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From Emily Gee’s newly published book Hostel, House, and Chambers (see ‘Further reading’ below), we learn that a unique but hitherto little studied building type emerged in the 1870s in the form of residential chambers, hostels, and lodging houses offering accommodation for single working women. Designed to suit a range of different budgets and working situations, they were built by charitable societies, commercial dwelling companies, and private philanthropists. In doing so, they ‘quietly changed the economic and domestic opportunities’ available to lower-middle- and middle-class women wanting to take advantage of the new opportunities for employment that opened up in the later 19th century.
Earlier in that century, the main sources of female employment were factory work, agricultural labour, or domestic service, and working women either lived in the family home or in servants’ quarters provided by their employer. Between 1861 and 1911, the number of women in paid work (excluding domestic service) grew fourfold, from 200,000 to 800,000, a figure that reflects the growth in the range of roles now open to women. By 1902, 174,000 women worked as stenographers (or court reporters), government or commercial clerks, secretaries and typists, bookkeepers, accountants, and cashiers. In 1911, there were 183,000 female teachers and significant numbers of women worked as nurses and shop assistants. Around 50,000 more worked in a variety of trades, including as a laundress, seamstress, milliner, and bookbinder, or in factories making jam, tobacco products, ceramics, boxes, or artificial flowers.
Many of the women taking on these new roles were young, single, and keen to assert their independence. Work took them from their family home to cities and towns (36 per cent were in London), but there they faced a restricted range of accommodation. Common lodging houses were to be avoided as only one step up from the workhouse – places of dubious repute and a last resort for paupers and the homeless, rather than a safe and respectable haven for the new working woman.
If you were employed in a shop or department store, you might be offered accommodation on the upper floors of the building in which you worked, in lodgings modelled on the servants’ quarters of large private houses. Nestled under the roof, dormitories were shared three or four to a room and were furnished with beds, washstands, and chests of drawers. The better employers provided communal dining and sitting rooms, but many such lodgings were ruled by a housekeeper with a sharp eye for transgressions (such as returning late after the doors were locked) that could lead to pay being deducted. This so-called ‘living-in’ system catered for the many thousands of women employed as ‘shopgirls’ but varied greatly in quality. Because shopworkers were effectively under surveillance by the employer and on constant call, ‘living in’ was a major source of grievance when, from the 1890s, shopworkers began to organise and demand shorter hours, higher pay, and better working conditions.
Maintaining virtue versus advancing empowerment
An alternative to ‘living in’, for those who could afford it, was to rent lodgings, usually in the attic rooms of a family house. In her autobiographical novel The Tunnel, published in 1919 but set in 1896, Dorothy Richardson’s main character (employed as an assistant in a dental surgery on Wimpole Street) describes her small attic room in a Bloomsbury house, up many flights of stairs, with grimy wallpaper and peeling paint, a battered chest of drawers and a rickety washstand, but welcome all the same because it represented independence.
Even such basic accommodation was beyond the means of many, however, and some of the campaigners for reasonably priced women’s housing saw this pursuit of solitary independence as fraught with danger. In addition to the risks of young women being exposed to the desires of predatory men, they might, according to the charity called Homes for Working Girls in London (HWG), be ‘led into sin’ by ‘their own weakness, unprotected, with no parent to look kindly upon them, perhaps imbued with self-will and the desire for freedom’.
Lodgings were ruled by a housekeeper with a sharp eye for transgressions (such as returning late after the doors were locked) that could lead to pay being deducted.
Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the earliest efforts to provide sufficient suitable accommodation to meet the growing demand came from Christian organisations. HWG was set up by John Shrimpton in 1878, to ‘help those who help themselves’ by trying to gain an honest living, through the provision of homes and ‘healthful recreation’ and ‘surround[ing] them with Christian influences and friendly guidance at the most critical period of their lives’. Bible-reading and prayer groups, ‘wholesome reading’, and ‘healthful conversation’ were strongly encouraged in HWG homes.
HWG provided accommodation in converted London townhouses, the first being Alexandra House (88 St John Street) with rooms for 25 residents. A basic room cost 2s 6d a week, including the use of reading rooms with magazines and newspapers; for 3s a week, breakfast and tea were included, and full board cost 4s 6d. Typical salaries at the time ranged from 5s to 10s a week. By 1905, HWG had eight homes, with accommodation for 550; residents had to be under 30 years of age, and they moved out when they married, so there was a regular turnover. Some 79,265 women passed through an HWG hostel between 1878 and 1959, just before HWG merged with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).
