Family,society and the ornamental villa on the fringes of English country towns

Ornamental villas were a significant constituent land-use of the early nineteenth-century fringe-belt of British towns. An outline of the origin and development of this innovation in middle-class house design provides a background to the detailed investigation of the villas of a typical small country town. Evidence indicates that the kinship and wider societal groupings of the country town middle classes played an important subsidiary role to the better-known factors of land-ownership structure and national economic fluctuations in the decision-making process of locating and building ornamental villas. The case study suggests that some of the unexplained residual values of Whitehand's models of fringe-belt formation, which are rooted in the theory of land economics, can be explained, in the case of ornamental villas, by reference to the life cycle of their occupying families. Marriage and the death of the head of household are the most significant parts of the family life cycle.