Watching the English

NESTBUILDING RULES

Which brings me to the English mania for 'home improvements', or 'DIY'. When Pevsner described 'the proverbial Englishman' as 'busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands', he hit the proverbial nail on the head. Never mind football, this is the real national obsession. We are a nation of nestbuilders. Almost the entire population is involved in DIY, at least to some degree. In a survey conducted by some of my colleagues about fifteen years ago, only two per cent of English males and 12 per cent of females said that they never did any DIY.

We updated this research much more recently, when SIRC was commissioned by the tea company who make PG Tips to do a study on home-improvers. (This was not quite as daft an idea as it sounds: we found that any DIY task requires the consumption of vast quantities of tea.) In terms of numbers, we found that nothing much had changed, except that the proportion of women involved in DIY is probably now even higher. And if anything, the English were found to be even more obsessed with their nestbuilding.27

I was not directly involved in the SIRC DIY study, but it was conducted in a manner of which I approve - not by ticking boxes on a telephone questionnaire survey, but by actually going out and spending time in the temples of the DIY faith (Homebase, DoItAll, B amp;Q, etc.), talking at length to DIYers about their motives, fears, stresses and joys. My colleague Peter Marsh, a devout DIYer himself, reasoned that some special temptation would be needed to persuade these fervent nestbuilders to interrupt their Sunday-morning pilgrimage to talk to our researchers. His ingenious solution was tea and doughnuts - a familiar, established part of the DIY ritual - offered free from the back of a van parked strategically in the DIY-store car parks.

It worked a treat. Stopping For Tea is such an integral element of the DIY routine that nestbuilders who would never have allowed a conventional researcher with a clipboard to intrude on their twig-gathering were more than happy to gather round the SIRC van, gulping mugs of tea, munching doughnuts, and telling our researchers all about their home-improvement plans, hopes, worries and disasters.

The Territorial-marking Rule

The most common motive for DIYing among our car-park sample of typical nestbuilders was that of 'putting a personal stamp on the place'. This is clearly understood as an unwritten rule of home ownership, and a central element of the moving-in ritual, often involving the destruction of any evidence of the previous owner's territorial marking. 'You've got to rip something out when you move in,' one young man explained. 'It's all part of the move, isn't it?'

He was right. Watch almost any residential street in England over a period of time, and you will notice that shortly after a For Sale sign comes down, a skip appears, to be filled with often perfectly serviceable bits of ripped-out kitchen or bathroom, along with ripped-out carpets, cupboards, fireplace-surrounds, shelves, tiles, banisters, doors and even walls and ceilings.

This is a 'rule' in a stronger sense than an observable regularity of behaviour: this kind of obsessive territorial marking is, for the majority of English people, an obligation, something we feel compelled, duty-bound to do: 'You've got to rip something out...'

This can be a problem for those who move into brand-new 'starter homes' or other new houses, where it would clearly be ludicrous to start ripping out virgin bathrooms and untouched kitchens. Yet we found the DIY temples full of such people, eager to add whatever 'personal touches' they can to mark their bland new territory. Even if you can't rip anything out, you've got to do something: a house that has not been tinkered with barely qualifies as a home.