ABSTRACT
The worst lodging houses in the post-War period had changed little since George Orwell's day. Lodging houses had long ceased to be the bawdy establishments of Victorian England, but were often highly unsatisfactory from a sanitary standpoint. Most of the remaining lodging houses and hostels in the early 1970s were in buildings built before 1914, and crude night shelters of the crypt, railway arch and disused factory type exist to the present time. The Sunday Times in 1978 described the Highgate Hotel in Birmingham, where 65p then bought a seven by five foot cubicle for the night. From the 1950s the Rowton organisation decided to upgrade itself into the field of higher-class commercial hotels, and neglected the upkeep of its working men's establishments. Non-commercial hostels have proved just as bad. In 1980 when the Missionaries of Charity Hostel in Kilburn, London, went up in flames, people died.
