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Emily Gee, "Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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E
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Emily Gee about her book titled Hostel House and Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman, published by Liverpool University Press in 2025, this book helps us understand why where working women actually lived. If we're going into the 1800s, obviously with the Victorian and Edwardian period going into the 1900s as well, there were lots of women working. And while today working men and women might live in the same sorts of places, gender roles were a bit different in Britain at the time. And so we get to go into these houses with this book. We get to understand what it was like where they were sleeping, eating, socializing, all these sorts of things to understand a really key part of more women entering the wider workforce. So it's a really interesting lens, I think, on architecture, on women's history, on a whole bunch of things of Britain in this time and place. So, Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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C
Oh, thanks so much for having me.
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E
Miranda, could you Please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
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C
Sure. Thank you so. Well, I've long worked in historic building conservation and public history. I did listing for many years where we, where we protect the most important buildings and some work on planning. So I've always worked with buildings, historic buildings, and always with my work. Now I work with church buildings in particular. There's been a really strong link between people and buildings and that's kind of what I've been most interested in really through my work and studies. I actually I had the privilege of doing my undergraduate work in an all women's environment. I went to Smith College in Massachusetts and I've been fascinated from that moment to this, about that extraordinary kind of camaraderie and sisterhood that comes from being in a building with living in a building with 60 other women for several years and also interested in the kind of architectural practicalities that that involved and what the buildings looked like and how they accommodated us all for that particular kind of studying and living purpose. So that was sort of in my mind through my work. And I did a project some years ago when I was at the Architectural association in London doing a building diploma in architectural conservation. And that's in Bloomsbury in London. And there are a number there of these 19th century chambers for women which I learned about from, from other scholars who had had written about those. And I was intrigued and dug a little further. And the more I looked, I realized that there were many of those, but also these slightly different kind of hostels. And it seemed like a really interesting discovery for me that there they were hiding in plain sight on the streets of London, all these buildings. I slowly found more and more and more that were housing lots and lots of women who were coming to work in the city, really just like was. And as I dug, I found more archival photographs and architectural plans that just made it too compelling to not pick it up and take it further into a book, which is what Hostel House and Chambers is.
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E
Thank you for telling us the origins and the sort of backstory of the project. I can definitely imagine sort of walking around, especially having read the book now I sort of want to go walk around some of these neighbourhoods again and go, oh, okay, hang on, this is what's going on here. So I can definitely imagine that was a really interesting spark to investigate. So let's get into this history then. We're talking about working women joining the workforce. They obviously need housing. But as you discuss in the book, there were kind of other, I suppose, interested parties as well, who wanted to sort of solve this problem. So you talk about different kinds of campaigners and campaigns. What kinds of housing and living conditions did they want working women to have? And to what extent were there lots of class divisions? I mean, working obviously is a class in and of itself, but there are gradations within that. So what were the kind of goals of housing for working women?
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C
Yeah, it's a really big area. It's quite hard to pinpoint sometimes because, as you say, there are lots of different types of work and lots of different conditions that women in particular were living in and which the campaigners were trying to create architecturally and socially for them. There were a number of, mostly women actually, at the forefront of campaigns, pains for housing women. One particularly impressive woman is Mary Higgs from the north of England in Oldham in Lancashire. And she and some of her colleagues started off focusing on looking after working class women for whom the real risk was homelessness or living in lodging houses of ill repute. So they had a really strong campaign to try and keep them away from these really challenging situations or environments. And Mary Higgs actually, and her counterparts, they went undercover and they went through what they called the tramp wards to understand the conditions that women faced and understand the needs. They. They were concerned about sort of marauding men who. Women were sleeping out on the. On the Embankment in London or kind of drunk and unruly women in the lodging houses. So it was. They're quite grim scenarios that they were finding and trying to campaign against and find, you know, find a better alternative, really. But they soon realized that actually, while that continued to be a concern, what was really pressing in this time period, this was around sort of 1900, that what they really needed was housing to campaign for housing for women who were coming to work in the cities in new roles, new roles like clerks and commercial roles and secretaries and teachers and nurses. And so they shifted their focus from a campaign for sort of homeless and working class women to thinking about where lower middle class women might live, given this really dramatic new need in cities. And there was an organization called the national association of Women's Lodging Houses. And they together kind of shifted, shifted their attention to this new focus on both encouraging municipalities on cities to play their part in setting up hostels and also bring everyone else with them. She wrote an amazing book with someone called Edward Hayward called Where Shall She Live? Which was a really sort of polemical and campaigning text, setting the scene and saying, actually, this is what we need to focus on now is housing this new wave of working women. And they look to cities, they look to London County Council, who were a bit hopeless really when they tried so hard that they weren't able to fulfill that particular need as municipal housing. And they also had a very strong sense to your question on class, that actually women of different roles could not be housed together. That of course flower sellers and lawn dresses and charwomen, in their view would absolutely have to be housed separately from secretaries and shop assistants. And they were a bit, you know, so focused on this idea that I think it really set them back in fulfilling that sort of municipal aspiration for housing for working women.
