Directory of Research and Expertise

Thesis Title: Lodging-house urbanism, social classification, and the mobile lower-middle class in Victorian and Edwardian London

Abstract: This project begins from a single street and ends with a claim about the Victorian city as a whole. Offley Road, Lambeth, built between 1880 and 1883 and consisting of 52 four floor terraced houses, classified by Charles Booth in the 1890s as ‘fairly comfortable, good ordinary earnings’, is the case study through which this thesis advances an argument about lodging-house urbanism: the social logic by which the late-Victorian lower-middle-class terrace functioned not as a stable residential community but as a form of urban infrastructure for a population defined by its mobility, its economic volatility, and its relentless performance of respectability under conditions that made respectability structurally precarious.