ABSTRACT
This chapter examines specific depictions of shared accommodation within this context through fiction and film of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing a set of emerging tropes that relate to the cohabitation of strangers and the sharing of intimate space in precarious circumstances. It proposes that the more marginal and peripheral domestic sites of the bedsit, B&B and shared house are a significant locus within cultural depictions of asylum, at once revealing the socio-economic circumstances that attend asylum seekers in Britain, but also providing a narrative basis for the exploration of a complex mode of hospitality in domestic settings that are defined by transience and the presence of strangers. The slipperiness of categories also extends to Bed and Breakfasts, a deceptively homely term that, since the last decade of the twentieth century, has been increasingly used to describe temporary social accommodation.
