Diasporic Spaces of Conviviality and Domesticity: On the Political Significance of Kitchens in Post-War Britain

Planning the Post-War Kitchen

The historian Claire Langhammer (2005, p. 348) points to how ‘In the postwar period the political meanings of housing became ever more significant and it was consistently central to political debate throughout the 1940s and 1950s’. The aspirations for a new realm of domesticity seem to be on the cusp of fulfilment but Langhammer notes how many remained excluded from it given the deficiencies of large swathes of Britain’s housing stock. Kitchens form an important arena within the home. However, rather than simply viewed as domestic and private spaces they form a key part of a wider connected dimensions of culture and cultural practices. They critically operate as sites for the reproduction of labour within capitalist economies and enhance the possibilities for unpaid domestic labour (Amoroso & Alcocer, 2025). There are tensions between these aspirations of domestic life and security and how they can be shaped and confined through societal norms. Questions of liveability and their relationship to building standards or regulations have formed a key area of study for those concerned with the built environment, especially in an era of housing crisis (see, for example, Moslehian et al., 2023). Others have turned to the inter-relationships between gender and societal norms and the reconfiguration of kitchen spaces (Hand et al., 2007). Within feminist and anti-racist scholarship diasporic connection and belonging are created within ethnic and racial groups and also as ways to connect with others with an immigrant background. However, the relationship with food, cooking and the kitchen as important transnational and migratory practices related to the materialities of the home have been less well connected to planning debates.

One of the principal limitations has been the attention to the kitchen, and the wider home, as expressed through technical space standards that miss how they embody particular idealized visions of society. While there has been a great deal of scholarship that has turned to how British imperial planning envisaged distinct racial hierarchies in colonial and settler-colonial societies, less attention has been paid to the reworking of these ideas within the metropole (Home, 2013). The post-war kitchen was constructed as part of a modernizing Britain. While housing renewal was desperately needed, the organization of spaces formed part of the ongoing efforts to return women to the domestic private sphere as wife and mother. These efforts, although contested, framed the housing layouts of millions of kitchen spaces due to the sheer quality of housing built in the post-war period. Alongside this the political narrative of the woman in the kitchen as a key component of the ‘happy household’ utilized the home as a space of spatial and social gender confinement.

The framing of women’s role as domestic labourer within housing reconstruction and improvement forms an important dimension of our understandings of the family unit. Rachael Scicluna (2015) argues that the kitchen operates a site of complex power relations. Her work shows that ‘the political meaning of the kitchen . . . is constructed out of the integration of different forms of power and resistance’ (p. 185). But my primary focus is not an evaluation of conceptions of family life or ideals of domesticity even those these are important fields of scholarship (Haggett, 2008). Rather I am interested in how these ideas connect to spatial imaginaries. Although the kitchen operates as a physical space, it exceeds these parameters and forms part of the ways in which spaces are being refigured through increasingly diverse societies and the transnational ties of migration (Knoblauch & Löw, 2020). The feminist planning scholar Daphne Spain’s (2014) work on the post-war planning of urban space leads her to consider that: ‘The postwar American metropolitan area developed during an age of “high patriarchy” as women retreated from work and the public realm’. Likewise in Britain, the mass refiguration of urban space facilitated ideas of an urban form that valorized traditional gender norms. Furthermore, these gendered norms became increasingly centred around White Britishness as racialized migrants from British colonies were largely unable to access good housing, framing the discourse that they did not wish to live in better conditions (Burnley, 1967).

Feminist scholars have demonstrated that a clear imperative was to re-establish hetero-normative patriarchal relations within family life (Pennington, 2024). British people desired some form of normality after the deprivations of the war and the significant shift of women into the labour force as men were conscripted into the armed forces. Wartime structures such as state-run British Restaurants became important in feeding parts of the population, including those without kitchens and women working outside the home. Although instituted as part of the war effort they revealed other types of possibilities for domestic labour and collective endeavour. These facilities were popular and the Women’s Group on Public Welfare report argued for the British Restaurants to continue after the war (Pearson, 1998, p. 180). As Nadja Durbach (2017, p. 20) notes ‘the introduction of a state-run meals service opened up the possibility that the cooking of meals for oneself or one’s family – an often-onerous duty – need no longer structure a woman’s day and thus limit her economic, political and social choices’. However, many, including Labour politicians, saw these restaurants as undermining the family and the perceived duty of women to cook for their families. They were even argued to be non-British (Evans, 2022). The development of an infrastructure that created possibilities for women and opened up the possibilities for marginalized people to eat cooked food were radical and point to the possibilities of meaningful state interventions into gendered labour despite their post-war dismantling. But this pattern of scepticism or rejection of communal and co-operative living despite its advantages reflected the primacy of the individual private space of the domestic realm within British society (see Evans, 2022).

