At Trend-Monitor we are often asked the size of an average kitchen in the UK. We had an idea, but no concrete evidence, which is why we were really pleased to find this interesting piece of research by LABC Warranties which documents the changing average kitchen sizes across the decades.
The data experts at LABC Warranty wanted to settle an argument once and for all – are Britain’s houses really getting smaller? To do this they turned to property sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla and analysed data on 10,000 houses built in each decade going all the way back to the 1930s.
And according their analysis – Britain’s houses really are getting smaller.
Why did they start in the 1930s? Well, unfortunately there just isn’t enough data for houses built in the decades before 1930. Whether they have been knocked down to make way for new housing developments or turned into student accommodation, there simply weren’t 10,000 houses available to analyse.
So what did their analysis tell us about kitchen sizes?
Houses built in the 1930s had the smallest kitchens of any decade, with the average measuring just 12.27m2.
In the 1940’s the average kitchen size grew by nearly 1.5m2 across the decade
In the 1950s, the average kitchen size grew by another 0.30m2
In the 1960s, the average kitchen size grew again, this time by another 1.32m2
Overall, Britain built the largest houses during the 1970s, however the average kitchen size within these houses started to shrink
In the 1980s the average house size started to shrink and the kitchen size shrank even further
In the 1990s Britain’s houses continued to get smaller and the kitchens lost another 0.25m2
Again in the 2000s, Britain’s houses got even smaller, along with the average kitchen size
Today, Britain’s new-build houses have never been so small. The LABC Warranty analysis of the first seven years of this decade shows continued regression. Compared to the previous decade, homes built from 2010 onwards are over 4m2 smaller, and our kitchens are not much bigger than they were in the 1930’s – the decade of the smallest kitchen.
Methodology
All statistics that feature in this article have been collated using open data from property sites Rightmove and Zoopla. The study looked at 10,000 houses built in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and the current decade. Data was taken on individual rooms within a home. All statistics are calculated on average.
Source: Research by LABC Warranty