We tested champagne the other day, Lindsay Nicholson, the magazines editorial director since 2008, says, and people were standing outside taking pictures. We may have to put up blinds
Nicholson, who read astrophysics at university, has worked at Good Housekeeping since 1999. Back then, she says, the magazine was starting to be written off. What was the point of it? But I think it speaks to an eternal truth: to allow your family to have the best life you need a good home. Its not about being a domestic goddess its about being happy at home and having the time and energy for everything else.
Good Housekeeping takes your domestic happiness seriously, which is plain the minute you step into the Institutes new premises. The ground floor has three kitchens: one for prep; one for demonstrations, where it is hoped that chefs will display their talents, and parties and cookery courses will take place; and one for testing, where four women devise and trial recipes for future issues. (The women are of great interest to passers-by, who, immune to more exotic sights, have probably never seen anyone do anything quite like this in the neighbourhood.) The test kitchen has eight ovens, able to produce enough recipes to fill 30 pages per month. The readers love these pages, Suzannah Butcher, the acting cookery editor, says. They ring up at all hours of the day to chat about the recipes, and they send in photographs of their own dishes. Sometimes they even ring on Christmas Day.
Beneath the kitchens is where the real business of the Institute takes place. In subterranean, windowless depths, eight people spend their working lives doing the kinds of things you do on a daily basis in your own home but in test conditions. The head of testing is Trisha Schofield, who arrived at the Institute as an intern 25 years ago and has worked there ever since. In those days, she says, we had secretaries, and one typewriter for the whole department.Now she has no secretaries and almost 1,000 square feet devoted to testing every household object, piece of technology or food that you can imagine wanting to buy or use. That is more than 1,000 goods and services a year, all while publishing a monthly review as she goes. We test everything from lawnmowers to hairdryers and iPhones to pension plans and ISAs, she says.
We test the product as you would at home, using it in the way that someone who hasnt done it before would do it, reading the instruction book and keeping to the manufacturers guidelines. Readers are much more tech-savvy now than they used to be, but there is so much choice that they really need guidance, need to be nurtured through buying decisions.
The tests Schofield and her team perform are exhaustive and carried out with impressive, some would say obsessive, attention to detail. Products that reach the required standard can use the Good Housekeeping Institute approved logo, a badge much coveted by manufacturers, which, even (or perhaps especially) in this time of extensive online reviewing, appreciate objective, trustworthy approbation.
In a ledger extracted from the archive, earlier testers have recorded their findings in faint pencil long-extinct items such as the Easiwork cabinet dresser, Adapto bucket and Petrolite lamp have been put through their paces and given the tick of approval. Todays testers record their findings on electronic spreadsheets, and ledgers are a forgotten commodity, but still a slight whiff of the quill pen and earnest, old-fashioned endeavour lingers over the whole operation. When you reach the dishwasher- and washing machine-testing rooms it becomes earnest, old-fashioned endeavour as rewritten by Roald Dahl.
In a shiny white space, between ranks of new dishwashers, Kelly Greene is applying scrapes of spinach, egg and porridge to racks of white china plates using a paintbrush. When the smears have dried, she will load the plates into the dishwashers along with a collection of glasses that have been swilled out with red wine and tomato juice and kissed by someone wearing lipstick and set the cycle going. She will then unload, check for defects and move on to the next cycle aiming to test four dishwashers simultaneously over four days.
You may think loading and unloading dishwashers all day long would drive you nuts, but next door Verity Mann has an even more un-welcome domestic task to perform: testing washing machines, 12 altogether, all hooked up to a domestic-level water supply. She is analysing stains using a spectrometer. The stains themselves are provided by a company that creates 13 blots (coffee, tea, blood, curry, foundation, olive oil and so on) on bits of cloth, which are then sewn on to pillowcases by Mann and put in the machines along with a soil slip (a piece of smelly soiled material, also designed by a specialist company). The machines are tested on four different cycles, taking into account water consumption, electricity usage and creasing, over two to three washes a day. In the morning you just come in, Mann says, and put a load straight on.
Farther along the corridor Carrie-Ann Skinner is testing chips in an air fryer. They are pale and soggy but, she says, will probably come out better when we test the maximum weight of chips as stated by the manufacturer. We cook things like you would at home: Yorkshire pudding, fairy cakes, roasts. An oven is being tested for its door temperature and is wired up like a crash victim in A&E.
