Rented rooms make unhappy homes. The literature of 1930s London abounds in tales of dull routines set in cheap lodgings, their inhabitants clinging to dreams of a better job, a nicer room and a romance that would put the end to their financial misery as well as their loneliness. For the period's literary lodgers, London bedsits are always defined in terms of what they lack: space, style and any sense of cosmopolitan freedom. While complaints about the dullness and conformity of the suburbs had become standard by the early 1900s, after 1918 the experience of renting in central London no longer provided a cosmopolitan antithesis; central London lodging was perceived to be as grim as suburban life.

That renting flats in London is a dreary experience was by no means an interwar discovery. George Moore, in Confessions of a Young Man (1886), professed his unreserved hatred of his London lodging house – ‘eggs and bacon, the fat lascivious landlady with her lascivious daughter … I can do nothing, nothing; my novel I know is worthless’ – sentiments reproduced almost exactly in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying half a century later. And in Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), Edwin Reardon suffers the ignominy of trying to write in the shabby rooms he rents with his wife and child, unable to cope with the squalor and the constant reminder that he has to support the family. The stifling atmosphere of London lodgings also figures prominently in New Woman novels, most notably in Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) where the protagonist, Mary, hoping to make it as a journalist, takes up rooms ‘giving on a grimy back-yard’. And Dorothy Richardson's Miriam Henderson, a direct descendant of the New Woman, feels her heart sink as she enters her Bloomsbury room at the beginning of ‘The Tunnel’ section of Pilgrimage: ‘This is the furnished room; one room … The awful feeling, no tennis, no dancing, no house to move in, no society.’

The trials of young writers by grim living conditions were still a prominent subject for London writers in the 1920s and 1930s, a continuity ensured partly by the fact that the rooms they occupied were often the same as the ones that had been inhabited by their predecessors.