1. Section of a common lodging house, 1847, the only illustration in Hector Gavin’s Sanitary Ramblings. 1978 Rookeries and Model Dwellings English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space It was no accident that Henry Roberts’s early and influential scheme for model family dwellings (1847—50) was planted at the core of ’s most disreputable rookery, in Streatham Street, St Giles; nor that forty years later London’s last' remaining rookery, the Jago, was torn down to make way for the first model housing estate by the LGG, the Boundary Street scheme (1889—1900). Perhaps the desire to see purity triumph over iniquity was enough to explain their vivid conjunction, but a jaundiced remark from the architect Robert Kerr, trying ineffectively to muscle in on tenement construction, suggests that the connection between rookery and model was more than a matter of siting. ‘Philanthropists’, he said, ‘accept the worst cases as the type on which to base their oper­ ations’.1 His astute observation furnishes this article with its theme: that twentieth-century housing is in some measure the relic of an entirely successful campaign to liquidate the rookery den, and that what we now refer to as decent homes have their origin in the in­ decencies to be found there.

THE CONTAGION OF IMMORALITY In the middle years of the nineteenth century the crowded con­ dition of the poor was subjected to relentless social criticism in preparation for what one writer heralded as ‘the long-promised era of domestic legislation’.2 But when audacious investigators descended into the and rookeries, to compile statistics or to witness the scandals of poverty, they did so in order to paint all the more vividly a picture whose outline was already sharply etched into the conscience of every reformer - a picture which could at times overtake the evidence of description. In 1848 Hector Gavin published Sanitary Ramblings, a meticulous survey of and, according to H. J. Dyos, the most credible account of an early Victorian .2 In amongst many tabulations and maps there was one illustration - a section of a decrepit and populous common lodging house (Fig. 1). In the text it states quite clearly that no such establishments were to be found anywhere in Bethnal Green,1 yet its appearance in this work was neither neglectful nor deceitful; indeed the fundamental purpose of Sanitary Ramblings can more easily be understood from this engraving, with its inhabited cesspit, crowded day-room and packed attic dormitories, than from the text itself. This was the spectre behind philanthropy; these three! types of interior stood for certain specific evils. The cellar flooded! with effluent was regarded as the source of zymotic diseases; the* day-room (or common kitchen) was characteristically portrayed as the scene of daylight dissipation, drunkenness and criminal conspiracy; the dormitory as a nest of sexual promiscuity. Brought together, they represented the ultimately malign power of bad dwellings. It was a picture not of an actual place but of a latent condition; a potent, fearful and lurid presentiment revealing'the intimate bond between physical and moral degradation. / These two words, physical and moral, were as good as welded together in the literature of improvement. The Health of Towns Committee reported in 1840 that, ‘in addition to the physical evils entailed upon the poorer classes by the state of their dwellings ... their moral habits are affected by the same causes’.5 Numerous attempts to trace the influence of unhealthy surroundings on the moral as well as the physical condition of the poor confirmed that the lowest morality was always found in the worst-constituted dwellings and neighbourhoods,6 that ‘filthy habits of life were never far from moral filthiness’,7 and that where there were bad homes there were bad hearts and bad deeds also.8 The close alignment between dwellings and moral character sought by the Victorians has to a large extent been overshadowed by the sanitary aspects of reform, although it would be hard to say whether ventilating the breeding grounds of cholera seemed any more urgent a task in 1850 than did the dispersal of ‘the miasma of thoral disease’9 which hung over exactly the same regions of the metropolis as the malodorous mist which was thought to engender epidemics (Fig. 2). Immorality was generally portrayed as if it were a physical ail­ ment, propagated in the same mysterious way as a contagious disease from certain ‘moral plague spots’10 such as St Giles, Drury Lane, The Devil’s Acre, Jacob’s Island and a dozen other rookeries in London alone, where the dangerous classes were to be found amongst the chronically poor and dispossessed, crammed into a congested, dilapidated fabric and ‘surrounded with vice as with the atmosphere’.11 A great variety of similes, metaphors and analogies served to describe the moral malady in terms at once medical and melodramatic, often emphasizing the immanent possibility of it bursting out of its restricted habitat within the rookeries to infect the population at large.12 In the 1840s domestic architecture was for the first time de- 96 ployed direcdy against the twin evils of vice and ill health in towns. Before this the dwellings of the poor had been treated as a 2. The Disease Mist: a map of Bethnal Green in 1847. According to Hector Gavin, the mist, engendered from the odours of fecal matter and decomposing organic substances, was the cause of numerous epidemic and endemic diseases. Its most opaque centre was in the district later to be known as the Jago. marginal concern of rural philanthropy, while in the cities prac­ tical efforts to control morality had been confined to the building of prisons, workhouses, churches and ragged schools, just as similar efforts to control illness had been confined to the building of hospitals. But now moral and physical reform were to take their place at the very centre of daily life. Behind novel claims that dwellings left an ‘impress’ on the life of the people,13 that ‘the true schools and the only practical reformatories of the poor’ were their homes,14 that every house, however mean, was ‘a casket containing a precious jewel, and should be fashioned accordingly’,15 and that improvements to popular housing were instrumental to social pro­ gress,16 lay a conviction that virtue could be wrought from archi­ tecture as surely as corruption was wrought from slums. When in 1847 George Godwin, editor of The Builder, reported the opening of the New Model Lodging House in St Giles, he was able to maintain that ‘an important duty in the progress of social 97 amelioration is that of the architect’.17 It would be easy enough to miss the full significance of this statement. The programmes of sanitation and ventilation devised to ameliorate physical conditions are well known, but it was not just this limited set of techniques to which Godwin referred, nor did the society responsible for the erection of the New Model Lodging House restrict the horizon. Its Prospectus declared that it supplied ‘all those conveniences which whilst conducing to the health and physical comfort of the in­ mates, tend to increase their self-respect, and elevate them in the scale of moral and intellectual beings’.18 This was not at the time an extravagant claim, yet next to nothing is known of how these efforts at moral improvement were translated into archi­ tectural practice. How could the arrangement of domestic build­ ings counteract vice and elevate the spirit? In the following I try to answer that question by investigating the sensibility of reformers regarding human intercourse, and then relating this to the archi­ tectural methods adopted to bias conduct in particular directions consonant with that sensibility.

