ABSTRACT
Of the mid-Victorian housing reformers Octavia Hill was by far the most widely known and respected. One must stress at the outset that, unlike nearly all the others in the field, Octavia Hill managed to reach the less prosperous and the irregularly employed labouring classes. In a sense, her philosophy of housing management was part of an attempt to root the precepts of Christianity more firmly in society. Starting with five acres of scattered property in South wark, Miss Hill was soon managing dwellings for the church in Lambeth, Westminster, and Walworth. Blind to the aura of authority, discipline, control and rather rigid paternalism, in short a sort of benevolent despotism that suffused the relationship with Miss Hill’s charges, she idealistically believed she had achieved one of her great principles, that 'rich and poor should know one another simply and naturally as friends'.
