Inter-war speculative housing, that is built as a commercial project either to sell and realise a profit on costs or to rent to realise a long-term profit from rentals was the most numerous type of housing built between the wars. Such housing swelled the suburbs, added to the housing stock of villages and studded the ribbon development extending alongside arterial roads leading to/from settlements. This category encompassed a wide variety of house styles from mansions in their grounds to relatively modest terraced properties with some garden space and usually with at least a ground floor bay window. Such speculative built housing might be architect designed or of a copy-book design familiar to the builder employed, with the mock-Tudor style being much in vogue. The dimensions of these houses and that of their rooms and facilities did not allow them to qualify for a subsidy. Clearly in such a wide category of housing the quality of the finished product could vary greatly, this depending on a range of factors but particularly the standards of the building contractor employed and the quality of the building materials employed. Typically, these sort of houses are the ones for which it is said ‘I bought this house in the 1930s for £2,000 and now it is worth £200,000’.
Inter-War subsidy houses were often, but not exclusively, built as terraced houses of modest dimensions (this varying with the varying requirements of successive governments, s.p.b.s) and if incorporating a bay window at all these were usually shallow and right-angled. Deeds were not required to state whether, or not, a property was a subsidy house so defining such today is usually an educated guess.
Having this afternoon had a ride out to Hornsea, partly to see the spring-tide crash against the sea defences as well as walk the dog on the beach (before the flow tide reached the sea defences) a nice little example of inter-War speculative ribbon development is going into/out of Seaton, here being a succession of detached bungalows, the 1930s being the coming of age for bungalow living.