STREET REVIVAL

Jane Sanders doesn’t just live in a Fifties house, she also embraces the decade’s lifestyle, says Caroline Mcghie

Jane Sanders is fascinated not just by the house she lives in, but by the period in which it was built, and by the woman who was its first owner. A Miss Eastwood, unmarried and in her forties, planned the house in 1952, the year of the Queen’s accession, and moved into it in 1954. Angling Spring, named after the woods behind it, originally had two bedrooms and two slate-shelved larders – one for pots and pans, the other for dry foodstuffs. Jane, who shares the now enlarged house with her husband, Dean, and their five children, has fully entered into the spirit of the place. She wears period aprons, just like housewives in advertisements of the period, a time when women were adjusting to the new world of fridges, food-mixers, Bakelite and Coronation chicken. “Miss Eastwood was a mistress at a private school, very involved in the Red Cross, quite fearsome,” Jane says. “She never threw away a pair of stockings, a newspaper, a used light bulb or leftover soap. She had a real wartime mentality. Back then, you never knew what could be useful in the future. It was all still here when we moved in 16 years ago.” But who in their right mind would buy a poorly insulated and energy-hungry Fifties house? “The estate agent advised against, as I had two small boys and was due to give birth again. It had no heating apart from paraffin stoves, and it was cold. There was an old oven but no fridge. But it just had a lovely feeling.” As with other houses built in the postwar years, when land was plentiful but building supplies scarce, Angling Spring was cube-shaped and set in an ample plot. This made it ideal for extension, and the Sanders family now have seven bedrooms and a big kitchen. “I feel very sad that we didn’t use Crittall windows, which we should have done, but they are so expensive now,” says Jane. “The kitchen had one cupboard so we asked a carpenter to make a run of them in the same style. I don’t need a fitted kitchen. And when we renewed the bath, we put linoleum down. Mottled green.” She was determined to keep Miss Eastwood’s larders and to preserve the parquet floors. She also began to collect Fifties bits and pieces. “I have a bit of furniture from my grandma, a bookshelf which my uncle made, a glass-fronted cabinet, an umbrella stand in the hall, some original Fifties posters encouraging people to see England by rail and a lovely vase,” she says. The children, now aged from 11 to 21, have grown up knowing nothing else. When their parents took them to the Imperial War Museum, they moaned that everything there looked exactly like home. Now the family is selling through Savills (01494 725636) at £1.4m. Well might we gasp at the way prices have soared. In the Fifties, most people rented. Only 25 per cent of the population owned their own homes, and the average house price, according to analysis by Savills and Nationwide, was £1,891. In 2012,the average is £162,722. Therefore, vintage bottles of wine to enjoy in the maze of cellars below. It was then, too, that Terence Conran, 21 years old and bursting to break out of the austerity years, launched Conran & Company, with workshops in the basement below the Ballet Rambert. He had worked on the interior of a flying boat at the 1951 Festival of Britain, including a design covered in vaguely phallic motifs, which his mother thought looked like a series of signs indicating “this way to the gents”. No one could have known that within a decade he would be selling us chicken bricks, garlic crushers, glass tables and paper lampshades. It was a period on the edge of dramatic change. Already architects in the United States were doing jaw-dropping things with glass and steel, and some of it crept in here. The architect Peter Wormsley designed Farnley Hey in Farnley Tyas, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, which is being sold at £699,500 by The Modern House (08456 344068). The property is almost as it was then. “In style, Framley Hey suggests the influence of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, brought to a dramatic site in the Pennines,” says English Heritage. “It typifies the best of the Fifties in its lightness, sense of picturesque and optimistic stance.” The house sparkles with floor-toceiling windows, floors of camphorwood and Yorkshire stone. Lemon-yellow Formica is in the lavatory, and there is a dance floor with a built-in sound system. “There was a love of new materials but also of traditional wood and natural stone,” says Albert Hill, of The Modern House. “The major change was in the open-plan spaces, the cascade of space. The dance floor is a joyous expression of post-war euphoria. They didn’t have to bring in a band. They could use new technology and have amplifiers. It became a place for play and leisure.” Most houses, though, still harked back to the Thirties, when every room had a dedicated purpose. Penny Boff was born in 1955 into the house that her father, Laurence Jeffery, a quantity surveyor, had built in 1951 on land in Guildford, which cost £5,000. Albermarle House is classic, detached and tile-hung, with three