Mobilising Housing Histories

Preface

ANDREW SAINT

This book is full of good things and new things about London’s housing history. Over and above that, it tries to learn from that history and argues for applying its ‘lessons’ to London’s present housing predicament. It provokes some simple questions: but what are those lessons? Is urban housing a topic whose history is more or less pertinent to the present than others, such as urban transport? More fundamentally, is it ever possible to learn meaningfully from history?

To take the last question first, it’s surely a peculiarity of modern Western life to assume that history is a sealed book belonging only to the past. No pre-twentieth-century society ever supposed that its existence was anything but a continuum, and that its ...