An emerging hegemonic narrative saw the role of women in the domestic sphere as vital to the post-war reconstitution of the nation-state. Labour’s attention to the individual kitchen despite positive aspirations set the scene for women to be spatially regulated as domestic labourers given the intensive demands of cooking and cleaning for the family in the period. This reflected a shift for middle-class women who had been shouldering more domestic duties as it became increasingly uncommon to have servants, particularly following World War II when many former domestic staff chose not to return. Instead, the role of the housewife in the running and management of the ‘servantless’ home became increasingly considered an aspirational mode of living for women in the post-war period (Delap, 2011). Post-war gendered roles and the spaces of the kitchen became aligned with ideas of modernity and ‘rationally’ organized family life. However, Langhammer (2005) notes that the domestic idyll in fact increased the burden of unpaid labour and that middle-class women in particular now faced ‘a commitment to the chores which their mothers would have employed other women to perform’ (p. 360).

Feminist scholarship has turned in more detail to the development of the modern kitchen (Freeman, 2004), planning experiments in collective provision of food from the late 19th century (Pearson, 1998), as well as the role of women architects and designers in the postwar period (Llewellyn, 2004). Furthermore, resistance to patriarchal gender relations and the role of the housewife form a key component of feminist scholarship from the 1960s onwards (Davis, 1981; Collins, 1990; Greer, 1970). Alongside this broad scholarship on food and cooking, literature has also explored its inter-relationship with nation and nationalism, class distinctions, immigrants and diaspora, and how these form part of a constellation of home-building and memory practices (Buettner, 2012; Jeong, 2019; Parveen, 2016).

Domestic kitchens that provide space to prepare and cook food in the home are necessary to the functioning of individual households as the site of domestic reproduction of labour. But they are malleable and shifting spaces. In late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, the location of the kitchen in Britain varied with class. For the middle and upper classes, it occupied a hidden space staffed by domestic servants for the wealthier classes. In contrast, it was the central living space for the working classes, given that it acted as the only heated room (Betts, 2014). The individual kitchen is entangled with the notion of the private family that emerged from the mid-18th century onwards in France and then at a later stage Britain (see Hareven, 1991).

The kitchen space drew increasing attention from architects and planners in the early 20th century as designers became preoccupied by Taylorist modes of scientific management and sought to apply them to the domestic sphere. The Frankfurt kitchen designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky became a heavily influential prototype of the modern fitted kitchen. Schütte-Lihotzky’s contribution as architect and designer is important in her design of what is now considered the precursor to the fitted kitchen. The historian Jane Freeman argues that her wider aspirations were for a form of ‘living kitchen as encouraging communality’. Nonetheless Freeman argues that the eventual design is more ambiguous and that ‘she bowed to the intellectual theories of the day and arguments about the economic of the mass housing projects and opted in her design for a purely cooking kitchen’ (p. 39). Despite innovations to make women’s role in the kitchen easier the dominant design that emerged due to budget constraints was a kitchen that could only comfortably accommodate one person who was then cut off from the other people and spaces of the house. ² Mark Llewellyn (2004) traces how kitchens became a focus of interest and importance for those concerned with home economics, including planners, as the management of the home was increasingly entrusted to both middle-class and working-class women in their familial role as a wife and/ or mother rather than to the sphere of domestic paid servants. Llewellyn (2004) turns to how the British architect Jane Drew who attempted to design kitchens for efficiency and her wide-ranging research on the changing role of women precipitated by the war as well as the ‘new materials and methods of production’ than included her undertaking ‘journeys to America’ (p. 49). In seeking to design and arrange kitchens that reduced domestic burdens for women in post-war Britain a series of five designs were set out that potentially suited different classes and incomes. Despite Drew’s desire to reduce and rationalize domestic labour, it did not extend to a radical rejection of the burdens falling on women. In this sense the rationalized kitchen was unable to radically alter the gendered spaces of the home. The architectural theorist Maria S. Giudici (2018) considers how:

The kitchen has become just a cubicle in which the woman is supposed to do her duty as efficiently as possible, interacting very little with the other members of the household. (p. 1220)

