Matching and Newness Rules

The lower-middle and working-class lavatories, which they call toilets, may have matching coloured loos and basins, which they call bathroom suites, and even matching coloured loo paper. Those of the upper-middles and above will almost always be plain white, although you will sometimes see a wooden loo seat.

At the highest and lowest ends of the scale (upper-middle and above, lower-working and below) you will find old, threadbare and mismatched furniture, while the classes in between favour brand-new ‘suites’ of matching ‘settees’ and armchairs, ‘sets’ of matching dining tables and chairs, and yet more ‘suites’ of bedroom furniture with matching bedspreads, cushions and curtains. (These carefully co-ordinated furnishings may involve cottagey-chintzy flowers, Conran-Ikea ‘simplicity’, or television-inspired ‘themes’ but the principle is the same.) The upper echelons, proud of their eclectic antiques, sneer at matching ‘suites’; the lower echelons, ashamed of their ill-assorted cast-offs, aspire to them.

In fact, an English person’s social class can be gauged immediately from his or her attitude to expensive brand-new furniture: if you think it is ‘posh’, you are no higher than middle-middle at best; if you think it is ‘naff’, you are upper-middle or above. An upper-class Tory MP once sneered at fellow Tory Michael Heseltine by remarking that Heseltine had ‘had to buy all his own furniture’ – the put-down implication being that only nouveaux have to buy their furniture: genuinely upper-class furniture is inherited.

The Brag-wall Rule

Another helpful class-indicator is the siting of what Americans would call your ‘brag wall’. In which room of your house do you display prestigious awards you have won, or photographs of yourself shaking hands with famous people? If you are middle-middle or below, these items will be proudly on show in your sitting room or entrance hall or some other very prominent place. For the upper-middles and above, however, the only acceptable place to exhibit such things is the downstairs loo.

This trick is ‘smart’ in both senses of the word (posh and clever): visitors are highly likely to use the downstairs loo at some point, and to be impressed by your achievements, but by displaying them in the loo you are making a joke out of them (taking the piss, even) and thus cannot be accused of either boasting or taking yourself too seriously.

The Satellite-dish Rule

From the outside of an English house, even if you are not familiar with the class-semiotics of plants and flowers, which I will come to later, you can make a quick broad-brush class assessment based on the presence (lower class) or absence (higher class) of a satellite dish. This is not an infallible indicator – although many people classify entire neighbourhoods by counting satellite dishes – but a house with a satellite dish can be classified at the lower end of the social scale until proven otherwise by the presence of unequivocal upper-middle or upper-class features.

A satellite dish on a very grand old house in an upper-class area could, however, be a sign of nouveau colonization. But to be sure, you would have to go inside and look for cocktail cabinets, thick carpets, brand-new leather sofas, circular baths and gold taps. If instead you found faded colours, priceless but threadbare oriental rugs, shabby damask sofas covered in dog hair and cracked wooden loo seats, you would revise the occupants’ social class upwards, and assume that they had some suitable reason for watching satellite television – work in broadcasting or journalism, perhaps (check for BAFTAs in the downstairs loo) or an eccentric passion for basketball or sit-coms or some other aspect of popular culture.