Dr. Annie Gray

That kitchen to me is the ultimate in a kitchen that acknowledges that people who cook, at that point women, didn't come in one size fits all and therefore the kitchen shouldn't actually come in one size fits all either.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it was built around the idea that flats, modern apartments, had really small kitchens, that you couldn't have servants in them.

This was a kitchen designed for the one housewife, and it always was a wife, household.

I mean, in Britain, as in most of Europe, a lot of people did have servants in the 1920s and 30s, and I think that's one reason it was so slow to catch on.

That and the fact that a lot of people weren't building houses.

The basic design of the kitchen hadn't really changed for a millennia or so.

Your standard kitchen would be a workspace, usually a table.

It would be somewhere to cook, which might still be an open fire, especially in rural settings, but in urban settings was more likely to be a closed range using coal or wood.

Gas came in at the end of the 19th century, but it was quite slow to take off.

And everything was either built in by a carpenter, if you could afford it, or it was bits and pieces of furniture that you'd come by.

And one of the ways in which the Frankfurt kitchen was so influential was the idea that it was fitted and didn't have gaps so that dust and bits of food would go into it.

And was there an influence of that kitchen on the way people cooked?

Not immediately.

I mean, the Frankfurt kitchen had an impact on design and on the way in which kitchen designers thought about kitchens, most notably in the States, where it went away, got mixed up with the factory system and was eventually reborn as the fitted kitchen.

But the biggest impact actually was just in the fact that you then had something as cooking and as domestic service changed automatically.

which was already in existence, which could then come in.

What I would say is that once you start to get the fitted kitchen and the idea of the kitchen as a space, which the mistress of the house is in quite a lot of the time, you get a shift in the idea that kitchens are dirty spaces, a shift from kitchens are places for servants to kitchens are now places that I might want to show off.

So very gradually, really from the 1930s through to, I would say, the 1970s, 80s, you see this shift towards the show kitchen, the kitchen with the serving hatch of the 1950s onwards, where your guests for dinner might sit at a table and see into your kitchen.

And from there, slowly, you end up with what I would say is the modern kitchen, very aspirational space, even if we're not cooking in it, which an awful lot of people don't.