At the same time, there were class differences at work with some working-class families rejecting the idea of a more flexible kitchen dining space extolled by forms of Modernist architecture (see Meah, 2016). The Dudley Committee, chaired by the Earl of Dudley (1944), was commissioned by the Ministry of Health in 1942 to ‘make recommendations as to the design, planning, layout, standards of construction and equipment of dwellings for the people throughout the country’ (p. 8). Their report ‘Design of Dwellings’ was published in 1944. In their early comments they note that the viewpoints of women were important given the necessity of understanding the ways in which homes functioned. They explain ‘In this matter the housewife is the expert and local authorities should have constant regard to her views’ (1944, p. 10). Catriona Beaumont details how women’s groups organized to have their viewpoints incorporated. Women wanted homes to have ‘kitchens with built in cupboards and draining boards . . . which would reduce the daily load of the housewife’ (Beaumont, 2013, p. 89). The aspirational post-war kitchen was a site of innovation as piped hot water and gas and/ or electricity were integrated into the home allowing for modern cooking and water heating methods (Beaumont, 2013). Indeed, desires for modernization of the home were critical to the viewpoints expressed by the women’s organization and reflected in their survey of 2,500 women (see Scott, 2007). The ‘evidence submitted by the Mothers Union to the Dudley Committee in 1942 incorporated many requests made by the women’s groups, a testament to their influence on housing design policy’ (Alonso Aranda, 2024, p. 11). However, new housing designs that were emerging were not universally embraced (Llewellyn, 2004).

The heavy focus on forms of efficiency relied on women to take up the mantle of the main (unpaid) domestic labourer. The Housing Manual published by the Ministry of Health (1949) and other government documents set out detailed layouts and models for the kitchen that detailed the necessity of cup hooks, drying racks, and storage spaces under the sink, the opening of oven doors, and the need for natural light for the woman working in the kitchen. They designed possible cupboards and larders, and spoke about the limits to food storage needed in an urban setting. But the efforts to design model layouts through documents such as the Housing Manual (1949) could be considered to be highly prescriptive. As Alvara Arancibia (2024) argues,

The Housing Manual is an example of the exacerbation of the kitchen as a means for the standardization of dwelling design. Here, three types of kitchens imply each a clear definition of its ‘user’ and a corresponding lifestyle.

The Housing Manual offered three different kitchen designs (the kitchen living room, the working kitchen and the dining kitchen) but their underpinning gender norms were consolidated as millions of housing units were constructed in the post-war period. Arancibia (2024) is further critical of the language that conceptualization of people as the ‘user’ of space and the ways in which this commodified both people and houses. As well as this the space standards within the Housing Manual were lower than those set out in the Dudley Report (see Johnston, 1980).

The geographer Angela Meah argues that the kitchen’s return to a more central space of the house actually creates new forms of gendered labour such as the need for women to simultaneously mind children while engaging in domestic labour and for the need to keep these spaces clean (Meah, 2016). Ideas of efficiency and good design were not feminist arguments, but ones that spoke to a modernizing Britain based on ‘traditional gender values’ (see also Meah & Jackson, 2013).

But the alignment of the kitchen as a physically planned space with its inhabitations are entangled with ideas about moral worth that encompass racialized and classed narratives. Britain’s post-war housing focused on the development of a series of new towns outside London and other major cities, alongside a focus on suburban development. The mass construction of these homes offered a quality of living space and standards that had not been experienced in much of the inter-war private rented spaces (Clapson, 1998). Meryl Aldridge (1996) argues that the new towns’ urban planning efforts most ably demonstrated the importance of the traditional family unit to planners and architects, spatially arranged around the activities of a working man and a woman as the housewife. Even if the reality was more complex with women in the paid workforce, feminized labour was not seen as central to the household despite the expectations that it was provided. Pennington (2024) comments how ‘Town plans and built environments prescribed particular gender roles, and women’s experiences of employment were grounded in urban space’ (p. 5). Thus, the efforts to improve living conditions within a modernization of Britain can also be read as the configuration of homes to re-consolidate women’s subordinate gender role. Even if women contested these gendered roles and remade spaces to serve their needs and desires, the patriarchal imaginary of the post-war era was also entangled with the reconstruction of the nation-state.

Beyond the Post-War Planned Kitchen?

These aspirations of better housing and the domestic aspirations of individuals and the state contrasted with severe labour and material shortages that hampered post-war reconstruction (see Flinn, 2012). Even if the emergent housing reinscribed gender roles and norms, the quality of the new housing was far superior than that within the left behind inner urban areas. However, a new counterpoint would emerge between those benefiting from new or vastly improved housing and those who were facing inadequate housing accommodation. The new paradigm of housing engaged in a valorization of the housewife and family that would become increasingly understood through moral and racial tropes.

