Free standard shipping on all orders
  • Visa
  • Master Card
  • American Express
  • Apple Pay
  • Google Pay
  • JCB

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

1st Edition

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

By Alistair Cartwright Copyright 2026
234 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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 –... Read more

List of figures and tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section 1: Paradoxes of Decline

Section 2: Living (in) Ruins

Section 3: Transition Zones

Chapter 1: The World Turned Outside In (Luxury Squats)

Section 1: Something outside ourselves

Section 2: Who were the squatters?

Section 3: A World Within

Section 4: Ghostly Pavements

Chapter 2: Lonely Londoners

Section 1: Psychosocial Environment and Social Disorganisation

Section 2: Mobility and Stability in a Service District

Section 3: Community and Isolation between the Walls

Chapter 3: The Hearth and the Inferno

Section 1: The Un-Ideal Home

Section 2: Regulatory Subjects

Section 3: Home Safety Culture

Section 4: Geographies of Risk

Section 5: At Home with the Accidental

Chapter 4: The Landlord and His Doubles

Section 1: Little Old Landladies

Section 2: The Black Landlord

Section 3: Landlordism on Trial

Conclusion

Index

Biography

Alistair Cartwright is an architectural and cultural historian based at the University of Liverpool, School of Architecture. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre and has worked for various built environment charities. He has published widely on topics such as the politics of postwar immigration and housing in London, the aesthetics of the ‘un-ideal home’, subdivision in the private rented sector, and the role of rent tribunals as spaces of resistance. His current research examines the social 'afterlives' of domestic architecture in the cross-currents of decolonisation, focusing on connections between London and the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius during the process of post-cyclone reconstruction.

Add to Cart