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E
Okay, that's really interesting to understand, like how stridently they were insisting on these class boundaries. What did they sort of envisage then for like what the actual houses would be like. Like for flower girls, would it be smaller rooms and for Clark's bigger ones, like was the emphasis on hygiene or noise? Like what, what were the kind of goals of the structures?
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C
I mean, I think my sense was that the buildings were fairly similar and that there would be multiple small rooms, but they were very big on there needing to be separate entrances and the fact that they couldn't all be living communally in the same place. And there was a sense that actually, you know, one would kind of taint or, you know, have different sort of moral values on, on the other. So it was a. It was a very interesting sort of architectural separation. But I think fairly similar modest housing for all those involved. We see the. For housing from then and you know, we'll perhaps come to that later. But you. On a much larger scale, the municipality, London County Council in this case managed to build housing for working men. They were very much working in working class roles, so laborers, and they would often come home, you know, dusty and dirty from, from building the railroads and building the new metropolis of London in that period. So there was a lot more focus on kind of boot cleaning rooms and large communal washing areas. And also the sense of sort of self improvement as well. Reading rooms and places where they could get a haircut and clean their boots to think about going out and getting a different sort of job perhaps in the future. All enabled by this kind of architectural world that they were creating.
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E
That's definitely interesting to hear about. Kind of where the emphasis was or wasn't, of course, before sort of purpose built housing could be made to fit all these criteria. As you mentioned, there were kind of ad hoc options being pursued first. So what were some of the early options for housing for working women, was it when everyone's just kind of trying to find somewhere to sleep, do we still see these kinds of class distinctions? Do we see charities running them? Before everything's all organized, what options have we got?
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C
Yeah, so there's quite a range of options actually in the 19th century. Not a large number of each, but a wide range of things happening. So the very first thing that I, that I found is a really interesting example. It's little commented on at the time, but it was around 1850 in London when the Society for Improving the Condition of the Laboring Classes, one of those wonderful long kind of Victorian entities, published a plan showing how to convert a smart London townhouse, a typical kind of 18th century terraced house or townhouse, how to convert that into housing for 50 women. So they showed a kind of before and after and put a number of partitions in and made a few sort of structural changes, but mostly just adapted the interior to suddenly house 50 women. And that was, you know, as the name suggested, that was probably for working class women. But it was a really interesting idea about how to convert a fairly typical bit of building stock into something quite different. And we see some other conversions. There was an amazing woman called Lady Fielding who funded a self supporting scheme in Chelsea in London, again converting some artisan flats into rooms for 50 women. These were described as sort of gentle women of slender means. So, you know, not having a large amount of money and probably just living very simply, but again communally in a slightly sort of idealized environment. And then we also have. Those are quite sort of individual entities, but we have a number of quite sort of stalwart Christian organizations in the 19th century that were very much on the case. There's the Homes for Working Girls, the Young Women's Christian association, very familiar organisation, I'm sure, and the Girls Friendly Society. And in the 19th century they were mostly, as with the others, kind of converting existing houses at this point. So quite a lot going on and definitely a sense of responding to a need, but mostly within the existing housing stock until the 1880s or so.