Rising poverty encompassed white people and people of colour but racial explanations were turned to by the public and policy-makers as reasons for accelerating urban decline. As the historians Rhodes and Brown (2019, p. 3243) detail:

Settlement in deprived urban areas was taken as evidence of the cultural pathologies and ‘otherness’ of black immigrants and minorities were largely defined by the assumed features of their spatial location, constructed not as victims of systemic racism and inequalities, but as ‘perpetrators of decay’ (Smith, 1989, p. 119) ³

The post-war housing narrative of ‘good’ families living in improved housing is an important counterpoint to understanding how the domestic vision facilitated the denigration of minorities vision. Migrants took jobs in the newly established welfare state, in transport, and in industry helping to rebuild Britain. Post-war migration from British colonies has been the subject of significant scholarship (see, for example, Bhambra, 2017). The discrimination faced by post-war New Commonwealth immigrants is located within a longer lineage of racial discrimination grounded in colonialism (see Hammond Perry, 2015). The poor housing they were consigned to offered few of the amenities suggested by the Government’s extensive design of dwellings manuals. However, limited attention has been given by planners to how the absence or inadequate kitchen and cooking spaces shaped their lives and prejudices against them.

The Improvised Kitchen

Through engaging with the finer grained accounts, alongside other representations of lived space, the British postwar imaginary of the kitchen comes into view as situated within the ideal home and family and inappropriate for those deemed to be inferior.

The normative visions of the British housewife, however problematic, would come to stand in stark relief to the incoming New Commonwealth immigrants. Ideas about their distinctive racial, ethnic, cultural and religious difference were marked by long-standing ideologies of European racial superiority (Gilroy, 1987). But in the level of the day-to-day, ideas of incompatibility of living habits emerged within racialized discourse. There was fierce opposition to allocating people of colour better homes and it started to be argued that they would unsuitable to live in such housing (Burnley, 1967; Henderson & Kerns, 1984).

The imaginary of the idealized post-war kitchen was based upon ideas of efficiency and modernization and ethnic minorities were placed outside these discourses due to colonial forms of racism. Greater attention is thus needed to how the kitchen within the spaces open to people of colour inflected their everyday experiences and how their inadequate spatial arrangements helped to crystallize and sustain forms of prejudice.

The British Institute for Race Relations commissioned a number of studies to understand the situation of people of colour (see, for example, Rex & Moore, 1967). Davison’s study of London published in 1966 found startlingly high proportions of people of colour living in one room. There were significant differences, with nearly half of Caribbean people (43%) and nearly one third of Jamaican people (29%) in this type of accommodation. People from Pakistan had over one fifth living in a single room whilst Indian people constituted a figure of 16%. However, all groups were starkly different to the English, of whom only 2% lived in one room and the survey revealed also that the Polish community, an almost entirely white group, had 6% living in such accommodation. Davison (1966) points out the absence of finer details on the reality of these conditions and the impacts this had on every aspect of life:

The bare statistics of overcrowding which have recently been examined take on a greater air of reality when a family is described as living in a tiny room where it is hardly possible to open the door when two people are inside. (p. 46)

Davison gives details to the impacts of trying to live with dignity in such reduced circumstances. He notes that people still try to keep their homes ‘clean and tidy’ (Davison, 1966).

The historian Alistair Cartwright (2020) turns to these rooms in divided houses as neglected spaces that form part of an official discourse that is critical of immigrants’ living styles. He examines how the landing becomes a warm space as tenants set up oil heaters for heating as well as the cooking of food or the warming of water. While potentially highly dangerous, Cartwright elaborates that these landings could offer communal spaces where a multiplicity of actions occur and a multiplicity of items were located. He is alert to the hardships and deprivations faced by occupants, but Cartwright’s deeper investigation demonstrates the neglect of how space was being shaped by those in dire circumstances who remained outside of planning’s visions for domestic improvements and efficiencies. People of colour did move to council housing, but there were efforts to restrict their access to the newest housing (Henderson & Kerns, 1984).

In London, subdivision of larger houses was common. Access to kitchens or bathrooms was limited, or if the dwelling had them, they might be closed to tenants or unfit and unusable. The difficulties of living without access or limited access to food preparation and storage had significant consequences on the everyday activities of shopping, cooking, eating and arranging the home. Surveys of household conditions can give some sense of the limitations of the lack of a proper kitchen but it is within literary accounts and photojournalism that we find some of the nuances of the meaning of being denied the domestic idyll. The challenges for New Commonwealth arrivals were significant. The renowned Black British author Andrea Levy’s Small Island turns to the experiences of Hortense, a Jamaican schoolteacher, and her husband Gilbert and their migration to post-war London. Hortense joins her husband in London, imagining her education as a teacher will enable her to take up some form of middle-class life. She is increasingly disturbed by the reality of England and the realization of their inferior status and living conditions in London. Her husband Gilbert has rented a place which turns out to be a room within a home of multiple occupation owned by a white couple. After a fraught arrival Hortense tries to draw upon some form of normal life and domestic routine. She states to Gilbert:

I will cook in the kitchen.

