Living London: A Window on the Institutional Interior

This chapter examines the photographic representation of a range of residential institutions within a collection of early twentieth-century writings, Living London: Its Work and its Play, its Humour and its Pathos, its Sights and its Scenes, edited by George R. Sims and published by Cassell & Company between 1902 and 1903. The collection made a variety of urban environments visible to a contemporary readership for the first time and offers an opportunity to look across institutional sites and typologies to explore common aspects of their spatial, material and aesthetic organization, their status as dwelling places, and their relationship with an idealized domesticity, rooted in an understanding of the home as a moral centre for family life and a foundation of social stability. Drawing on a selection of images, it considers the visual evidence that Living London's photographs offer for a relationship between the design of institutional interiors and those of private homes of the period, as well as the ways in which domestic ideals informed the representational choices of the collection's photographers and editor.

Living London, an ambitious attempt to record the panoply of metropolitan social experience at the start of the twentieth century, incorporated 175 articles and somewhere in the region of 1,500 photographs and other illustrations. The series was published fortnightly at a cost of 7 pence and in three bound volumes that sold for 12 shillings each, making it affordable to a middle-class audience and almost certainly available to a wider working-class readership.