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E
Okay, that's good to understand. Now we've been mentioning London throughout, but it's worth, I suppose, taking a moment to kind of make sure that we're not just focusing on London without thinking about that focus. So is the London focus because they're kind of at the forefront of these sorts of developments or are they behind? How does London sort of compare?
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C
Yeah, well, interestingly it's sort of both. It's definitely when we take the long view, we see that London was definitely behind in terms of municipal provision. And we know now that it's ultimately failed in providing any public municipal housing for working women, whereas other cities managed to do that. So in that sense it was very much behind. But then where it was at the forefront was in creating these really sort of handsome architect designed business minded hostels for working women. So if we go back to our campaigning friends. So Mary Higgs, who I mentioned earlier, and Olive Christian Malvary. So they were the two that sort of did this amazing sort of undercover work and they were really adamant that every town and city should have safe accommodation for women. And that was very much a focus of the national association for Women's Lodging Houses. And they centered on London for obvious reason because that's where there were more jobs, more women were coming to work. And they sort of led this call to arms to the City of London and they picked it up. They heard that in 1897 and really started to try and think how they might manage that provision of housing themselves. And they drew up architectural plans for London County Council women's lodging house for 50 women right nearby, a very successful one that already managed to build for men. But each time that failed and they weren't able to design an enterprise that would be self supporting. So that was the sort of London municipal story. And as I say, it was very much behind the curve. Other cities were doing really interesting work. Glasgow in Scotland had a number of examples and perhaps the most impressive one to refer to, which is a real favourite is in Manchester north of England, Ashton House, which was built by the municipality. It was designed by the city architect in 1910. It's a really handsome kind of arts and crafts building that housed single working women mostly in quite sort of working class roles in the city. And it was the first on any scale. It housed about 220 women and it was a real exemplar and sort of showed London really what could have been done, but what it just didn't manage to do. But London did lead the way and perhaps we'll talk a bit about that on this purpose built, designed housing for women. So in that sense it was at the forefront of the type.
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E
Now it's interesting to see sort of which bits are and aren't kind of being learnt from in different places. And in fact that's something I'd love to pick up from. You mentioned briefly earlier that of course housing for single working men was very much in existence by now. So when we're talking about these purpose built things for women, how much could the existing housing for men be used as examples?
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C
Yeah, it was a really clear model, I think, for the women's projects, that the men's hostels, as I said, there was a bit of a class difference. So the real focus for women's housing moves to housing for sort of clerks and teachers and nurses. That the men's lodging houses, which were much, much bigger, were really for working class or laboring men. Yet they still provided a model. And the main ingredients are apparent in both. And these tended to be the idea of really tiny individual sleeping spaces for each person, for each single person, and then a large number of really quite general, I'm sorry, generous communal spaces throughout for largely quite improving activities. So big reading rooms we see in the men's housing, we then see quite sort of dainty, but still large and comfortable sitting rooms in the women's hostels. One thing we don't really see in women's hostels later is smoking rooms. That the men's ones often had large smoking rooms as well, but also barbershops and boot cleaning areas and lots of large areas for washing. So those main ingredients we see being replicated, although often on a more modest scale, but the same idea of kind of tiny private space and large, generous communal spaces. The men's lodgings were mostly municipal. In London, London County Council built a number of really very handsome architect designed buildings. They were quite cutting edge architecturally. And then there was another group that were designed for men which were called the Roughton Houses. They were set up by a philanthropist called Lord Rowton, and together they served observed in thousands of men. The largest Rowton House that opened in 1905 in London's Camden Town was for a thousand men. So these were really vast scale buildings and nothing ever matched that for women's housing that followed. But it did. Look at it for a model and it comes a little bit later. But a hostel called the Ada Lewis House in Elephant and Castle in South London was the kind of the epigee of this kind of housing for women. It was opened in 1913, so about 10 years after these men's ones, and it was much smaller. It was for about 220 women or so, certainly not a thousand, but it was modeled on it almost to a T. Even the bedspreads had exactly the same kind of roundel with the name of the building on it. So they were very clearly looking to these men's hostels as a model, even though the scale was quite considerably different. We do actually see there are some fewer but some quite interesting examples of sort of middle class or bachelor housing as it's called, bachelor chambers in this period in London, which were more similar really to the women's hostels that followed. But interestingly they, they tended not to have those communal spaces. So a kind of equivalent bachelor chambers for clerks built at exactly the same time. There's one in Fitzrovia, just north of Oxford Circus, for example, called Audley House that was opened in 1905 or so. It's almost exactly the same date as one a few streets away built for the Young Women's Christian association called Ames House. And they were housing about the same numbers of people. But interestingly the men's ones had their own entrances. So sort of kind of going into a little miniature flat and there was. There's no communal space there at all. Whereas what we see in all of the women's housing is this sense of communal space, tiny rooms, but large sitting rooms and dining rooms where women could come together. And I think that's the clear distinction really is this area of sort of building empowering spaces where I sort of imagine the women were together, were supporting one another, were building that sense of camaraderie that I think the still unfamiliar situation of women living singly in that period would have really required. And the architecture here was clearly enabling that.