MORAL GEOGRAPHY There was an established convention, perhaps no more than a lit­ erary device, which treated the city as if it were a map of the world, with its pastures, swamps and deserts, its charted and uncharted regions. It played its part in the rhetoric of mid-century reform, though not without a shift of emphasis, as when areas of the great towns were said to be as dark and impenetrable as the equatorial forests of Africa, the populations of certain districts as wild as Kaffirs, as rude as Hottentots, or as barbarous as savages. The language of the explorer had been overlaid with that of the ethno­ grapher, and the city seen through these analogies was cut across with ethical as well as physical boundaries. Impediments to traffic might here and there be removed but that only served to emphasize deeper layers of impenetrability, as recognized: Owing to the vastness of London — owing to the moral gulf which there separates the various classes of its inhabitants - its several quarters may be designated as assemblages of towns rather than as one city.'9 The power of the ethnographical analogy, with its concomi­ tant suggestion of a civilizing mission, extended beyond figures of speech and could help account for the production in 1889 of a remarkable series of maps (Fig. 3). The Descriptive Maps of London Poverty, compiled under the direction of Charies Booth, appear a( first sight to be maps of housing conditions, but although they ari based on house-to-house surveys, and although their graded tints are applied only to domestic development, they indicate the dilapi­ dation of the occupants, not of the building fabric. In Booth’s classification, categories of class, income and morality were fused into a single gradient ranging from ‘upper middle class and upper class — wealthy’ to ‘lower class — vicious, semi-criminal’. So near was the presumed correspondence between virtue, , wealth and gentility, or vice, poverty and vulgarity, and so closely were these characteristics tied to the house, that the maps have to be read as a simultaneous charting of: 1. the distribution of wealth, 2. class dif­ ference, 3. variations in moral character, and 4. good, bad and in­ different dwellings.20 The Descriptive Maps of London Poverty joined the physical pattern of the city to the social and moral condition of its inhabitants with an unprecedented, methodical boldness, and confirmed that the chronically poor and dangerous classes21 tended to congregate in distinct enclaves with a( noticeably different pattern from the rest of the city - something that had been taken for granted since the 1840s, and was hardly a revelation in itself, though to Victorian reformers it meant rather more than it does to us. The discernible differences at the scale of the city between layouts consistent with morality and layouts conducive to brutality could be compared with differences, equally self-evident, at a smaller scale. Thus architecture — in its broader social perspective, beyond the territory marked out for it by art — could be interpreted 3. Descriptive Map of London Poverty, northwest section, compiled in 1889 by Charles Booth. The darkest tone indicates buildings occupied by the ‘lower class - vicious semi- criminal’ grade. as a physical geography of moral conditions: the layout of the house mapped the moral condition of the family, and the street layout mapped the moral condition of a community, just as the city mapped the moral condition of society at large. An informing purpose of the first philanthropic housing agencies was therefore to replace dwellings that were both the sign and cause of corrup­ tion with the format for a new, purified domesticity. To understand their portentous experiments it is also necessary to understand the moral geography of public and private space as they perceived it.