Heres the wet room, Schofield says as we speed on past the ovens. In Soho this could mean a number of things, but here it is a room containing two showers, in which raincoats, umbrellas and wellington boots are doused in various weights of water. You put all the stuff on and then stand under a shower until you get wet, Schofield says. Unfortunately we cant test for wind resistance, but we can do tents, just not here
It is quite extraordinary to think that while you are wandering about the streets of Soho, beneath your feet a small army of people are doing things such as testing out rainwear in a shower, smearing plates with porridge, and sewing stain sheets on to pillowcases and waiting to see what happens to them in a cool wash. But all that seems quite normal compared with the stringent requirements of the vacuum-testing room.
This is where Janet Leigh spends her days a soundproof room floored in wood and standard carpet and kitted out with a sofa, armchairs and a coffee table laden with Tupperware boxes and an open packet of digestive biscuits. To test a vacuum cleaner, it turns out, you mix together 17g of sand and 17g of flour and sprinkle the result over a carpet measuring 70cmx 1m. You use a heavy hand-roller to press in the mess, weigh the vacuum cleaner, give it five sweeps over the carpet and then weigh it again, and from that you can work out how much mess the vacuum cleaner has picked up. We also test for pet hair, biscuit crumbs and thread, Leigh explains. Hence the biscuits theyre not my lunch. The pet hair is real dog hair, which comes from Battersea dogs home and has to be combed into the carpet.
But that is not the weirdest thing about the vacuum-testing room. Later, in her office, Nicholson reveals that after they found the premises in Soho, she and a colleague sat down every Friday to work out how the Institute was going to be decorated, including the kind of sofas, upholstery and carpets that would go into the vacuum-testing room. James Dyson has been in there, she says, cleaning the carpet with one of his vacuum cleaners the same way we do.
The Good Housekeeping Institute tests are valuable because they are reproducible, Nicholson thinks. We test everything as it would be used in the home. There is a lot of non-rigorous testing happening on the internet, but we are rigorous and can show protocols, and we are very frank about the testing process. For instance, recipe-testing. Many of the cookbooks being published are not triple-tested like our recipes. We sometimes find terrible errors in cookbooks and if youre trying to cook from an untested recipe and it goes wrong, you can waste a lot of money.
In addition to its eight ovens, the gleaming test kitchen, run by four charming women who look as though they should be out partying rather than thinking up new ways to bake banana loaf and clearing up afterwards, has got a new Aga the first the Institute has had to test on. In some ways, the Good Housekeeping Institute kitchen forms the beating heart of the magazine when you think of Good Housekeeping, chances are you think, Phew, that will sort out supper for tonight. We have 4,000 triple-tested recipes on the website now, Nicholson tells me. And we are considering adding recipes stretching back to 1922. Duplication is remarkably rare, although we do have loads of recipes for chocolate brownies.
The design of the kitchen evolved from a team wish list, which for those interested in updating their own kitchen included raised ovens; a boiling-water tap; induction hobs; plenty of storage space; and a very cool wiring station, which pops up out of the worktop and keeps all your plugs and flexes in order. New gadgets appear on a daily basis; a collective sigh of pleasure fills the room at the thought of testing out a sous vide and a spirulina machine.
Now that the Institute has acquired its smart new home, what of the future? Weve been producing all this tried and tested research content for years, Nicholson says. But the advent of digital means that the whole thing could open up dramatically. The next thing is videos. Weve already created 300 food videos, showing how to cook various dishes. And we can extend this to include video guides on household jobs, for example small plumbing jobs, sewing on a button, changing plugs, getting rid of stains. Stains are huge in Good Housekeeping readers love them, and the magazine operates a whole stain-removal section. Its all stuff that used to be passed on by mothers but isnt any longer.
Nicholson is also considering beauty testing. Weve got space to do it now we hadnt before. We can look closely at anti-ageing skin products, and hair dyes thats a huge market. We have a reader panel of 12,000 volunteers happy to take part in tests, so we could have 28 people coming to have their hair dyed in a test. And we will be running cookery courses at the Institute Ive been here for 15 years, and I think its more exciting now than at any other point.
goodhousekeeping.co.uk/cookery-school
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