This is the kitchen.

Where?

You see that ring and that sink, that is the kitchen. The dining room is over there where you see the table and two chairs.

You tell me you cook on this?

Yes, that is what I’m telling you.

Just this one little ring? (Levy, 2005, p. 30)

Here the kitchen formed part of a continuous living space that did not allow the possibility of the domestic idyll. The challenges of adjusting to the different foods and shops of Britain were compounded by the limited space for cooking and the inadequate facilities often provided.

The reality of migrants’ lives in poor housing facing discrimination in everyday life and political discourse yet the making of community in diaspora is an important part of the story. The literary theorist Kim Evelyn (2013) sets out in her discussion of both Small Island and The Lonely Londoners that ‘homemaking in the face of housing discrimination is a significant accomplishment’ (p. 136). Evelyn (2013) continues that we should look more closely at the remarkable ways in which people have made homes in diaspora despite the sexism inherent within notions of domesticity ‘Just as making a home of a diaspora requires a conceptual leap, act of agency, and a flight of imagination, so too would making a home of the dilapidated tenements in which migrants frequently find themselves . . .’ (pp. 136–137).

The photographer Nick Hedges attentiveness to the lived experiences of poverty provided an unparallel series of resources since the 1960s that have stimulated political debate and action. However, his photos from the 1970s can be read in multiple ways, reflecting his deep interest in people and his sympathetic depictions of them. In one set of photos, he entitled ‘Single parent living in one room’ from Tottenham in 1972, we consider the confinement of people of colour. Figure 1 demonstrates the challenges of living for one young Black woman standing against a kitchen counter by a cooker. As we look to this picture, we see that the room serves as kitchen, sitting room and bedroom. Bottles of milk on the counter indicate that there is no fridge. The items are neatly arranged; a teapot stands neatly on a tray next to a washing up bowl with no sink and behind her the storage units jostle for room against a dressing table, child’s teddy bear and what looks like a portable heater. In a second photo the space opens up and we can glean that the foot of the bed extends as far as the makeshift kitchen area (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Kitchen, Tottenham 1972.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Living in One Room, Tottenham 1971.

The challenges of keeping the spaces organized, given they were often in poor states of repair, are immense. Not only are there no labour-saving devices or storage and organization of the modern kitchen, but the kitchen itself is a makeshift arrangement within the main living and sleeping space. The kitchen in these spaces was in reality one hob or makeshift cooking item, vastly outside the fitted kitchen of planners’ modernist visions and the recommendations of the Dudley Report or the Housing Manual. These spaces did not offer the diagrammatic layouts of the ideal kitchen or share any similarities with the Taylorist logics of the Frankfurt kitchen. Yet within these spaces New Commonwealth arrivals and their descendants improvised kitchens as spaces through which to engage in the necessity of caring for their families. If these ideals were assumed to create and reflect back the idealized family, how did outside discourses around these improvised kitchens reflect both gendered and racialized debates?

Taking the Kitchen Outside

In this section, I turn to the ways in which food practices were a key motif around which prejudice was expressed towards the British South Asian community. More recent work has engaged with British minority communities and how they have adapted domestic spaces to suit their needs. Shameen Black (2010) turns to how ‘an emphasis on food is exceptionally prominent in the construction of South Asian identity in Anglophone discourse’ noting how ‘India in particular’ operates as a ‘signifier of exotic culinary practices’ (p. 6). South Asian immigrants formed a key grouping within New Commonwealth arrivals in post-war Britain. The predominantly male migration was followed by the arrival of other family members. Patterns of settlement led to many living in terraced housing, akin to row housing, in cities and towns in the West Midlands and North of England. Noha Nasser turns to the ways that ‘Muslim South Asians have adapted and transformed existing built form in Britain’ with a key area of interest being the British terraced house colloquially known as a two up and two down with ‘a back extension or “lean-to” for the ‘kitchen-cum-scullery.’ The adaptation of the two downstairs living rooms into gendered space reflect how some South Asian migrants from ‘the average rural house’ engaged in everyday spatial planning practices whereby ‘During the process of displacement, the spatial practices used in such rural homes were to a large degree transferred and reinscribed into the spaces of the terraced house’ (Nasser, 2003, p. 11).

