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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Also a common feature is the galley kitchen, an unpleasantly small working space that often doesn't accommodate more than one person at a time.

It's quite different to what I'm used to from Ireland, where the kitchen is the second social space of the home after the sitting room, and often contains the dining table.

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In the UK the kitchen was a larger, family space until after WW1, when they started building more apartments in London. The art deco 1920s/30s vision of the kitchen was that is was secondary to the other functions of the house and that family & social areas should be distinct from the messy kitchen. Over the next few decades that spread to houses, whose owners wanted to appear cultured and have a dining room, forcing the kitchen into a smaller space.

The 1960s especially saw a lot of terraced houses put a small kitchen out back so they could knock through the 2 rooms downstairs and remove the old ceilings and fireplaces. In the 2000s those properties that didn't modernise in the 60s now fetch the higher prices.

Those awful galley kitchens were a feature of the move from proper two up, two down to the extra bit at the back -- the only way you can still get light into the back room is to make the projecting part narrow enough to still allow a window in the back room. So the now separate kitchen becomes a dysfunctionally small corridor with side facing window. In narrower fronted houses, these can seem so tight you wonder how people use the oven or fridge.

You say that, we stayed in a farmhouse in Ireland. Two rooms - one bedroom and the kitchen/sitting room, around a huge hearth. With the cowshed directly attached. Ours was vaguely modernised, hearth ripped out, small bathroom add-on. Without the warm hearth, the building started to suffer. If only these old stone cottages were insulated beneath and outside.

Small windows were a result of the window tax.

Well, peasant cottages from the 19th century, for sure; I lived in one at one point too, and there the cooking would have been done on the hearth, the focus of the living space.

That cottage was cool in summer and cold in winter and damp all year around, walls made from stone and mortar over 1 metre thick, originally with a thatch roof but since replaced with tile after a fire. The economy that built those cottages was basically subsistence living, hardly a structure built with surplus to make different choices.

Open plan kitchen / diners are common in the UK. It comes down to preference. Some prefer a separate kitchen and dining room and other prefer a combined space.

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