ABSTRACT
Housing has always been a politically contested arena in the UK, because the questions of where we live, who we live with and how we live are inextricable from the pursuit of wider goals such as economic ‘progress’, the protection of rural landscapes and nationalistic imaginaries, and notions of which kinds of urban form are acceptable. A strong housing focus is also characteristic of the way urban redevelopment and ‘regeneration’ has been approached in the UK. One reason for this is that the pace of industrialisation left a legacy of poorly built flats and houses. Another is that the low incomes of the industrial working classes in the nineteenth century, combined with high demand for housing close to the key areas of work, often led to overcrowded, expensive and poorly maintained accommodation which deteriorated over time. The improvement and redevelopment of housing became a key concern for governments throughout the twentieth century, generating not only improvements in living standards but economic benefits, through increased domestic consumption and a healthier workforce, and giving rise to new cultural practices such as homemaking (Ravetz 1980).