THE DWELLING - MANSION AND HOVEL Although London’s rookeries were made up of many flimsy sheds and ill-constructed hovels they also contained what once had been fine, large houses, latterly fallen into decay and filled with crimi­ nals, prostitutes, loungers and beggars; a fact that was noticed by a number of investigators, including The Revd Thomas Beames, who wrote as follows in The Rookeries of London (1851):

Thus in the dingiest of streets of the metropolis are found houses, the rooms of which are lofty, the walls panelled, the ceilings beautifully ornamented (although the gilding which encrusted the ornaments is worn off). The chimney-pieces models even now for the sculptor. In many rooms there still remains the grotesque carving for which a former age was so celebrated.22 Yet these grand architectural relics of an opulent past were thought to be no more appropriate to their current use than the makeshift huts that had accumulated in their courts and gardens. There were two features common to hovel and mansion which rendered them unfit as moral dwellings. In the first place they both provided endless opportunities for opening ways in and out of buildings and between rooms, so that ‘every apartment in the place is accessible from every other by a dozen different approaches’.23 W. Weir said that in the least salubrious quarter of the most 5. View from the Brewery Bridge, from Gustave Dore, London: A Pilgrimage, 1872.

4. A slum staircase, from George Sims, How the Poor Live, 1883.

notorious rookery, around Church Lane, St Giles, it was ‘as if' the homes had been one great block of stone eaten by slugs into in­ numerable small chambers and connecting passages’.24 Presented with a bewildering, indecipherable network of passages, doors, stairs and rooms, it was as easy to get lost accidentally as on pur­ pose. Thus The Revd Thorold became so confused trying to locate a pious consumptive in one of ‘the old-fashioned dilapidated tenements’ with ‘lodgers who swarmed in every corner of the building’, that he entered the wrong room on the wrong landing and tumbled into the den of a dog-stealer.25 At the same time police records describe a wide variety of contrived escape-routes; secret doors, bolt-holes, runways, elevated ledges and even a spiked wall used by retreating law-breakers.26 You could never be certain where anyone was (a frustration to social investigators, debt collectors and reformers as well as the police), but you could be 102 sure that whatever anyone did, it was done in the purview of numerous neighbours. Mayhew, Dickens, Weir, Sims and Octavia

