A programme on BBC Four I am currently enjoying is ‘If Walls Could Talk’ with Lucy Worsley. Each episode takes us through a different room in the house from the Middle Ages up to the current day, describing its uses, activities and transformations. It offers a wonderful insight into how the modern home has evolved through the ages and how we have come to value whats inside our homes today. Tonight’s episode was the bathroom, a room which before the beginning of the 20th Century simply did not exist. It was only after the First World War and the emergence of Hollywood, that the bathroom came to be seen as a place to relax, pamper and recharge, and not just a room defined by it’s practical uses.
Watch on BBC iPlayer
Watch on BBC iPlayer
There was a misconception up until the beginning of the 20th Century, that washing, bathing and water itself could be harmful. People thought that if your pores were opened up by the water, then ‘miasma’ or bad air could enter your skin and have disastrous effects. Instead people washed their linen and clothes more often than themselves, and used bowls of water in their bedrooms to wash their extremities and faces. At the beginning of the 20th Century, families could use a tin bath beside the warmest place in the house, the fire, starting with the father and mother, and down to the youngest siblings. Survival of the fittest!
1930s
1950s
Bathrooms began to appear as seperate rooms in the 1930s and some interesting(!) suites began to appear up to the 1980s. Today the bathroom has gone all modern, clean and sleak. See: American Vintage Home
And today..
