The journey of the sweet bungalow
The etymology of the word ‘bungalow’ has a fascinating story of movement from Bengal in India to the land of Britain.
It had the support of Gujarat on its journey to us here too.
Something always tugs at the heartstrings when there’s a connection to Gujarat.
When I speak in my mother tongue, and if someone in the extended family in India has built a house, I’d say ‘bungalow bana vi lidho’, meaning ‘they’ve built a house’.
But I have noticed that the consequence of the word is dependent on the cultural and geographical scenario too.
In Gujarati, I tend to speak about any house as a ‘bungalow’ (but pronounce it more as ‘banglo’), regardless of how many floors it has.
Even if it’s a block of flats.
I know here in Britain a bungalow has a distinctive look.
No second floor and everything is single storey.
Bungalows in Britain always seem to have hanging baskets outside with beautiful flowers.
The lawn outside is always in pristine condition too.
And I keep relating them to more suburban, leafy areas of my Borough, rather than near the council estates and high rises.
However, as time has gone by, and more land is being used to build more homes, we tend to see the juxtaposition of both being much closer together.
The word ‘bungalow’ has a fascinating etymology, and sees its beginnings in the Hindi word ‘bangla’ or ‘bangala’ meaning ‘belonging to Bengal’.
It refers to the distinct style in which these low thatched houses were designed.
The Gujarati word ‘bangalo’ contributed to its evolution as well, and confirms why I still use it in my conversations in this day and age (despite stretching its meaning to all types of homes).
We see its introduction into the English language in around the 1670s to mean a ‘one-storey thatched house usually surrounded by a veranda’.
The Oxford English Dictionary confirms that the link movement of the word to Britain was due to sailors of the British East India Company being provided basic wooden shelters referred to as ‘bungales or hovells’.
The first bungalow created in Britain was in 1869 by unknown architect John Taylor built at Western-on-Sea in Kent.
Taylor had designed a cheap but weatherproof home for working people which a journalist noticed resembled bungalows from India and the label stuck.
The name was solidified further when eminent physician Professor Erasmus Wilson purchased one of the houses.
After the purchase, Professor Wilson wrote to Taylor stating:
’The idea of Bungalows seems to take people’s minds immensely. They are novel, quaint, pretty and perfect as to sanitary qualities. The best sanitary home for a family is a Bungalow’.
The UK boasts a housing stock of 2.6 million bungalows, which is around 7.7% of all houses in England and Wales (Council Tax statistics, 2021).
Right now in the UK we are having issues with the number of people wanting homes and the number of homes available, but concerns have been raised that the sweet bungalow is becoming an endangered species.
There seems to be some worry about the decline in building more due to economic pressures, land availability, changing consumer demand, and developers, who some say, are not meeting the demands of older people.
I don’t think in my life, I will ever get to live in a bungalow - the one that describes its original features of being one storey.
But then again, I call my own home of two-storeys a ‘banglo’ in Gujarati anyway.
So does it really matter?