Hill were all struck by the custom of leaving doors open day and night in the most abandoned districts. For story-tellers like Mayhew this meant that house-life was picturesquely displayed in the theatre of the street. ‘As the doors to the houses were nearly all of them kept open,’ he wrote of the Irish quarters, ‘I could even whilst walking along gain some notion of the furniture of the homes.’27 But for , on the other hand, such a practice would indicate that basic principles regarding property and person were being neglected.28 It was no easy task to discriminate one family from another, one activity from another, or one household from another, the interminable inter­ connections of the architecture having their counterpart in the apparently undifferentiated structure of low-life. Secondly, hovel and mansion lent themselves to overcrowding, each room being easily sub-let. One-roomed dwellings were the centrepiece of investigation: to the reformers they represented a domestic nadir, not just because of the uncomfortable density of their occupation, nor solely as a health hazard either, ‘for where overcrowding exists in its sanitary sense, almost always it exists even more perniciously in certain moral senses.’29 In a crowded room every detail of daily life was made public and familiar. Things which modesty and propriety would keep apart - cooking, undressing, sleeping, working, washing, bathing, defecating, urinating, fornicating, dying and giving birth — took place in close proximity in rooms empty of furniture but ‘never free of inmates’30 where neither comfort nor innocence could flourish. Indeed it was frequently supposed that only crime could grow out of this pooling of raw experience.31 Housing literature is shot through with innuendoes about the perils of intimacy involving men and women, parents and chil­ dren, youths and the elderly, lodgers and relations, friends and strangers in beds, on the floor, under beds, in every conceivable conjunction and combination. Investigators could reveal grotesque 6. ‘Cellar in St Giles sketched on the spot’, a one-roomed dwelling, door open to the street. instances of overcrowding but were as much concerned with the moral implications of flesh pressed against flesh as with the more obvious discomforts of piling too many bodies into a confined space. Here, for instance, is the Parish Surgeon’s account of no. 8, Tyndall’s Buildings in the Gray’s Inn Road: In the 1st floor, front room, the inmates were arranged as follows: a man, his wife, and 6 children at the left corner; - 2 children at the top and 4 at the bottom of the bed: it must be understood that all the parties to be described in the future do not sleep in bedsteads. At their feet, was a single man, beside them, a man, his wife and 4 children, including a girl of 15 years of age. Next to them a widow; and a mother and 4 children, consisting of a little child, a girl of 18 years of age, - and 2 boys 16 and 14 years old. - And at their feet laid a man, his wife and 3 children In all there were 26 persons! - the room is 13ft long - 11 '/> ft broad and 7 ft high. The rent is 2 shillings and 6 pence a week.32 Sleep, after all, was an erotic condition. Victorian artists, who 105 found the representation of sensuality in waking subjects most difficult, were often masters of the alluring, supine figure aban­ doned to sleep, not least because in that state the body lay open and unguarded. Similarly, the close scrutiny of beds and the exact distribution of sleeping bodies in rooms to be found in Medical Officers’ reports in evidence to parliamentary commissions and in housing pamphlets gave a perfectly objective measure to sub­ stantiate undisclosed suspicions. In order to forge a link between overcrowding and crime it was necessary to resort to psychology - to make reference to the ordinary condition of minds subjected to ‘gross indelicacy’, the association of ideas, and so on33 - but the link between overcrowding and sexuality needed no elaboration. The spectre that presented itself to the reformers was one of wholesale carnal indulgence, declining into habitual promiscuity and beyond that to incest.34 Visitors reported nakedness, ‘near undress’ and ‘scanty dress’ with the same unflinching attention to detail as they reported sleeping arrangements, for them another glaring evi­ dence of indecency: As we enter we are struck with a group of half-dressed people of both sexes collected around the fireplace. Before us is a singular man, of advanced age, in a state of partial nudity. Another man, of middle age, somewhat similarly conditioned, makes his escape as we enter, into an adjacent room, wherein, being without a door, we observe places for 2 or 3 beds on the floor.35 Still, the real truth could only be got from brazen or repentant confessions. These were few and far between, though J. Riddall Wood had been able to trace the career of several prostitutes back to a domestic source, one of whom ‘had lodged with her married sister, and slept in the same bed with her and her husband; that hence improper intercourse took place and from that she gradually became more and more depraved’.36 The exposure, mixture and dirtiness of life in one or even two 106 rooms, and the obliteration of virtue it entailed, was a central theme in the description of poverty. Beyond indignation and pa- 7. Plan of Model House for Four Families, by Henry Roberts, 1851. thos it offered a key for the reform of morality through domestic architecture. Since the moral problem of the slum dwelling could be tied down to its multitude of entries and exits and the indiscriminate use of its undifferentiated rooms, the architecture of reform would work by specifying movement and distinguishing spaces. The domestic requirements of body and soul were first trans­ lated into a thoroughly co-ordinated building in the block of ‘Model Houses for Four Families’ (Fig. 7) designed by Henry Roberts for the Great Exhibition of 1851, under the influence of , under the auspices of Rord Shaftesbury, and under the patronage of Prince Albert. Produced when housing philanthropy was in its rampant early phase, its unstinting provision of space and services was inevitably pared down in practice,37 yet it represents, as only an exemplary project can, the various ways in which architecture was to be deployed against low­ life. Two critical divisions were sown into the plan; one between 107 families and the other between the members of each family. FAMILIES AND SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS The Model Houses for Four Families were arranged in pairs around an open stair that could extend to as many storeys as necessary. As Dickens noticed, turning the stairs inside out was a novel manipulation performed in part to facilitate ventilation, but also to enable each family to ‘go home without crossing a neigh­ bour’s threshold’.38 The access stair’s outdoor location placed it firmly within the public realm. Its unoccupiable circulation space put a neutralized gap between every household. Families were placed within their own self-contained territory, disconnected from that of neighbours. To this end, privies and sculleries were also supplied within each apartment, an unusual luxury even for the urban middle class at this time. The separation of family apart­ ments was argued as an effective quarantine in case of epidemics, but it was argued too as a precondition for a certain style of intro­ verted domesticity not yet found amongst the poor. For both reasons Edwin Chadwick had proposed detached pavilion dwell­ ings for the low classes, amongst whom he had observed ‘greater noise in their occupations, uproariousness in their pleasures, extreme violence in their anger’, together with a general lack of restraint.39 Inside, the Model Houses were divided into a living-room and three bedrooms for parents, boys and girls. There was only one door into each of the bedrooms to ensure that they were never used as through-routes. As early as 1797 the reforming magistrate William Morton Ktt had recommended the provision of three bedrooms in rural cottages for reasons of propriety,3" and by 1851 many were convinced, along with Hector Gavin, that:

One evil consequence inseparable from the deficiency of bedrooms is a low state of morality, a breakdown of those feelings of delicacy that ought to be most carefully preserved in families of persons of both sexes growing to maturity.31 The number three was important since it allowed ‘for that sep­ aration which, with a family, is essential to morality and secrecy’;12 in other words, for sexual separation and the screening of naked­ ness within families pruned down to their minimal nuclear struc­ ture. Moreover, the architectural relationships of these bedrooms to the living room reflected the authority of parenthood and the decency of legitimate intercourse in a decent family. The children’s ! rooms were entered straight from the living room, so that ‘an j opportunity is afforded for the exercise of parental watchfulness’451 without parents actually sleeping with their children. The parents’ j bedroom, however, was entered via the scullery, ‘an arrangement; in many respects preferable to a direct approach from the living1 room’,41 because more secluded from innocent or prying eyes. In this way, by the subdivision and naming of domestic space and the careful, selective connection of rooms, architecture would provide, in Gavin’s phrase, ‘the entire groundwork upon which much of the moral and social improvement of the population must be based’.45 In Roberts’s Model Houses a new form of hollow brick construction was used to reinforce the divisions of the plan by absorbing noise, though it had originally been devised in collab­ oration with Edwin Chadwick as a sanitary measure: through floors and thin partitions made of hollow brick, romping children, crying, laughing, music, conversations, do not pass as distinct sounds, and the inhabitants of each room enjoy perfect privacy.46/ j Of course, from the Victorian point of v/ew, the moral family was to be the private family in both its external and internal re­ lationships, but it should be said that in all private arrangements, no matter how ‘perfect’, there is a supervening structure of com­ munications. Hence the wall and the door were the determining elements in the configuration of reforming architecture; the wall as the means of a general sequestration, the door to give specific 109 structure to personal relationships. Within each room, furniture and fittings (still uncommon in the homes of the really poor) specified yet more exactly the location and circumstances of domestic activity. So the Model Houses, in their fixity, stood in stark contrast to the confused, overlapping territories teeming with life in the slum. But although the archi­ tectural redefinition and segregation of the family might save those not yet corrupted, might even limit temptation and subdue passion amongst the tainted, it was all too clear that the reformed house was in itself insufficient to amend the lives of confirmed slum- dwellers. Later this would harden into a belief that ‘the habits and tastes and desires of the people are to a large extent hostile to improvement.’47 Not only were there ‘families’ who actively op­ posed the distribution of their numerous, extended membership into separate beds and bedrooms; not only were the second bed­ rooms in model dwellings left empty while the family continued to sleep together;48 not only were the long list of model rules for tenants’ behaviour widely resented;49 not only were unsanitary practices transferred to sanitary houses, overcrowdings per­ petrated, fixtures vandalized and public staircases abused, but demand fell short of supply. Model apartments and even whole blocks were sometimes left standing vacant in the midst of other­ wise crowded tenements... and this was not always due to poverty and high rents alone. An editorial in The Builder of 7 February 1857 alludes to this problem: In providing dwellings for the industrious classes in large towns, one of the chief efforts necessary is to get rid of the prejudices which exist, and make it difficult to persuade those who have been accustomed to certain dwellings to change them for others which are evidendy better; and in consequence, persons who own the inferior description of house property can point with a sort of triumph to the>ppreciation, by their tenants, and the profits of their dwellings, in comparison with some of the model buildings which have been put up in London. The story of Tyndall’s Buildings, with its ‘most difficult popu- lation’, was used to illustrate this telling state of affairs. The Parish . Surgeon’s account of no. 8 has already been referred to. Godwin’s editorial was written after an attempt had been made by the Met­ ropolitan Association to improve the place:

