ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century, London was transformed from a city that covered a relatively small area to a large, sprawling metropolis with suburbs linked to the centre by an extensive public transport system. Rapid population growth, rising living standards and new social values combined to created an enormous demand for single family homes. The physical separation of workplace and home, which had started in earlier centuries, accelerated to encompass most social strata over the period.1 Domestic life, furthermore, became increasingly privatised with a new, greater differentiation of a household’s living space from that of its neighbours. The suburbs, encouraged by prevailing building regulations,2 mainly grew up as uniform acres of terraced housing facing each other across paved and drained streets behind railways, old turnpikes and the repaved, but often still narrow and winding, lanes that had existed before urban expansion.