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E
Yeah, that's a really cool example of how much architecture can make a difference in one's sort of experience of daily life. And these projects really are pretty clearly designed, right? They're big investment projects in a lot of senses. So by the time this sort of takes off and is no longer sort of a one off, nice building or and we've moved away a little bit from the ad hoc, what are we going to do, for example, by the sort of start of the 20th century, what are we looking at? Is this a turning point in terms of housing for working women?
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C
It really is in terms of the numbers built and the kind of very clear model that's coming through. And if I can, I'll just step back one, just one decade really, because I haven't, haven't sort of set the scene with the ladies chambers. But there are a number. This is where this idea of a business comes out, a business minded enterprises. And that's quite a significant thing, this sort of architectural shift from the 1880s and certainly in the 1890s where women started campaigning, writing really, really emphatically in their own journals, the English Women's Journal, for example, for what they called a castle in the air. There's this wonderful sort of romantic idea of a. Where women could live together communally in harmony. And how there was an architectural need to do just that. And the call for that was answered by companies were set up as limited dividend companies. And we see a few. They've all got these wonderfully complex Victorian names. There's the Ladies Associated Dwellings Company which builds the first really impressive brick edifice in Chelsea called Sloane gardens house for 150 women. And then there were a couple that were built around that time by the Ladies Residential Chambers Company, similar words, they built in York Street Chambers in Marylebone and Chaney Street Chambers in Bloomsbury. And these were entirely purpose built. So these are the first purpose built chambers, they were called that we see. And they're quite handsome, sort of stately red brick affairs, very architectural, but again with the same idea. Tiny little rooms or sort of miniature flats of two rooms and then lots of lovely sort of communal areas at lower levels. And they were really for sort of pioneering professionals. We start to see early doctors and architects living and indeed working from these buildings. So they kind of set the model. I think that plus the men's lodging houses that we've just discussed really set the model for what happens around 1900. And as you say, that's really the turning point. I think there's a number of reasons for this. One is it was obviously a major time of change for women and for work. And there was kind of a housing crisis, really that was an inevitable response from that. We know that in 1861 there were 279 women working as clerks in this country. And by 1911 there were 124,000. So that dramatic leap in scale for just that one job role over 50 years was, was a, was a real shift. You know, there are 200,000 women working as nurses, teachers and clerks and shop assistants in the 1860s and then 800,000 in 1900. So suddenly there needed to be a place where all those women who were, who were single and in work needed to live. There were new buildings that they were working in. And I think that's an interesting thing, that it wasn't just the hostels that were developing building type, but we started to see offices much more prolifically built and worked in in this period. Also telephone exchanges, buildings that are responding to the new machines that are being invented and the new advancements in technology that were changing the way people worked. And women were increasingly doing this work. They were more educated by this time. And there was a shift really in the society's acceptance of that kind of work. And the other thing we see, of course in this period invented is the bicycle. And I talk quite a bit in the book about the increasing prevalence of bikes and indeed women riding them in cities. And I think that was a real enabler of independence on the city streets and also getting from home to work. So all of those big cultural and social and economic shifts were leading to this very distinctive need. As I say, a kind of a housing crisis. Really. Where can women safely and respectably live to do this new work?
