London's spectacular growth over the course of the nineteenth century produced an urgent problem: how people might live together, efficiently and harmoniously, in a congested urban environment? This problem, however, also presented an opportunity for architectural and literary innovation. By the turn of the twentieth century, new models of housing spanned the city's districts, from the open spaces of Hampstead Heath to those of Peckham Rye, and extended to all facets of society: workers’ hostels offered affordable shelter for itinerant labourers; model dwellings companies provided improved housing for the working classes and workers’ cottages for the upwardly mobile artisan classes; suburban expansion made available lowdensity neighbourhoods and individual gardens to the burgeoning middle classes; and in the city centre, apartment buildings provided accommodation for a metropolitan demographic diverse enough to include both thespians and parliamentarians. Yet the task of reinventing domestic space was not restricted to architects and urban planners: philanthropists, politicians, novelists, dramatists and pundits all turned their attention to reconceptualising the ways that people might live together in the city.

This book examines the relationship between literary representation and new forms of urban domestic architecture in London between 1880 and 1920. In principle, it is concerned with mapping rhetorical shifts on to the reimagining of household practice and the physical reconceptualisation of domestic space during this period. It treats architectural and literary forms as texts that both require exegesis, the rendition of which reveals the interconnectedness of material and ideological realms. The four decades around the turn of the twentieth century were a period in which there existed a comprehensive social effort to design domestic buildings that diverged from the conventional household model, which based its spatial organisation on the nuclear family unit. As Caroline Morrell explains, the Census Report of 1871 stated that ‘the natural family is founded by marriage, and consists, in its complete state of husband, wife and children’. Yet during the late nineteenth century, public interest and critical opinion were attentive to the growing diversification of domestic relationships in urban centres. A variety of models of housing that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century addressed this diversification, including the four that are the focus of this book: model dwellings, women's residences, settlement housing and the garden city.