ABSTRACT
The Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries caused a huge movement of people from countryside to town. The clearest insight into conditions of overcrowding, ill health and exploitation in the homes of the very poor is given by the 1885 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Octavia Hill gave evidence to the Commission of large rent debts accumulated in properties she acquired. Octavia Hill sought to change the built environment of her time, with all its horrors, by running it properly rather than trusting to a new round of building enterprise to replace the old. Management was co-ordinated at headquarters and most flatted estates did not have a resident superintendent because they were thought to be big enough.