It unfortunately happened that the Association did not succeed in purchasing the whole of the houses in the court, and this, in various ways, j led to much annoyance and difficulty. Notwithstanding, the necessary re- . pairs and alterations were proceeded with, — the cisterns and closets were i arranged; the cellars cleaned; ventilation cared for; washing places made in I each house; rooms which might be let to families were judiciously fitted with / partitions; in fact, the change made in the appearance and wholesomeness | of the place was wonderful: and yet a number of inhabitants seem to have/ opposed this beneficial arrangement. Although the collector had formerly felt very litde difficulty in collecting the rents when the place was a scene of dilapidation and ruin, it has become, strange to say, not easy now to collect the rent; and many doors are fastened with a padlock, the tenants having left. This sort of wilful and ignorant contempt for the means of health'and comfort, causes mingled feelings of vexation and pity.50 Evidently, the people were not always co-operative, partly because of an obvious alienation between reformers and unredeemed, but that was not all. The attack on existing domestic habits was, in fact, the obverse of housing provision. Even Henry Roberts had thought it neces­ sary to supplement his architecture with a pamphlet on Home Reform, instructing the poor on their own elevation. Reformers noticed recalcitraiice; historians notice the absfence of political agi­ tation from the poor themselves about housing conditions.51 And while it would be foolish to read their silence and their adherence to old ways as signs of contentment with existing arrangements, no amount of zealous enthusiasm on the part of reformers can conceal the gaps which should have been filled with grateful words from compliant tenants of improved dwellings in these early years. One can only surmise that slum-dwellers, too, were aware that the choice was not just between good and bad housing but between two radically different ways of life. Philanthropic housing was given shape by middle-class re­ formers and professionals who sought to re-mould the lower classes in their own recently crystallized image. Through housing they could centre the family within the ‘ease and peace and comfort’52 of a well-ordered home; thus they hoped to take life off the streets, out of public houses, places of amusement and nocturnal resorts, isolate it, parse it and bowdlerize it till all uproariousness, passion and violence were wrung out. This was, after all, their explicit aim. When Robert Kerr, in a miscalculated address to the RIBA, proposed that housing for the poor should comprise one large room, because they liked living that way, looked forward to seeing back and front doors open all day, and criticized the ‘dogma of the three bedrooms’ as propounded by Henry Roberts and Lord Shaftesbury, he was coolly received. The response was summed up by T. Hatfield Clark, who told Kerr that ‘it was a fallacy to say that because the poor were, as a rule, fond of living in one room, persons trying to improve the conditions of their dwellings ought not to provide more’ so as to give them a higher idea of their condition.53 Kerr, on the other hand, distinguished between the modern sophistications of privacy required by the educated,54 and the rude communality enjoyed by the lower classes, whose unrefined and indelicate behaviour had been mistaken for degradation by over­ sensitive philanthropists, and argued that, in any case, dwellings on his plan would be less expensive. His opinions were of course reactionary: it is difficult to see how such sentiments could do other than hark back to the past, since the reformers had already annexed the future. It should always be remembered that although many of the standards set by Roberts were more admired than reproduced in nineteenth-century working-class housing, they would eventually percolate into normal practice, some having long since been superseded by yet more exacting arrangements. On the side of progress Henry Mayhew, in a tract entitled 8. ‘The Humours of an Irish Wake as celebrated at St Giles’, c. 1800.

