Nicola here! When I was a small child we lived in an ultra-modern house in a town in the North of England. It was the 1960s and 70s and open plan was the height of fashion. Both sets of grandparents however lived in bungalows and my step-grandparents lived in a Victorian two-up tow-down house. All three of these buildings had one thing in common; they had a room that was “for best.” The door was almost always closed and when I was allowed in I didn’t like it. It was always cold (there was no heating on because it wasn’t used very often) and it smelled of that closed up mustiness that rooms sometimes have. In all cases there was a cactus or an aspidistra (or both!) on a wooden plant stand. It was the dining-room.
Dining-rooms are curious things. They go in and out of fashion. At some stages they are the ultimate in aspiration and at others 
ignored. The Ancient Greeks are usually given the credit for inventing the concept of the dining-room. There were very specific requirements for it: no more than 11 wood or stone benches around the walls. It was a place where men gathered to eat honey cakes and chestnuts, washed down with wine. Yes, it was men only! The Romans, refining the concept, created the triclinium where both men and women dined reclining on sofas, which can’t have been great for the digestion. The Roman triclinium was a very high status room built to have a view and to provide refreshing breezes as one ate. Many were outside and had murals on the wall and fountains in the tables, according to archaeology done at Pompeii.
Of course the majority of people, once they had moved into a built dwelling, had one communal room for everything, including sheltering the animals, and so had no separate eating area. The idea of a room that was specifically for the consuming of food died out of fashion, to be re-invented much later. In the meantime the nobility in their castles had a great hall which served many purposes, including as a communal eating area. The hall at Hogwarts (in the picture) is designed on a similar scale. With the size of the household this would have been a busy and noisy space, the lord and his family up on the dais and the household in descending order of rank seated at the trestle table below. In such a household the kitchens could also be a long way away from the room where the food was consumed. At Ashdown House, for example, built in the 17th century, the kitchens were in a completely separate building and it was the job of the servants to find a way to deliver the food whilst it was still hot. There were some benefits to this system since it did mean that the risk of fire in the main house was minimised (and also the smell of food cooking; a noble family wanted to eat it but not to smell food preparation!)
As was the wont with the rich, however, they soon felt the need for more privacy and so started 
to set a smaller chamber aside for more intimate meals. This was the parlour, and the great hall became the venue only for grand, formal meals. The dining room rose again in popularity and by the Georgian period the elegant room with its silver, china and linen was highly prized. People got quite carried away; some architects recommended a house should have 3 dining rooms, one for Winter (shielded from the bad weather and with a roaring fire), Summer (open to the outside with gentle breezes) and an in-between dining room as well! This was the period when the first official use of the name “dining room” began and was included in Dr Johnson’s dictionary.
With the industrial revolution and the rise of the middle class, the Victorian dining room became a place to surround oneself with as much comfort as possible. They furnished the room lavishly with mahogany sideboards and upholstered chairs as well as a grand dining table and as many ornaments and utensils as possible. The aspirational working-class dining-rooms of my childhood evolved from those sorts of rooms, a place that was for best where you ate proper meals such as Sunday lunch or used only when there were guests not family. They were usually situated next to the kitchen for ease of serving and some even had a serving hatch through the wall – I remember my mother being so proud of the hatch with its wooden doors! The hostess trolley was also the 20th century equivalent of all those wonderful Victorian dining accoutrements, I think!
Fashions in dining rooms also brought with them many other social changes over the years, from the introduction of the fork in the early 17th century to the introduction of different courses, to endless rules on when meals should be served and books on table manners. One Victorian guide listed, amongst other things that soup should be taken with a spoon, it was not the done thing to sniff a piece of meat when it was on your fork, and on no account should you blow your nose on the table cloth!
These days there seems to be a debate about whether the dining room is out of fashion or not. Whilst a lot of us eat in the kitchen, 
or in front of the TV, there are still those who maintain that a separate dining-room dedicated to the consuming of food is a special place. I imagine that the popularity of the dining room will come around again, just as it has done over the past 100 years or more.
Do you have a separate dining room or do you prefer a kitchen/diner or to eat elsewhere? Which of the historical dining arrangements would you have enjoyed the most – great hall, Georgian elegance or with the animals around the fire?! And do you have a favourite dining room accessory?
