The Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition 1944-1962: representations of the 'Ideal Home' and domestic consumption.

This thesis investigates the ideals of home, and their determination, promoted in the representations of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition during the period 1944 to 1962 in order to explore how, through their dissemination, the Exhibition intervened in the definitions and politics of home.
The thesis discusses popular ideals of home that emerged from the circumstances created by the Second World War. It situates the Ideal Home Exhibition in the immediate postwar exhibition context in order to reveal the relationship of the Exhibition to issues of design and the commercial interests of its exhibitors. The Exhibition is discussed as a business, assessing the objectives of the organisers and the nature of the 'audience' it attracted. The representations made by the Exhibition, particularly those in the 'Village of Ideal Homes' are examined in order to identify historical shifts in ideals of home in relation to housing design and the issues and political objectives of postwar reconstruction. It is then discussed as an intervention in the development of postwar consumerism, and as an intervention in the rise in postwar owner-occupancy. Finally, the Exhibition's representations are discussed in relation to its ideological address of nationalism, class and gender, and their construction of the 'ideal family' as the occupants of the 'ideal home'.
The thesis questions the notion that the Exhibition had an ideal of home, and suggest that instead it was constructed from ideologies of home. The Exhibition is seen as an ideological apparatus that promoted ideals of consumption and property ownership through an address of class hegemony.

A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.