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E
So with this massive increase and I'm so glad you gave us numbers there because it really is quite striking, the numbers are really quite significant there. So what sorts of housing then do we see from this point? Can you give us some more examples of kind of what some of these buildings were like?
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C
Yeah, and the names are really hard to distinguish and they often were used sort of slightly ambiguously and interchangeably at the time, but I call them broadly hostels. Sometimes they were called something house like Brabazon House or Hopkinson House, and that's where the house comes from in the title of the book because it's a sort of institutional, slightly institutional, institutional sense of a building type. But so I'll call them hostels. And they really start to be built almost immediately from 1900. Looking back to those ladies chambers, looking back to those men's lodging houses that are distinctively new type of building. What's interesting is that we can't really tell that they're distinctive from the outside. They don't announce themselves as housing for women. They were often. They were always designed by architects and often really quite smart up to the date architecturally. Buildings with quite a lot of architectural detail on the front. So they weren't modest. They very much fit in to the Edwardian streetscape. But they didn't say that they were for women. There was a sense that these were business minded enterprises. It certainly wasn't charity and they were just sort of fitting in and providing this very specific function. Interestingly, when you go around from the facade and go down the side road, the buildings were much plainer and they started to hint a little bit more about what was going on inside. Because they were obviously often just plain brick walls with lots and lots of windows, quite small windows that almost end up looking a bit sort of barracks like from the outside. So had some smart facades that fit in really comfortably to the Edwardian streetscape and then more modest expressions of their function on the outside. So that's what they were sort of doing on the street. Inside they were quite distinctive. And I think that's when you can immediately tell by looking at the plans and imagining the interiors how specific they were to housing working women. And they were extraordinary in their density. And I can kind of imagine what that feels like, you know, having lived in, you know, my. The resident. The house I lived in at Smith was built in 1902 and it housed 60 women. And then. So I sort of often go back to that in my mind's eye. I think that was definitely a very similar sort of architectural plan, as indeed with university housing at the time in women's colleges in this country as well. So they had a mix of generous communal spaces, as I mentioned before, and then tiny bedrooms upstairs. The communal spaces were mostly sitting rooms, often several sitting rooms, sometimes a quiet one and a more communal one. They were filled with furniture and trappings. That were really there, I think, to sort of exemplify the middle class home of the time, but just on a slightly larger scale. So there were wicker and rattan chairs galore, filled with chairs, tables with inkwells and blotters for letter writing. There were sewing machines on some of the tables, lamps for reading in those wicker chairs, and usually an upright or a grand piano to play on. And there were nice lamps, there were framed pictures on the wall, there were curtains at the windows. So a really sort of comfortable domestic existence on quite a large scale. There were large dining rooms, often in the basement, with long tables with tablecloths on them for communal dining. And so again, sort of the idea of a sort of middle class dining room in a house, but here on a much, much larger scale with these, with these long tables. And then upstairs, the upper levels were completely devoted to sleeping spaces. There were either cubicles, which were kind of, as we imagine, a shared toilet facility today, not full height, so walls that stopped before they reached the ceiling and stopped before they reached the floor, little tiny cubicles or bedrooms, but also very small. And in them there would be a single bed, a small chest of drawers, usually a washstand, sometimes a wardrobe if you were lucky, but often just a curtained rail against the wall for hanging some clothes. So really quite modest in terms of the fit out in these rooms, but they were beautifully kept. We don't have many images, but we have some wonderfully compelling photographs from the time and some descriptions that show that the rooms, tiny, were beautifully kept. They had framed pictures of family, little porcelain figurines and trinkets, very Victorian things. On every surface we see little screens to partition off the tiny spaces. So it could have a kind of multiple purpose. Beautifully kept, lots of textiles and rugs and often, and some of them even little tiny fireplaces. So well kept, tiny spaces for individual sleeping and then much more space given over to the communal living. You also see shared bathrooms and occasionally bicycle stores. And the other thing to mention is that there was always a room for a superintendent and sometimes other members of staff too, perhaps an assistant superintendent or a clerk. So there were sort of supervisory roles in these houses, but otherwise the women were living independently. But there was a sense that things were being monitored and an order was being kept.
