This semidetached house building boom in the new suburbs of every town and city was abhorred by the social elite because it represented, for them, the brash aspirations of their social subordinates. In the 1920s an average of 150 000 new semidetached homes were built each year for private purchase, rising to almost 350 000 in 1936 ( Oliver et al., 1981: 13). In twentieth-century Britain, during the interwar years, there was a massive boom in house building for the new middle classes. In working-class homes in northern England in the early twentieth century, for example, the purchase of a piano was as important in status terms as a neogothic mansion might be to the upper classes. Conspicuous consumption soon became a popular way of placement in the social hierarchy amongst the middle and working classes as they became more affluent. The process Veblen identified had been prevalent in the European upper classes for several centuries as a means of gaining patronage.
Conspicuous consumption is the process by which people achieve self-aggrandisement by outperforming their neighbours by displaying the sophistication, fashionability, grandeur, and expense of their homes.
Sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1914) introduced the concept of ‘ conspicuous consumption’ to describe the lifestyles of the American upper classes at the turn of the twentieth century.
Chapman, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012 The Ideal Home as a Consumer Product
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