ABSTRACT
From Friedrich Engels’ description in 1845 of common lodging houses as ‘hot-beds of unnatural vice’, to popular fictional representations of the ‘bawdy house’, the communal aspects of boarding house living have long been associated with sexual impropriety.2 Writing in 1935, the author of Hotel and Boarding House Management observed that ‘boarding houses and small hotels exist to a great degree under moral suspicion in the public mind. They are viewed as places of “bad repute”’.3