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E
That's a lovely image you've painted for us there. Thank you for that, though. Obviously with the restrictions of an audio only medium. I realise that one thing we've talked about is London compared to other cities and London housing in terms of class differences but we haven't really addressed the fact that London's actually really big. Obviously not as big necessarily early as is now, but there's a lot of different parts of London at this point. So these buildings you're describing for us, these living situations, are they different for different parts of London? Do we see, for example, kind of all the Clarkes live, I don't know, by Temple Station and all of the flower girls live here, like, do we see patterns like that?
- [33:19]
C
We do see some patterns, absolutely. Generally, I think there was a pretty good mix and it certainly wasn't regulated, so there wasn't a of sense sense that you sort of had to live in a certain place depending on your role. But as you say, a number of logistical reasons, such as proximity to work, meant that there were definite sort of accents and flavours to some of the hostels. They were broadly the same architecturally, although they definitely fit into their neighbourhoods. So for example, a few that were in Chelsea, there's one just off Sloane Square which is rich in sort of terracotta detailing that fits in with the sort of smart mansion blocks of that area. So there was a sense of wanting, wanting to fit in. But we do see relations to work having a sense. So, for example, in Fitzrovia, which is just north of Oxford Circus and has traditionally been a very sort of fashion and textile oriented place, still today we have a higher percentage of milliners and dressmakers living among amongst the residents there. In Pimlico, which close to Westminster in the House of Parliament and a number of commercial offices in this period, there were generally more secretaries and clerks living in those. And in slightly more bohemian areas like Bloomsbury, we do get more writers and indeed artists in Chelsea, which has historically been an area associated with artists. So there's, yeah, definite accents, but not a sort of regulation. The census, as you will imagine, is wonderfully revealing by roles and age and also a sense of where women came from, of course. So just taking one example, a building that was opened by the Young Women's Christian Association, I mentioned it earlier, it's just north of Oxford Circus, it was run by a female superintendent. There was a team inside that had a house matron. They also had a small restaurant with five waitresses and five housemaids. So quite a big staff. And then in 1911, soon after it opened, there were dressmakers, milliners and drapers at the nearby department stores along Oxford Street. So that's not unexpected. We knew that there were three women from Sweden who were all embroiderers, one who Worked at the remarkable liberty around the corner. But then there were also teachers and clerks and stenographers and secretaries. They were averaged in. The average age was about 25. Most came from London or from southeast of England, but we know that there were 10 of the 90 or so women came from Europe. So it was a really interesting mix. And, yeah, largely driven by the neighbourhood, but certainly not exclusively. And there was a real diversity across the one exception to that is company housing. And it's perhaps just worth flagging that there are certain job roles that that particular nurses that had historically lived together for obvious reasons about proximity to the hospital, for example. So nurses housing, which is very similar architecturally, is an exception to that rule. And also the housing that was built by some of the department stores, Bourne and Hollingsworth, a very famous London department store, they actually built their own housing for women. Hundreds of women lived in the two really impressive hostels they built in Bloomsbury in the first and second decades of the 20th century, entirely for their own shop assistants and drapers. So there was a definite focus in that particular housing. And the one thing that we see, there's a really handy guide that was published a bit later in 1925, which listed all of the different types of accommodation for women available at that time. And it was done in conjunction with the London County Council. So there was a sense of sort of municipal ownership of it, even though they hadn't built any of the hostels themselves. But it was a handy guide and it did explain what types of women were living in each house, really, just so someone newly arrived in London could perhaps get a sense of a little bit of the character of that place. So it wasn't a restriction, but there was a sense that if you worked in theatre, some of the hostels in the West End would be more likely to house theatre girls, as they were described. So, yeah, one could find particular kinship professionally if one were looking for it.
- [37:44]
E
Yes, it definitely sounds like there were a whole bunch of options and diversity amongst the different places. So thank you for giving us a sense of that in terms of continuing this trend of sort of comparative questions. We've talked about London versus other places in the uk. What about housing for single working women in American cities like New York or Boston?
