ABSTRACT
The origins of the middle class block of flats in London can be traced back to 1853 when Victoria Street in Westminster was being cut through one of Victorian London’s many ‘rookeries’. ‘The journey to work and the problems of transport in a city where it was no longer possible for many to walk to work altered the popular view of life in the central area’. The convenience of centrally located flats may have outweighed any residual dislike of flat living, and Escott refers to their ‘great advantage to busy men or women who are anxious to purchase the seclusion of domestic life at the cost of as little inconvenience as possible’. The physical evidence of the 1930s boom is everywhere apparent in London. In central and inner London, large new blocks were erected on cleared sites; in the older, nineteenth-century suburbs large Victorian villas were demolished and the sites redeveloped.
