Mobilising Housing Histories

Chapter Two ‘Miles of Silly Little Dirty Houses’: The Lessons of Victorian Battersea

COLIN THOM

Today in the terraced streets of south Battersea, beside Clapham and Wandsworth Commons, rich people live in Victorian houses built for lowly artisans, clerks and shopkeepers. Meanwhile, in north Battersea, most of the Victorian workers’ housing erected there has been swept away and replaced with post-war council housing, much of it high-rise. Why is this so? This chapter looks at the building boom that accompanied Battersea’s spectacular population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century and considers the contrasting stories and trajectories of the houses provided in both the north and south of the area. It describes briefly the rapid ...