- [38:06]
C
There are a lot of commonalities with major cities in the U.S. in this period, particularly, as you might expect, looking in New York and looking in Boston. And we see a similar focus on sort of starting in the 19th century with converting existing buildings and sort of making do with existing housing. Stock to respond to the initial need and then moving to larger and more purpose built and distinctive housing for women. New York had an extraordinary number, both of buildings, but also their scale. And it really surpassed the size of any of the hostels in London. They were also different in that most of them were privately set up by individual businessmen, in some cases, sort of individual kind of commercial setups and. And much more like hotels, sort of run more on a hotel model, but exclusively for women. There's one called the Martha Washington Hotel, perhaps one of the best known, opened in 1903 and it was immediately full to the brim of women working in very similar roles to what we've described in London, you know, as stenographers, teachers, writers, bookkeepers. So a lot of similarity with a slightly different model and a much larger scale. In the York, perhaps the best known is the Barbizon. And listeners may know the wonderful book that was recently covered on a book by the same name by Paulina Bren that was opened in 1926. A number of famous women lived there, including Sylvia Plath. So really interesting comparisons to New York, also to Boston. I was very struck to discover one in Boston, in Franklin Square that's described as a home hotel for young women. Opened in 1902 too, but it housed 400 women. So really large scale, nothing like that in London. And it was the brainchild of a universalist minister. Some were there on a visiting. You know, visitors to the city might live there for a few days or a week and others lived there much longer term. It was really similar to the English ones. It tended to have what were described as donors rather than investors. So a slightly different kind of economic model. And didn't seem to shy away from. From that sort of charitable or philanthropic focus like the London ones did. But it similarly had a big large hall for entertaining, a library, elegant writing room. And like the London examples, no shortage of potted plants. They all seem to have these giant house plants throughout, very much in a sort of Edwardian style. And it's perhaps mostly on the west coast. But it's worth just paying homage to the great buildings designed by the. The architect Julia Morgan, who built a lot of housing for women, particularly under the patronage of the Young Women's Christian Association. And her really elegant Beaux Art style buildings were really suited to these characterful housing for women. Often that included swimming pools, which I could just imagine how wonderful that must have been. And there's one example of that that I found in London, a swimming pool in the Bourne and Hollingsworth Hostel in Bloomsbury and yeah, wonderfully compelling images of the shop assistants having a relaxing swim after long days selling endless pairs of gloves. It's wonderful.
- [41:28]
E
Yeah, that sounds quite fun. What if we move forward in time? How, for example, did the world wars change the housing needs and housing solutions for working women? If we move, for example, into the sort of interwar period.
- [41:43]
C
Yeah, and this is an area I certainly cover in the book. Others have done more work on this. It's really interesting. And the war effort during the First World War, for example, really shifted the use of the buildings. Many more women were coming to work. Some of them were turned over to house soldiers for a while. The rules were definitely relaxed a bit, but they were busy, full to the brim and really served their purpose. Particularly, you know, slightly different purpose, but with real gusto during the First World War. Between the wars we see a suburban expansion as with residential living of all types. And we start to see a number of hostels being built out in the garden suburbs and the sort of outer areas of London which were more reachable by new transport lines being open in that period. So other organizations with equally complex long names, United with Women's association. Sorry, United Women's Housing association and the Women's Pioneer Housing, they start to build in the interwar period on the sort of edges of London in the sort of leafy bucolic suburbs. They tend to be have slightly larger spaces. So as makes sense, there's a bit more land out there. They tend to be sort of bedsits or flats, less of the sort of communal spaces, slightly more independent, but very much in an all women environment and they would fit into the architecture of their place. So the ones in Hampstead Garden Suburb are distinctively kind of red brick and Neo Georgian in style. Whereas there are some in Highgate in North London which look like little Tudor, little Tudor palaces up on the hill with sort of false timber framing and very sort of Arts and crafts in their style. So as with the inner London ones, we see them responding to their neighbourhoods architecturally and just relaxing a little bit in terms of space and opening up options for women who would be living on the edges and perhaps commuting into the city, but just with a bit more fresh air on the edge of town. So it was an exciting time. We also see some slightly more modernist examples, particularly in West London. Women's pioneer housing, for example, built some really interesting sort of modernist equivalents of those earlier examples. And there are other scholars doing interesting work in this period period. So it's a great Story.
