in praise of kitchens

I love the house I live in, don't get me wrong. I am not a tidy person and I need more storage space. I have decorated this house from top to bottom and I like it a lot. The kitchen's been done twice. I like the look of it. I like it better if it's empty of stuff. Which of course it never is. It's not like I have a lot of kitchen stuff - well, ok, I probably do have a fair amount of baking stuff. And a breadmaker. But no gadgets going dusty or being well used. More cookery books than I use, but probably no more or less than everyone else. But you know what I don't have? More space. Not for gadgets, or books, or dirty washing up (I may only wash up when I've no worktop left, but I'm hardly unusual in that either!). But a kitchen isn't really a kitchen unless it's a hub of the house. Now it's easy to put space into your kitchen, and IKEA are good at helping make the tiny kitchens we have here into as spaceful as possible, but for some reason today I've been pondering the relativity of size in English kitchens. Now I do have a separate little kitchen - for example Jo and Andy's house down the road doesn't have the extension and in many ways I prefer their smaller-in-total kitchen diner to my kitchen and dining room, so estate agents probably rate it as a handy separate room. And obviously it's nice to be able to have a dinner party and guests not to be looking at the chaos of the kitchen... But still. My grandmother's 1930's house in Warwick was the same basic layout as my parents' in Yorkshire, the latter being more lucky to have had an extension that provided a double sized kitchen than the additional study/bedroom and bathroom. So we've obviously been building houses 'wrong' for a lot of the last century, which make comments I'm about to make about society not a new building issue. Indeed, some new expensive buildings have huge fancy kitchens, though some of them are basically all kitchen, island and all. What I miss is a big kitchen space. I used to do my homework sometimes in my bedroom, sometimes in the kitchen while mum cooked tea. We always sat down at the kitchen table to chat when we got home before homework started. There is something right about a ktichen which has the space not just to squeeze in a table that you can eat breakfast at, but that can be the heart of a home. Even in a small house/flat, a teeny tiny kitchen as a separate room doesn't do it for me as well as a room that you can be in. You almost never find flats or houses in Sweden that have stupidly small kitchens. In small-ish rooms, the kitchen simply runs the whole of one wall, making sure there's room for the dining table. The old Victorian and 1930's houses in England prove we didn't necessarily provide the space then either, before society televisionised, but I do think that it affects society now. Indeed, busy parents who both work, single parents, singles who feel 'feeding themselves' a chore - everyone has good reason to spend the minimum time in the kitchen, but is it such a travail to spend more time in the kitchen than in front of the TV/PC? It's hardly surprising food comes from the kitchen to the sofa if that's where people are. If you have dining room space, it's often sacrosanct as tidy and a bit grown-up, for dinner parties that hardly ever happen. And there isn't space in the kitchen for people to help out/kids to learn to cook/non-cooking partners to keep the chef company with wine/discuss the day or week in the steam or aromas of dinner cooking. Much as I love my diningroom, I'd sacrifice it for a huge kitchen (huge, bearing in mind just one extra person in my kitchen gets in the way, unless you stand in the door, is to a certain extent relative).

Would a huge kitchen make me cook more? It would be nice to think so, but I'm not entirely romantic nor misguided. My not cooking runs in phases, sometimes I'm better than others, but when I don't it is due to many things, and blaming a little kitchen is not what I'm about.  But it would be good to be able to leave out the bread machine, or to have kit to hand and space to make things, surrounded by people. One day I'd like a really big kitchen. As long as it wasn't a kitchen, but a true kitchen-diner, a room that could be the heart of the house. The real heart of the house.