In these ways the domestic realms of cooking and eating reflected aspects of the gendered post-war patriarchal aspirations of the British nation-state. Yet when transposed to minority communities, their ways of life were viewed with deep suspicion. The British South Asian community faced significant racial prejudice because of perceptions of tight-knit families and communities. The idea that migrants were ‘intruders’ into British space is a central theme within racist rhetoric expounded by Enoch Powell MP among others. But smells of cooking and the presence of the ‘taken over’ shops are directly networked to the spaces of the kitchen. Here women might be considered to be fulfilling what is in theory an idealized gender role through their labour in the kitchen. Yet we can clearly see the limits of the desire for women’s role were highly racialized. Their labour is to produce ‘ethnic’ foods and the result is not contributing to an idealized British domestic idyll but an incursion of migration that is unwelcome. Complaints emerged from English residents about the smells of cooking that were considered to extend the reach of foreignness into the domestic spaces of their homes (Yemm, 2019). Complaints about South Asian food aromas are not consigned to the past. ⁴ Here, in stark and offensive terms the intersections between race, ethnicity and exclusion based around food and cooking practices that animate racist sentiment.

The historian Oliver Betts’s examination of the smellscapes of poor districts in 19th century considers the role of intense overcrowding and poor housing construction in the permeation of smells:

Smells of cooking would have filled the air, issuing not only from chimneys but leaking out of cracked and bent flues and from broken or ill-fitting windows, thin or cracked walls, and loose-fitting doors . . . (Betts, 2014, p. 119)

This is not to say that if smells were confined that there would be an absence of racism or that complaints are not part of a racist discourse. However, the relationship between housing construction, proximity, density and housing quality are critical to ideas of disturbance. But they are in direct opposition to the importance for people to have the opportunity to cook and to try and re-establish patterns of home foods in creating and nurturing diasporic identities.

The journalist Elspeth Huxley’s (1964) problematic description of Southall in the 1960s reflects a burgeoning opposition to South Asian arrivals:

Their numbers rise month by month as more Asians come, and as white owners sell because the district’s ‘gone coloured’ [sic]. We are back again with the smell of curry, gardens used as garbage dumps or children’s lavatories. . . . It is said that property values in the area have dropped by fifty per cent. (p. 88, emphasis added)

The description mixes together food, hygiene and property values. Ideas of good housekeeping, central to the kitchen as part of the post-war ideal of domesticity are reworked into allegations of poor or deficient usages of the homes by South Asians that draw on racialized stereotypes. The trope of ‘the smell of curry’ encapsulates a sentiment of anti-South Asian racism that amplified cultural and ethnic difference and considered it to intrude upon white British people. Interestingly, curry is itself an Anglo-Asian construction that is recorded in written accounts in Britain as far back as the 1600s.

Buettner discusses how narratives of food and culture were used to stigmatize South Asians. She turns to the West Midlands of England where hostility was growing towards South Asians in the run up to what would become a highly controversial election campaign in Smethwick in 1964. Buettner points to published letters in the local paper that complained about the smell of garlic and how culinary practices became shaped into a wider narrative regarding purported Britishness

Ignorance of, or indeed any inclination towards, what counted as ‘our ways and manners’ extended to South Asians’ dietary habits – ‘that curry’ – that many local whites deemed offensive and ‘smelly’ . . . (Buettner, 2014, p. 719)

The claims that areas were being taken over by South Asian people forms part of media representations of the period. At the same time, South Asian women were represented in both racialized and gendered ways. In one local authority area local residents demanded a rate rebate because of the smells of Indian cooking on their streets (Yemm, 2019).

Discourses around South Asians as being culturally incompatible with Britain are long-standing. The development of the community extended the conceptual and material notion of the kitchen and food outside of the home. Many of the first post-war migrants were men. They often took shift work and lived in dormitory style accommodation in houses. Canteen style restaurants emerged offering low-cost meals for these low paid workers who were living without families. Buettner elsewhere writes that

Men who ran these casual, cafe-style establishments often had begun as factory workers before deciding to go into business for themselves by providing a service that fellow new arrivals in Britain wanted. Typically located near factories and mills relying on Asian labor, these eateries stayed open long hours to attract workers when the night shifts ended, providing inexpensive ‘home cooking’, sociability and a support network for Asians who worked and lived nearby. Rarely, if ever, did an English customer cross the threshold. (2008, p. 875)

These arrangements arguably echo the communal feeling of the second world war. Here, the kitchen spans the public and private sphere, operating outside of the home.

The increasing New Commonwealth population challenged the assumptions around food as normalized practices, although it is important to note that Jewish and Irish peoples’ diets had been the subject of discrimination in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As migrants settled into homes, often older terraced houses, the kitchen may have been modified and modernized, but not as an idealized space. Some Indian migrants perhaps faced greater difficulties in meeting food needs with vegetarian and Halal diets that were not catered for in the mainstream. Grocers and markets were established in areas where migrants were living and many would also have to travel to major urban centres for particular food items as well as non-perishable items being sent or brought from overseas.

