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Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

TOM CROOK
TOM CROOK*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Tonge Building, Gypsy Lane Campus, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP
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Abstract

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , December 2008 , pp. 414 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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