‘Home is Home be it Never so Homely’, astutely identified a plau­ sible reason for the rise of private domesticity, and hence for the subdivision of household space: Among those who are not compelled to labour for their living, there is less enjoyment of the ease of home, and consequently a greater love of society, than is found amongst those who return to it after a heavy day’s work.55 He recognized that a greater craving for society and amusement was to be found in the upper strata as well as the lower reaches of society - wherever, that is, it had not yet been displaced by the overriding compulsion to work. For him it required no great leap of the imagination to see the link between an industrious population and a well-housed population. Reformed housing was not so much a reward for hard work as its necessary counterpart. The housing reformers first tackled the problem of the family dwelling (and, to a lesser extent, that of the lodging house). In so 113 doing they set out to provide moral termini in a still degenerate social landscape. Part of their purpose was to absorb society from public places into private places, yet there was to be another effort, framed in similar language, and using similar techniques, to give a moral structure to public space. The combined form of these two operations was the housing estate. 1. RIBA Transactions, first series, vol. xviii, p. 40. 2. George R. Sims, How The Poor Live (London, 1883), p. 6. 3. H.J. Dyos, ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, vol. xi, p. 5. 4. Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings (London, 1848), p. 68. Gavin was concerned, however, that certain inns and beer shops were taking in lodgers, ‘thus on a small scale exhibiting the evils common to lodging houses’. According to A. S. Wohl, the engraving in question had first been published a year earlier in a tract on Field Lane (The Eternal Slum, London, 1977). 5. Quoted in The Builder, vol. i, 1843, p. 32. 6. Gavin, in The Habitations of the Industrial Classes (London, 1851), pp. 69 et seq., was able to marshal twenty-six sources to this effect. 7. W. Beckett Denison, ‘On Model Lodging Houses’, in Melioria, edited by Ingestre (London, 1852), p. 182. 8. John Knox, The Masses Without (London, 1857), p. 182. 9. Quoted from The Revd H. Worsley in Gavin, Habitations, p. 71. 10. , ‘The Devil’s Acre’, Household Words, vol. i, p. 297. 11. Sir Robert Rawlinson, The Social & National Evils of the Domiciliary Condition of the People (London, 1883), p. 2. 12. See Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of I^ndon (London, 1851), p. 120; Abry Booth, letter to The Builder, vol. i, 1843, p. 235; J. C. Symons, Tacticsfor the Times as Regards the Condition & Treatment of the Dangerous Classes (London, 1849), p. 1. 13. Gavin, Habitations, p. 39. 14. Rawlinson, p. 3. 15. Gavin, Habitations, p. 24. 16. Henry Mayhew, ‘Home is Home be it Never So Homely’, in Melioria, p. 262. 17. The Builder, vol. v, 1847, p. 287. 18. Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, Prospectus (London, 1857). 19. Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings, p. 4. 20. Charles Booth, Lfe & Labour of the People, vol. x (London, 1903). 21. The term ‘dangerous classes’, in use through the latter half of the century, was defined by Symons as ‘not only criminals, paupers and persons whose conduct is obnoxious to the interests of society but of that proximate body of people who are within reach of its contagion and continually swell its number’. Symons, p. 1. 22. See Beames, p. 22; Rawlinson, p. 9; ‘The Deeper Depth’, The Quiver no. viii, 1866, p, 497.

