Tom hodgkinson

In the Middle Ages, towns and cities across Europe would compete with each other to build the biggest church. This same competitive spirit has overtaken London today, but now it’s all about the kitchen.

My friends’ houses look fairly modest from the outside, but penetrate more deeply and a vast, echoing atrium will open out at the back. It will have immense glass doors, looking onto an excessively neat garden which looks more like the terrace of an Ibizan villa than the rose-strewn backyards of old. Indoors, there will be exposed brickwork and hanging lamps. There will be a granite-topped island, so you can drizzle olive oil over the rocket while chatting about Brexit; and there will be white tiles on the floor.

It never stops. Just when you have become accustomed to the biggest kitchen ever, another friend tops it with an even bigger and more temple-like kitchen. They stick out even farther into the garden and have even higher ceilings and, this time, it has an ice machine and the taps produce boiling water. Naturally, there will be one of those wireless sound systems, a professional chef’s range, and possibly even a pizza oven in the garden.

On entering these vast, cathedral-like living spaces – formerly known as kitchens – I would feel a surge of middle-class envy. They made our kitchen look so small, like a galley.

The thinking behind the everexpanding kitchen is that, instead of moving, you should improve. What with stamp duty and silly house prices, it makes more investment sense to add a few square metres to your kitchen than to sell up. So it is that, in my street, seemingly every other house is covered in scaffolding.

This craze for building extends across the country. The Office for National

The Oldie Statistics has just released an online tool that will help you calculate how much each new square metre will add in value to your house. In London, a kitchen extension could instantly add £100,000.

The trend for church-like eating spaces is also, of course, related to the cult of food. The cook officiates at the marble altar like a priest.

So, when the neighbours in our Victorian terrace told us that they were planning to extend their kitchen into the side return, and could they have permission to build the adjoining wall a little higher than is usual, we were thrown into a quandary.

Mrs Mouse said that she liked the side return as it was, a sort of damp home for frogs, the hosepipe, sacks of coal and kindling wood. That was how these Victorian terraces had been designed, and it was a good design. Besides, why did we have to join the bourgeois mania for improvement? What was wrong with our small kitchen? The food that came out of it was perfectly good.

Though the spirit of Diogenes is strong in me, and I often crave the simplicity of living in a one-room hut with a single plate, one spoon, one knife and one fork, and a tin mug, I found that my inner bourgeois self-improver took over and I argued that we should join the neighbours, smash down the wall and get ourselves one of these big kitchens.

‘We have three teenage children, a Labrador [admittedly a mistake] and a cat,’ I argued. ‘It will be great having a bigger kitchen. We’ll keep it simple, though.’

We told the builder that we just wanted a bigger kitchen, not a grander kitchen with new units. We would just repaint the old units and avoid getting an island like everyone else. Then we decided to get an Aga-type oven called an Esse, instead of the underfloor heating which is all the rage. So we would have a simple farmhouse-style kitchen in the middle of Shepherd’s Bush. The children offered suggestions. ‘Can we have one of those boiling water taps like Katie?’ ‘Can we have an ice machine like Joe?’ I am wary of slipping down this route, as the acquisition of new stuff just tends to reveal new desires, not to mention creating a lot of unnecessary work, as Sir John Denham put it in his 1642 poem, ‘Cooper’s Hill’:

… men like ants Toil to prevent imaginary wants, Yet all in vain, increasing with their store Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.

The striving, bourgeois self-improver is of course nothing new. According to historian Keith Thomas, the 17th century saw a positive mania for showing off among the middling sort, particularly in London. He quotes a Cornish gentleman remarking with horror after a visit to the capital on ‘the vanities of London, everyone in coach and clothes endeavouring to surpass one another’.

Another moraliser of the day complained that women were not interested in the innate quality of a thing, but only whether it was a better thing than their friend’s thing: ‘They see nothing that another hath, but have a mind to the same, if not a better of like kind.’

That reminds me of the joke in The Simpsons where Marge is seen flicking through a magazine called Better Homes, which has the subtitle ‘Than Yours’.

Well, after months and months of noise and dust and complex financial manoeuvres, our new big kitchen is ready. And it’s brilliant! So light and airy. I feel like I’m in an Ikea ad.

By all means, take me to Innisfree and give me a small cabin of clay and wattles made… but not just yet.