The YWCA was another 19th- century innovation, tracing its origins to the hostel set up in 1857 at 51 Upper Charlotte Street to house Florence Nightingale nurses on their way to and from the Crimea. By 1897, it had 24 homes, where girls slept in cubicles separated by wooden partitions. Every morning, they came together ‘to give the freshness of our first thoughts to God’. Similarly, the Anglican Girls’ Friendly Society, founded in 1875, had 11 ‘lodges’ across London where young women could sleep in cubicles.
In parallel with these overtly Christian institutions, a number of philanthropic individuals and charities rose to the challenge of providing safe and comfortable lodgings for working women – but these did so with what might now be characterised as a feminist agenda: to empower women to pursue lives on their own terms, based on self-reliance and the companionship and support of other women. There were strong links between the movement for women’s residences and those campaigning for votes for women and equal pay. The English Woman’s Journal, established in 1858 to campaign for women’s rights, declared in 1900 that ‘what women need today is equality before the law and equality of opportunity, the right to solve their own problems and fight their own battles’.
It was in this spirit that companies began to be set up to develop low-cost women’s lodgings on a commercial basis. These dividend-paying companies attracted many women investors: Emily Gee makes the point that, while some prominent men were champions of the women’s housing cause, ‘the prevalence of women in leadership and advocacy roles is a notable theme’ in the development of purpose-built hostels. The popular Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880 and publishing a mix of stories and educational and improving articles, noted in 1883 that ‘women have far outnumbered men in subscribing to this work for the good of their young sisters’.
An example of this kind of enterprise was the six-storey block on Peel Street, Kensington, which was converted by a company established by Lady Mary Fielding in 1878 to provide 53 rooms let at rents of between 2s 6d and 4s a week. Lady Mary’s enterprise was run as a business venture, and supporters were paid an annual dividend of 3.5 per cent. Being financially self-sufficient was an important part of the ethos of her residential project in order to dissociate the enterprise from any perception of charitable ‘do-goodery’. It was important to Lady Fielding and her followers that women should be seen as competent business managers, as well as providing a much-needed service.
Lodging life
It was a short step from raising money to buy and convert existing buildings to the construction of new architecturally designed dwellings. The first of these was Sloane Gardens House, located at 52 Lower Sloane Street, which was commissioned by the Ladies’ Associated Dwelling Company. The residence was built in two phases, as shareholder funding allowed. The first, accommodating 55 women, opened on 27 February 1888 and the second, with a further 130 rooms, opened the following year.
Countess Cadogan laid the foundation stone of the first block, and many of those who subscribed to the £1 shares were wealthy members of the upper classes. Queen Victoria’s cousin Princess Mary Adelaide was the guest of honour when a third block was officially opened in May 1890. The residents also tended to come from relatively prosperous backgrounds to be able to afford the rents of 7s 6d and 12s a week; just a handful of cubicles at the back of the building and under the roof were offered at the lower rates of 2s 6d and 3s 6d a week. Even while praising the building as ‘handsome, airy, and well-appointed’, critics complained that such rents were hardly affordable for many working women.
The architect of Sloane Gardens House was John Thomas Lee (1844-1920), and the corner building that he designed, with its finialled gables, tall chimneys, and oriel windows, was striking for its quality and its curved façade, enlivened by rubbed brick and terracotta dressings. The Company was proud of the building’s fireproof construction and its lift. Archive photographs show that a typical room included a fireplace, shelving, and a bed in an alcove screened by a curtain. Magazines of the time gave tips on how to personalise and make efficient use of this kind of limited space, creating a homely atmosphere with rugs, a bedspread, lace, framed prints, books, and flowers.
The building provided a communal dining room, too, where residents could enjoy breakfast, cold or hot luncheon, tea, dinner, and supper at ‘reasonable prices’. In addition, there were several sitting rooms, a reading room and library, and a music room. Residents paid for their own fuel and electricity, and a fortnightly room clean was included, though not ‘boot cleaning’. Some 15 live-in servants worked under a superintendent to provide all these services.
