natural world – icicles, flint shards and so on. Whatever else you could say about his net curtain it would be hard to imagine them being constantly twitched by disapproving, pleasure-fearing neighbours.

Putting the kit in kitchens

The Times ran a piece I wrote on my top six innovations in the kitchen. This is what I wrote:

The desire for convenience, for labour-saving devices, has been a dream that has shaped the modern kitchen. Sometimes labour-saving was merely labour-displacing: a 1950s dishwasher had a cycle of just three minutes (compared with an average of ninety minutes today) but every single item had to be packed in its own separate plastic container and then unpacked afterwards. But labour wasn't the only thing that needed saving – so too did space and money. Space was saved with items and devices that could have multiple functions – a stool that was also an ironing board as well as a step ladder, for instance. Money was saved, not just through scrimping but also by spending. At least that’s what the advertisers were telling us: buy this expensive food processor and save, save, save.

Kitchen devices came with a price tag that was social as well as financial. Fridges and freezers, for instance, sounded the death knell for neighbourhood shops and announced the era of the supermarket. And all the gizmos that found a place in the post-war kitchen could be seen as an attempt to return women to the kitchen to create more and more complex dishes after a wartime spent out of the house in paid employment.

While gadgetry has put the kit in kitchens, changes in energy and the introduction of new materials that have had the most significant effect. The shift from solid fuels (primarily coal) to piped and wired fuels (gas and electricity) was decisive, but it wasn't till after World War Two that many rural communities would be on the grid. Today it is probably hard to imagine kitchens without a host of synthetic materials like Teflon and silicone; in the 1950s and 60s it was new forms of plastic that transformed the kitchen.    

1.      Electric Kettle. This electric kettle from the 1920s would have boiled water much faster than a pan on the stove. It would also have been cleaner because most stoves used solid fuel in the 20s. Ubiquitous electricity was needed for the electric kettle to become an everyday reality.

2.      Fridge-Freezer. The first fridges were often gas powered, but it was the electric version that came to stay. My parents bought me a small fridge in 1987 and it cost exactly the same amount as the first fridge they had bought when they got married thirty years earlier in 1957.

3.      The food mixer. If you could afford it US imports like the Sunbeam Mixmaster were available in Britain from the 1930s. They could ‘mix drinks, grind coffee, open cans, turn ice cream, polish silverware, sharpen knives and scissors’. A home-grown version became popular in the 1950s when Ken Wood developed his Kenwood Chef.

4.      Spitfire saucepans. These saucepans from the 1946 exhibition ‘Britain Can Make It’ utilised a manufacturing process discovered while trying to develop longer lasting exhaust stubs for Spitfires during the war. Other domestic appliances that were developed during the war included the electric blanket, for pre-central heating living.

5.      Plastics. New synthetic material such as composite vinyl and melamine transformed the kitchen in the 1950s and 60s. Here Dunlop claimed that their 1967 Vynolay range could ‘cover a fair-sized kitchen floor for as little as £5’.

6.      Vegetable Peeler. The Rex vegetable peeler (from the Swiss company Zena) is a classic design: simple, cheap, and superbly functional. It was first produced in 1947 and soon found its place in kitchens all over the world. Sometimes it is the small and modest that makes the difference.

Feel the Noize

As a child of about eleven the little gang I hung out with must have felt that we didn't have enough presence in the world. It is all very well treading lightly on the earth but wafer-thin eleven year-olds need some material gravitas or they will float away. One of the many solutions we found to our lack of earthly presence was to intensify our sonic force – to make some noise. This was the early 1970s, a time when Noddy Holder and his Slade comrades were beseeching us to Cum on Feel the Noize (the spelling was designed to approximate the regional dialect of the Black Country area of the Midlands of England).  

One way of making some Noize was to fix pieces of card to the front and back forks of our bikes so that they caught the wheel spokes, producing a clattering noise. This was meant to sound vaguely like a motorbike revving, or the clatter of a football rattle, but sounded exactly like pieces of card being constantly whacked by wire spokes. We were, I'm sure, taught this technique by older kids.

The early 1970s must have been a time when people were worried about gravity and the lack of it as the fashion in shoes resembled the sort of weighted-boot required by deep-sea divers, or the build-up disability shoe needed to counter a disparity in leg lengths. The stacked shoe, the must-have foot ware for any youngster or man or woman-about-town was a weighty thing. Glam-rockers like Slade favoured the excessive soled and heeled boot, which often looked like a bovver-boot with additional soles and heels attached that had then been spray painted silver. High-street fashion could be just as whacky and there was a period, I'm pretty certain, when you were limited to buying varieties of stacked shoe from a quarter-inch sole (favoured by Clarks) to two inches and beyond. It is no wonder that the audiences to the Top of the Pops shows from the early 70s seem to shuffle about – their shoes must have been weighing them down.

My mother would buy my shoes a size or two larger than actually fitted so that I could grow into them (though they usually wore out before this thrifty wisdom came into effect). I must have persuaded her not to get my shoes at Clarks at some point and to opt instead for a fairly decent stack with plastic uppers. They were pretty heavy. For my comrades and me, though, just having a weighty stacked shoe wasn’t going to be enough – we wanted additional sound. So we regularly studded the soles and heels of our shoes with Blakey’s segs: these were little moons of metal that you could stamp into the heels and toes so that you could make the sort of clatter that an inebriated and inexpert tap-dancer might make. They could also produce a stuttering shower of sparks when riding your bike and using your shoes as a break – this worked best on concrete. When you walked down the corridor in school you could sound like your sonic presence was really being noticed by the world.

            One balmy summer night a bunch of us wandered about the cul-de-sac where we lived. We purposefully scuffed our feet as we went, not really realising that the segs we had attached to our shoes were designed to protect them from the wear that scuffing could cause. For us they were an invitation to insistently scuff – a way of learning to become life-long scuffers. Somehow out of nowhere we started to chant, to shout, one word. The word was ‘BOLLOCKS’ and I don’t think any of us knew what it meant – I certainly didn’t. We didn’t shout it with any venom or even disdain. I think we chanted it in a celebratory incantation – in the way that other people might give praise – it was our momentary Hallelujah. Each time we shouted it we grew louder, till the word started ricocheting off the walls and rooftops of the houses. Doors started opening and soon a parent of one of us ran up to us and told us to shut up. That was the end of the night as we all went back to our own houses to receive our own lesson about swearing and to learn our fate.