Further pressure was added through the multiple requirements of accessing, preparing and consuming food that extend the space of the kitchen beyond its physical position in the home. Feminist scholars have critiqued planning’s inability to span the spaces of the public and private sphere. For migrants, cooking required networks of people and spaces, the emergence of specialist grocers and restaurants. This infrastructure of cooking spanned the public and private realm and the food of incoming migrants gave a sense of intrusion into formerly white communities. Hamlett and colleagues’ (2008) analysis of oral histories note the difficulties of accessing food stuffs and the growth of South Asian grocery stores and access to halal meat as the community grew. The kitchen and the meeting of family needs and desires in creating meals from ‘home’ alter the public sphere and raise questions regarding the capacity of planners to mediate forms of spatialized ethnic change.

However, a critical distinction must be made between imagining that prioritizing forms of design of the kitchen facilitate forms of belonging and inclusion. Instead, the improvised kitchens that many minorities used formed an important dimension to the building of minority communities in Britain and other white supremacist societies. The capacity to cook and taste foods from home even when shops are stocked with many unfamiliar items has been an integral aspect to community building. My mother recounts experiences of moving to South East England in the 1960s to train to be a National Health Service employed nurse. Her colleagues from countries including Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Singapore and the Philippines would come together at the weekend to cook different foods from home over a portable gas stove in her shared bedroom in a rented house. The arrangement was not a formal kitchen but these improvised kitchens are important sites of a diasporic domesticity which also reflected changing gender roles as all the women worked as well as shifts in class for many migrants as women such as my mother had never cooked before arriving in England. The bedroom became an improvised kitchen where they added canned and dried flavours from home to the fresh food available and where they would meet and find respite from the challenges of life in a new country.

These experiences challenge the dominant post-war political imaginaries. The Dudley Report and post-war housing manuals and guidance did engage with women and their needs for the home but they were never established to challenge gender or class (Beaumont, 2013). Sam Selvon’s (2014 [1956]) influential book the Lonely Londoners sets out the plight of men arriving from the Caribbean in post-war London. The main protagonist Bat finds himself always helping newcomers even if he complains about this bitterly. As people come by his small room, he offers food seemingly cooked on one small ring within his lodgings. Comfort and advice along with a meal from home are dispensed to these distressed and out-of-place men.

Here the kitchen and its space of respite are being shared by men who have arrived on their own looking for work. In The Housing Lark (2020 [1965]) Selvon gives insights into the interiorities of life within the overcrowded and subdivided immigrant homes and the multiple difficulties of being away from ‘home’. The offering of food and the sociable sharing of spaces are highly intimate acts of kindness and reciprocity where multiple nationalities could come together. Anomas Pieris and Kelum Palipane (2022) emphasize how they are writing against the Australian context in setting out how the kitchens they discuss offer ‘narratives of persistence rather than of resistance to systems of oppression, our reactions to living in a social system that is not of our own making’ (p. 170).

bell hooks’s concept of homeplace has been highly influential to Black and minority feminist scholars. hooks (1990) turns to the experiences of the Black community where:

Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not encounter white racial aggression. (p. 388)

hooks’s conception of ‘homeplace’ provides an opening to explore how minoritized communities form places of respite away from societal prejudices. Thus, homeplace can be thought of as an intimate space of sanctuary ‘amid a harsh world outside characterized by white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy’ (Brant, 2023, p. 47). Homeplace as a concept and resource offers an important way of productively thinking through the experience of people of colour moving to Britain who faced forms of racism mediated racial hierarchies that were reconfigured within the decolonizing empire. As hooks turns in her discussion, the physical inadequacy of many of these interior spaces do not reduce their capacity to serve as places of meaning giving physical and psychic sustenance where new forms of domestic spatialized belonging challenge oppression.

For migrants arriving from the New Commonwealth, food is tied up with complexity as a site of memory and belonging, but also difficulties, loss and exclusion (see Ahmad & Ramlan, 2019). Avtar Brah’s (1996) work has developed our understandings of diaspora and the importance of recognizing the power relations that frame processes of migration. In the post-war era, the planned kitchen was framed around traditional yet implicitly modern families. In contrast the decrepit housing of many post-war immigrants from British colonies became aligned with cultural difference and exclusion from forms of planned modernity. Yet the remaking of life in hostile conditions continued within the excluded and non-conforming kitchens of diaspora. Forming a sense of belonging and home has been significantly challenged by the different spaces of the British home compared with the homes that many immigrants left behind. As Sian Supski (2006) explores in relation to post-war immigrants to Australia, making the kitchen a homely space was central to many women’s sense of belonging in a new country.

