London historians marvel at London's population growth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but never at how those hundreds of thousands of people got housed. It did not just ‘happen’; building tens of thousands of houses required marshalling land, money, materials and labour, and directing them at specific building sites. The task was performed by a myriad of small-scale builders from most walks of life, projectors who used contracts to have work done they could not perform themselves. All this was done in an environment of considerable risk in building new houses because of royal prohibitions against doing so, and facing large fines, sometimes imprisonment, and their new houses pulled down.

Historians have largely ignored the tens of thousands of landlords, and hundreds of thousands of tenants in early modern London. Society was not organized to readily reveal their relation and magnitudes, so the issue must be approached from a variety of directions. Modern stereotypes of both were well formulated by that period, despite the intricacy in and frequent dual role of landlord and tenant played by the same persons. Property holdings were dispersed among a variety landlords, so tenants faced no stranglehold over dwellings, while landlords in the main used rental holdings to supplement their basic incomes.

The building industry's organization has been relatively invariant down through history due to housing's unique characteristics: durability, fixity in location, complex co-ordination of various trades on site and financing its great costs. That organizational form has allowed speculative development to flourish periodically during large increases in urban population, despite considerable risk. The same building and speculative processes occurred in ancient Rome and cities in England and the US at greatly different periods of time but those histories do not acknowledge the similarities of development processes that each reports. A separate ‘housing literature’ that steps back from particulars possibly explains why these accounts are so alike.

Little has been written about urban property investment in seventeenth-century London. Market norms for investors were developed in a relatively unregulated environment, and in response to surging urban growth. “Pattern books” (manuals of design, measuring, and building) provided information to investors, helping them to evaluate an assorted set of properties. While the methods of investment described in these books were initially rudimentary, there is evidence of increased sophistication in the latter part of the century. The gradual institutionalizing of real estate practices helped to attract the necessary capital to finance London's remarkable physical growth.