ABSTRACT
Central London is rightly renowned for its many squares and terraces of fine period houses. It is much less well known for its numerous blocks of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century private flats. The break-up process is not unique to London, however. Nor is it unique to blocks of flats or to Britain alone. On the contrary, flat break-up is merely one expression of a wider process of tenurial transformation from renting to owning which has been common to many Western capitalist societies over the last 30 years. Where attempts were made at explanation, the focus was almost exclusively on demand-oriented, behavioural explanations which stressed the role of choice and preference in residential decision making and intra-urban migration. It is only relatively recently that the realities of investment and profitability have been brought into the forefront of concern from the historical backwater in which they had languished.
