0.1 Origin of the Inquiry

The Wartime Social Survey was asked by the Board of Trade to enquire into certain facts about blackout which the Board needed in order to make estimates of future demand. To carry through this investigation it was necessary to make certain observations and measurements, and it was thought worth while to extend the inquiry to get certain other information about windows which might be useful to the Ministries concerned with housing and the Building Research Station.

0.2 Scope of the Inquiry

The inquiry ascertained the size of windows in the sitting room, main living room, kitchen living room, scullery, bedroom and bathrooms of 918 houses chosen at random. It also discovered the area of walls in which windows were placed and the proportion that the area of the window was of the wall, the area of the room was ascertained and the proportion of all windows to the area of the floor calculated, the height of the sill above the floor was measured, and the extent to which windows were obstructed by curtains, net, plants, ornaments and furniture were observed. A question parallel to a question in the Lighting Inquiry(1) was asked to find out whether the housewife considered she could see “well”, “all right”, or “badly” by daylight in each of the rooms.

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0.3 The Sample

The sample was of houses chosen at random in the following towns and London boroughs and the characteristics of the households, housewives and houses thus included are given below:-

Middlesbrough

Durham

Leeds

Selby

Leicester

Gainsborough

Norwich

Ipswich

Southend

Fulham

East Ham

Greenwich

Battersea

Erith

Woolwich

Eltham

Godalming

Newbury

Bristol

Wells

Plymouth

Llanelly

Birmingham

Stafford

Manchester

Accrington

Burnley

Glasgow

Edinburgh

Kirkcaldy

Ramsgate

(1) The Lighting of Buildings - Post-War Building Studies No. 12 H.M.S.O. 1944.

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All windows except bedroom windows were examined. In order to reduce the amount of labour involved a random sample of bedrooms was drawn from our sample of houses by taking one bedroom in each house in order of size; thus in the first house the largest bedroom was taken, in the second house the second largest bedroom, in the third house the third largest bedroom and so on.

0.4 The Report

This document does not in itself answer any specific question, nor come to any conclusions, but is rather a statement of certain data relevant to a number of problems in the design of dwellings. The data is, therefore, presented as a series of statistical tables with such explanation as is necessary to make them intelligible.