Books

“Deborah brings to life the history of typical 1930s British houses using stories from the archives of the real families for whom such houses were home. For anyone who wants to research the history of their own house, her new introduction gives away some key tricks of the trade.”

—Professor David Olusoga OBE, historian and presenter of A House Through Time

“Ideal Homes is a superb evocation of interwar living as expressed in its homes and furnishings. Deborah Sugg Ryan's new book skilfully interweaves social and design history and beautifully melds the academic and personal. Her exploration of 'suburban modernity' and its idiosyncratic blend of tradition and novelty, home and Empire, challenges the intellectual condescension of critics to find meaning and value in the lived experience of consumers and the messy, sometimes contradictory, choices they made. Along the way, it charts both the apparently rigid boundaries of gender and seemingly more fluid divisions of class. It's that rare thing - a book that will appeal to academic specialists and the general reader.”

—John Boughton - historian and author of Municipal Dreams

Deborah is best known for her books on the history of the home and is currently writing a history of the kitchen

Deborah’s first book The Ideal Home Through the Twentieth Century (Hazar) tells the story of the Ideal Home Show from its founding in 1908 to the present. Her second book Ideal Homes, 1918-39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester University Press 2018) was awarded the 2020 Historians of British Art Book Prize for Exemplary Scholarship in the Period after 1800 and shortlisted for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for an outstanding contribution to architectural history. It was reissued as a trade book in 2020 with the title Ideal Homes: Uncovering the History and Design of the Interwar House, with a new introduction on researching your house history.

Her current research is on the kitchen, the subject of a monograph she is writing for Reaktion Books. She wrote From the "smart" kitchen to "kitchenism' for the catalogue to the V&A’s 2019 exhibition Food: Bigger Than the Plate and contributed an essay on product design to the catalogue of the museum’s British Design, 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age.

Deborah also writes on the twentieth century historical pageant movement that produced outdoor spectacular performances with huge amateur casts, and has published several articles on the invention of historical pageants and spectacle in Britain, the US and the British Empire in the twentieth century, mainly focusing on the work of pageant masters Frank Lascelles and Gwen Lally.

 
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