ABSTRACT
Britain’s housing heritage offered an easily replicated housing model to private builders, making two-up and two-down, single-family dwellings with pitched roofs the most common, most durable, and most lastingly popular form of housing. Robert Owen’s renowned New Lanark mill in Scotland was probably the best known, most utopian and most far-reaching in its impact. Groups of better-off tenants organised co-operative developments owned by public utility societies, using many of Howard’s ideas. Octavia Hill, the most famous housing reformer, opposed demolition of poor dwellings, believing that clearance and rebuilding at great cost would exclude the very people who most needed help and were made homeless by the clearances. Back-to-backs made the removal of refuse and waste water difficult, but were the most economical form of nineteenth-century urban workers’ housing. The Victorian and Edwardian eras, the heyday of British urban expansionism, foreshadowed the main patterns of twentieth-century housing development.
