ABSTRACT
In 1865 the twenty-seven-year-old Octavia Hill took possession of her first block of housing, three slum houses in Paradise (now Garbutt) Place, Marylebone in central London. By the time of her death in 1912 she, and her ‘Fellow Workers’ as they were known, were responsible for the management of nearly two thousand dwellings across London,2 and, in the process, had created for middle-class women the new profession of Housing Manager. Unlike some of the women and organisations who are considered in this volume, Hill is hardly an unknown person whose achievements have gone unrecognised for want of an historical paradigm in which they can be included. She is, in fact, amongst the best documented of that generation which, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, created new areas of work for women,3 and she has been accorded due recognition for her significant contribution to that transition ‘from charity to social work’ which underpinned so much of the social history of the twentieth century.4
