Observations on do-it-yourself

In the spring, as Tennyson almost wrote, a middle-aged man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of retiling the bathroom. The boom period for the DIY market is between the Easter and spring bank holidays, and the targets most susceptible to this cyclical urge are those whom market analysts call "third agers".

DIY is supposed to have arrived here from American suburbia in the 1950s, along with rising home ownership and more leisure time. It gave postwar man a role about the house that appealed to his creative instincts without threatening his masculinity. But that is only partly true. After the Second World War, Britain's bombed-out and decrepit housing stock made DIY a necessity. In the late 1940s, the government banned any house repairs costing more than £10, because builders were needed for other, more essential work: and so people had to learn how to repair their houses themselves.

We still have some of Europe's oldest and most dilapidated homes. The long property boom since the 1960s has consisted of the buying and selling of an almost unchanging stock of period houses. In his film The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000), the architectural critic Patrick Keiller calculates that, at the existing state of replenishment, Britain's housing stock will have to last 5,600 years.

When most of us are spending a huge proportion of our incomes on old, cheaply built properties, DIY takes on special significance. The urban gentrifiers of the 1960s were the first to realise that there was cultural capital in renovation. They looked for signs of middle-class refurbishment outside other houses - sand on the pavement, batch mixers, skips and tipper trucks - to reassure themselves that there were "people like us" in the area.

DIY signals the respectable homeowner; it shows that people are making an investment in their houses and are there to stay.

In the days before DIY superstores, the renovation of old houses involved trips to builders' merchants and negotiations with workers doing "foreigners" (that is, working unbeknown to the Inland Revenue). Now, DIYers go to huge sheds which are everything that our houses are not: swiftly built, easily dismantled and largely recyclable. And what do they buy in them? Things to make their houses look even older: dado rails, ornamental mouldings, fireclay sinks. Not to mention the burgeoning market in salvaged materials such as old beams, fireplaces and floorboards.

In a recent report, Mintel notes the ris-ing popularity of DFY ("done for you"). The middle classes seem to be returning to the pre-Second World War pattern of employing professional tradespeople to do basic maintenance in their homes. All power to this growing band of people who can't be arsed to fiddle with a Rawlplug. A whole postwar cultural economy has evolved, from Barry Bucknell to Handy Andy, to persuade us that DIY is a pleasant hobby. But it is also a form of unpaid labour, in which an economic system that has failed to replenish an aged housing stock sells us back the tools to patch up our dilapidated houses.

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

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