Rented Worlds: Bedsits, Boarding Houses and Multiple Occupancy Homes in Postwar London, 1946-1963

Rented Worlds examines the hidden yet ubiquitous world of bedsits, boarding houses, service flats, subdivided terraces and other forms of private rented housing that continued to dominate postwar London, numerically as well as culturally, well into the 1960s. While the rise of council housing and suburban homeownership have both been thoroughly documented, it was this other kind of housing – declining yet highly contested – that formed the ideological substrate of many key debates about the postwar politics of welfare, ‘race’, class and gender. Covering from the end of the Second World War to the end of the first postwar Conservative government, and drawing on a range of untapped archival sources including rent tribunals, valuation lists, exhibitions and photography, the book traces a sequence of specific ‘problems’ as they coincided with key moments in postwar history: from the 1946 squatting movement and the problem of displacement after the Blitz; to the question of social isolation and new policies around mental health; to the chronic issue of overcrowding and a growing fire safety crisis. Told through the experience of tenants and proprietors, this new history of postwar London challenges architectural history’s ability to account for the unexpected after-lives of built spaces; spaces that were re-made from the inside out through processes of speculation, regulation, and grassroots spatial practices.