23. Beames, pp. 46-7.

24. W. Weir, ‘St Giles Past and Present’, Knight’s London, vol, iii, first edition, 1841—44, p. 267. 25. The Revd A. W. Thorold, The Sunday at Home, n.d. 26. This aspect of rookery life with special reference to police incursion has been nicely described by Kellow Chesney in The Victorian Underworld (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 124-36.

27. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol..i, p. 110. 28. E. Moberly Bell, Octavia Hill (London, 1942), p. 81. 29. Sir John Simon, quoted by A. S. Wohl in ‘Unfit for Human Habitation’, The Victorian City, edited by Dyos and Wolff, vol. ii, p. 613. 30. Gavin, Habitations, p. 32.

31. James Hole, Homes of the Working Classes (London, 1866), p. 20. 32. Rowland Dobie, A History of St Giles, British Library interleaved copy, cutting: ‘A visit with Parish Surgeon Whitfield to Charlotte’s Buildings and Tyndall’s Buildings’, n.d. 33. Hole, p. 20. 34. See A. S. Wohl: ‘Sex & The Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes’, in Victorian Family, edited by Wohl (London, 1978).

35. ‘Shadow’, Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs (London, 1858), p. 5. 36. House of Lords Sessional Papers, vol. xxvi, 1842, p. 126; quoted in E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution in Britain (London, 1966), p. 288. 37. John Nelson Tarn, Working Class Housing in 19th-Century Britain, AA Papers no. 7, 1969, chapters 3-6.

38. Charles Dickens, ‘Mr Bendigo Buster on the Model Cottages’, Household Words, vol. iii, pp. 338-9.

39. Chadwick Papers, UCL ms. no. 30, item 55. My thanks to Barbara Chu for this reference.

40. William Morton Pitt, An Address to the Landed Interest on the Defcimcy of Habitations, etc. (London, 1797), p. 21. 41. Gavin, Habitations, p. 41.

42. Henry Roberts, Model Houses for Four Families Built in Connection with the Great Ex­ hibition (London, 1851). 44. Ibid.

45. Gavin, Habitations, p. 30. 46. Charles Dickens, Household Words, vol. iii, pp. 340-1. The Builder, vol. vii, p. 343, illustrates this novel cavity system which, according to Barbara Chu, had been on Chadwick’s mind some time before. 47. Lewis Dibdin, ‘Dwellings of the Poor’, Quarterly Review, January 1884, p. 146; reproduced in Victorian Homes, edited by Rubinstein (London, 1974), p. 177. 48. Leon Faucher, ‘Manchester in 1844’, Victorian Homes, p. 261. j 49. Ingrestre, Melioria, p. 165; RIBA Transactions, first series, vol. xvii, 1866-67. ; 50. The Builder, vol. xi^, 7 February 1857, pp. 77-8. j

51. Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations (London, 1974), introduction, p. xvi. .■

52. Mayhew, Melioria, p. 263. 53. ‘On the Problem of Providing Dwellings for the Poor in Towns’, RIBA Trans­ actions, first series, vol. xvii, 1866-67, pp. 39-59. 54. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (London, 1864). /

55. Mayhew, Melioria, p. 261.

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