- [44:06]
E
Yeah, really interesting period. Thank you for giving us a sense of it. What about if we move even further in time? What about till now? Do any of these buildings still survive, still provide housing?
- [44:19]
C
They do. It's changed, not surprisingly, but most of the buildings survive. There are a couple of really sad demolitions which I mourn particularly having having seen some of the extraordinary archival photographs which sort of dug out in this exercise and have. So sad that the buildings are no longer here. Particularly Brabazon House which was definitely one of my favourites. One of the first that opened and sadly was demolished about 15 years ago. But most others I found survive. So some started as townhouses as we discussed and were converted and I think they've kind of of converted back into residential accommodation, into flats for example, or indeed to offices. But of the purpose built hostels and houses there are a wide range of uses today. So I think it's lovely because it shows how eminently adaptable these kind of buildings are and that we can really keep them and work with them and for new uses. So there are some of the changes chambers that I mentioned. One of them is a very smart residential club in. In Chelsea that's Sloane Gardens House now the Sloan Club, the. The other chambers, one in. In Bloomsbury and in. In Marylebone York Street Chambers. They are, they are flats. So they are not just for women but they are, they are flats. So still very much in. In residential use. There's the Ada Lewis House in South London in Elephant and Castle, which fantastically is a backpackers hostel and it still has all its exquisite glazed tiles in the communal rooms. Each room, the library, the sitting room and the writing room had different coloured glazed tiles and it was absolutely wonderful. Opened in 1913 and happily these are still sitting rooms for most of the young people who are visiting London and hanging out in these spaces where the wicker chairs want were and it's just so great, it's a perfect use. A number of the hostels are also NHS accommodation and some are a homeless accommodation and many supporting vulnerable women still today. And I think that's a particularly apposite and important poignant use. One's a smart art gallery in Adolescenti Gallery in Fitzrovia. So there's a. There's a really nice mix and I think it's wonderful that one can walk or cycle around the streets of London and find these buildings and see them carrying on their lives in quite a different way in many cases, but still in many cases housing people to sleep and to live. And I think that's A really important urban story about how we can adapt and reuse buildings and how we can continue to tell their stories. And I think it's sort of one thing I wish there was a bit more of, was sort of telling the story of those buildings to their current users. Not everyone who works and lives in them today knows what they used to be. So that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book, really, is just to kind of get that story out there so we can kind of think about who used those spaces before. And I think there's quite an interesting model really for us to think about with housing today. I know when I came to work in London, age 25 in the. It's just the kind of place I wanted, you know, just a small place to lay my head with some kind of communal, empowering friendship around so I could go off and work and live and play in the city. And I think there's something to be thought about in terms of what housing today might look like for some people. Obviously it wouldn't suit many, but I think it's an interesting model, I think, for planners who are thinking about housing in the metropolis today.
- [48:04]
E
Yeah, it definitely has some clear implications for now and the future, as well as some great stories from the past. So. So thank you for sharing them with us. If I can ask just as a final question, what might you be working on now that this book is out in the world? Anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [48:21]
C
I'm enjoying talking about it for a while, which is great. I work with church buildings at the moment, so some work around that, thinking about how church buildings serve communities. But perhaps the thing I'd sort of of hanker and would like to do more on thinking about how I could is I had the great privilege of cycling in Zambia a few years ago and one of the things that got me to stop on my bike on that long journey was looking at housing in rural and urban Zambia and how particularly women were really creating and caring for these extraordinary homesteads of vernacular architecture in those different settings. So that's something that I'd really like to explore a bit more if the opportunity arises. But people and buildings, it's compelling and it's something I'd like to keep doing and working with others on.
- [49:17]
E
Well, it is definitely a compelling combination. So for any listeners who want to learn more about the book we've been discussing, again, the title is Hostel House and Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman, published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [49:34]
C
Thank you so much, Miranda.
- [49:36]
E
It's been a pleasure.