For New Labour, read New Lounger. Tony Blair’s fondness for sofas seems to be growing. He graced Richard and Judy’s daytime TV furniture this month as part of his pre-election image burnishing. And Lord Butler of Brockwell, when investigating the Prime Minister’s style of government, noted what has become known as Blair’s “government by sofa” — a liking for informal decision-making on the No 10 soft furnishings. Perching himself between the Whitehall traditions of conspiratorial huddles in corridors and formal sitting around the Cabinet table, Blair has opted for the third way of the three-piece suite generation.
This might all seem a trivial trend, were it not for the fact that how and where we sit can reveal much more than we think. We are all far more sedentary than earlier generations. And this is not just because we drive everywhere or work and relax in front of computer and TV screens. It is also something we aspire to. Sitting down has always been a great status symbol, what the historian Sir Roy Strong described to me as “the great symbol of rank”.
Our ancestors worked hard to make ritual occasions reveal, in their seating arrangements, just who really mattered. The upwardly mobile therefore longed to join the downwardly sedentary. Gentry longed for impressive country seats, others aspired to college high tables or episcopal thrones, those standing for political office hoped to become sitting MPs (at least when the Queen wasn’t present).
Increased wealth and industrial advance meant that seating eventually became available for nearly everyone. And we did our best to spread the aspiration around the globe via the Empire. However, as the chair historian Galen Cranz points out, not everyone was impressed. The Chinese described chairs imported by the British as “barbarian beds”, while other cultures preferred to stick to squatting rather than adopt the British posture. But in Britain and much of the world the masses couldn’t wait to swap upright existence for as much sitting as possible. The spread of bureaucracy and international business added new status symbols. Eager young employees longed for an executive chair, followed, eventually, by a seat on the board.
And then the sofa revolution took it all a stage further. The hire-purchase set of soft furniture was one of the symbols of 20th-century affluence, even if later generations’ slow sinking into couch potatodom did not seem so noble. There are those who lament the loss of pre-sofa sitting standards. Sir Roy recalls many lunches with the late Queen Mother. “I never, ever saw her put her back against the dining-room chair. That was the Edwardian posture you were taught.” Rank was radiated not only by the fact that you were sitting but by the way that you sat.
Advertisement
The decline of good sitting — what critics might call our national slump — begins nowadays at the earliest stages of life. Children just learning to sit up are strapped into car seats and pushchairs for long periods. And those child seats are marketed as fashionable consumer products. Sitting is about status even when you are a toddler. Only gradually are parents and pushchair designers realising what harm may be being done to young developing spines.
Seated as fashion demands, moreover, children have little opportunity to develop their natural enthusiasm for walking. And this, of course, is the other side of our sedentary revolution. In recent decades, routine walking has stumbled seriously out of fashion. Those who planned our postwar cities used the word “pedestrian” as an adjective meaning unimaginative and backward. Road design made much urban walking unpleasant and hazardous. And the planners often seemed to believe it should be abolished entirely. The transport analyst Terence Bendixson recalls plans in the 1960s and 1970s to build a network of rubber travelators in London — the sort of moving pavement normally found in airport terminals. No one, it was assumed, should have to walk any distance between seats in car or train and workplace. Westminster hoped to travelate MPs from their offices to division lobbies. Mr Blair might have preferred something the French pioneered — motorised sofas to carry Parisian shoppers from car to department store.
In the end, cost, lack of space and unreliable technology stymied such plans. The ghost of travelator technology survives in the form of treadmills in urban gyms, to which workers retreat briefly from their office chairs in order frenetically to recreate the lost art of regular leg movement. But walking as a whole has steadily declined, while the time we spend sitting more or less statically continues to increase.
Can the trend be reversed? Professor Cranz tries to shock her Californian students into changing their habits by removing all the chairs from her lecture theatre and lying down to deliver her thoughts on the damaging history of furniture. “They think I’ve had a heart attack or gone mad,” she says.
But she believes the growing cost to companies and their insurers of injuries related to bad posture may force a change. Hard economics may make sitting more uncomfortable. The cultural resistance will be formidable. Chairs are historically potent symbols, and now sofas have been appropriated as seats of political and media power. It is difficult to see who will stand up successfully for an alternative.
Advertisement
Chris Bowlby presents Glued To Our Seats on BBC Radio 4 on Monday at 8pm