Sara Ahmed’s attention to questions of home importantly returns us to ideas of diasporic belonging. Ahmed sets out the rupture, ‘a process of estrangement’ that marks the journey of many migrants but that within arrival there can be processes that help to (re)constitute community although she is cautious of suggesting these are shared identities necessarily. Brah (1996, p. 192) writes ‘On the other hand home is also the lived experience of locality, its sounds and smell’. Ahmed draws on Avtar Brah’s consideration of what constitutes home and how it cannot be confined to geographic co-ordinates. Ahmed develops Brah’s thinking further in reflecting on ‘the lived experience of locality’ which she sets out to be.

The immersion of a self in a locality is hence not simply about inhabiting an already constituted space (from which one can simply depart and remain the same). Rather, the locality intrudes into the senses: it defines what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers. (1999, p. 341).

These insights open up ways to consider the kitchen as an important and intimate space through which a sense of self, home and community emerge. Ahmed invokes the human sensorium as co-constitutive of locality and place. We can add taste to these senses and the vital place that kitchens or cooking space serve in the making and remaking of self and community. Ideas that planning and reconstruction were solely progressive are challenged through understanding how migrants in the post-war era were excluded from the deliberations on the post-war home. Even if improvised kitchens reflect racialized inequality, they also highlight how the strategies of marginalized communities could make home troubling the limitations of a set of housing and planning policies that focus primarily on physical space. Recognizing how communities with an immigrant background have faced discrimination in relation to food practices can aid us in opening up the divide between the public and private sphere to offer more complex narratives of space (Sweet & Escalante, 2015). They ask us to consider how food practices constitute diasporic communities and to recognize the building of community even in inadequate housing conditions.

The kitchen, wherever situated and however constituted, is a complex space which spans patriarchy, resistance, care and prejudice. Yet the discourses of planning around efficiency and the notion of the user have hollowed out its meaning and importance. The geographer, Angela Meah’s consideration of kitchens emphasizes how ‘many contemporary Anglo-American feminists balk at the idea of commenting on either kitchens or cooking’ (p. 675). Meah continues,

I would argue that a conceptual shift is made possible if we focus on the issue of space, exploring how the spatial dynamics of the kitchen, and its relationship to the spaces beyond, can open up possibilities for expressing agency and power.

Coda

While the diasporic or non-conformist kitchen offers hope as a space of belonging in a hostile world, we must remain attentive to the limitations of housing in an ongoing and deepening crisis with living conditions that are not so far away from the poverty documented in the post-war period (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2017). The socio-economic position of the New Commonwealth communities and their descendants has changed. Nonetheless, racialized minorities continue to face disadvantage and the consequences of racialized prejudice. The diasporic or improvised kitchen as a site of resistance or community building should not be read as suggesting that housing standards are not important or to romanticize the prejudice faced by England’s postwar newcomers.

The nature of racism and discrimination has shifted since the postwar urban arena and reconfigured in ways that still implicitly are arranged around idealized homes and their occupants. The death of Awaab Ishak, by all accounts a happy 2-year boy, emphasize how racist tropes of housekeeping endure for people of colour. Awaab’s family lived in social housing in Rochdale and his parents were deeply concerned about his respiratory problems. Their flat was persistently covered in black mould, but despite many requests for repairs little action had been taken. One justification was that the housing provider blamed the parents for causing the conditions citing their bathing and vague claims that their cooking habits were unsuited for the housing. They instructed the parents to paint over the mould. In the public inquiry that would follow some 2 years later, the housing provider would be found to be culpable for the black mould, having failed to act appropriately. Awaab’s death was preventable, as was the suffering of the family in these circumstances. One could point to a social housing sector under strain of financial mismanagement, as well as institutional and direct forms of racism. These are all parts of the account. Yet the blaming of Awaab’s family foregrounded what were considered through a racially discriminatory discourse to be ethnically suspicious and problematic ways of living that directly denigrated the material form of an increasingly scarce housing resource (see Shurety, 2024). The ongoing housing disparities and their intense racial politicization demonstrate that few of the lessons of the post-war period have been learnt. The post-war kitchen moreover, despite its problematization, has been swept aside as a space where there is an increasing bifurcation between the kitchen as aspirational space and further reductions in living space in the United Kingdom. The controversial permitted development of office to residential space has further constrained and confined people, particularly people of colour and marginalized groups, to highly reduced living conditions (see Pineo et al., 2024). Moreover, the ongoing reduction of housing standards have eroded the planning aspirations of the post-war period and unfurled a new regime of divided housing in an increasingly divided Britain.