The ground floor consisted of an arcade of shops let separately to a range of enterprises including the Women’s London Gardening Association, which, in addition to selling cut flowers, offered such services as conservatory construction and the maintenance of cemetery graves, window boxes, and balcony planting. Staffed entirely by women, the business was one of several in the shop parade to employ some of the residents of the rooms above.
The rental records for Sloane Gardens House show the great range of occupations then open to women: as well as a sculptor and painter, a journalist and speech-writer, a chemist, librarian, and photographer’s assistant, several residents worked as governesses and milliners. Fiction again gives us an insight into life in the block: a serial in the Girl’s Own Paper in 1898 follows the adventures of a character called Hetty who has a room in a ‘red-brick pile in the wide and many-mansioned street of which it formed a part’. Her mother, when visiting, is shocked by the ‘comfortless muddle’ of her room, with unwashed dishes and ‘dust over everything’; she notes the way Hetty’s friends ‘tumble in and out of her room… sit about on the floor in the most uncomfortable attitudes, laugh and make fun incessantly, and say the cleverest and most daring things’.
What is being described here is a life of relative prosperity and privilege, not much different from that of any undergraduate leaving home for the first time, and a far cry from the life of overworked shop assistants, clerks, or typists elsewhere in London, Birmingham, or Manchester. The first purpose-built hostel for working women of lesser means was built in Moreton Street, just off Vauxhall Bridge Road in Pimlico, which opened on 10 June 1902. The funding came from the Brabazon House Company Limited, a business founded in 1900 by Lady Brabazon (1847-1918), who had already gained experience in property development with her Brabazon House hostel on Store Street, a more modest version of Sloane Gardens House. (A young woman who wrote to a newspaper of the day enquiring about London accommodation was advised that ‘Sloane Gardens House is, I think, a little beyond your means. Brabazon House would be much more likely to suit you, as you say you intend to be a real “working girl”.’)
The Pimlico version of Brabazon House was targeted at the ‘better class of working girls, or ‘Lady-Clerks’ as they were dubbed in the Girl’s Own Paper. Two tiers of accommodation were provided, equally split between 8ft-wide enclosed bedrooms and less private 6ft-wide cubicles with thin wooden partitions, all much smaller than the more expensive lodgings. Even so, the 90 units were heavily oversubscribed, illustrating the compelling need for further buildings of this type. The average age of the residents was 30, and they supported themselves mostly in low-waged and insecure occupations as typists, secretaries, and clerks working in the Civil Service, the Colonial Office, the Bank of England, and London County Council’s Education Office.
The architect of Brabazon House, Robert Stephen Ayling (1863-1932), went on to design several more hostels and nurses’ homes, including the second Brabazon House Company project: the larger Hopkinson House on Vauxhall Bridge Road, also in Pimlico. Built to accommodate 120 residents, this housed a kitchen and dining room in the basement, along with rooms for 20 servants and staff, and a large bicycle room. The first-floor sitting room had movable partitions and doubled as a concert hall, and there was a sick room and nurses’ accommodation on one of the upper floors – in high-density housing, infectious illness was a real concern. The building was fireproofed and had central heating; in addition, each room had shilling-in-the-slot gas meters and gas fires, and there were three baths and lavatories on each floor.
Ayling’s next building was St George’s House in nearby Vincent Square, privately funded by Miss Murray Smith, daughter of the publisher John Murray; a decade later, he was employed by the Girls Friendly Society to design a large hostel at 29 Francis Street, which was opened by the Bishop of London in February 1914. Being close to Victoria Station, it included a waiting room for women commuting to London on the cheap early morning trains, where they could take shelter and enjoy an affordable breakfast before the working day began.
Ayling’s fourth residence for women, St Clement’s House in Bolsover Street, just north of Oxford Street, was another GFS project, but now, some 37 years after its foundation, the organisation provided a more relaxed environment for residents, and the hostel was praised for not being ‘hampered by endless rules and regulations’. Regulations at Ada Lewis House, at 31 Draycott Avenue, Kensington, provide an insight into such rules as did exist at the time: no alcohol, card games, or gambling; no admittance after 11pm unless work required it; rooms to be vacated by 9am and only accessed after 7pm; no resident to visit a floor other than her own; and ‘absolutely no tea pots to be taken from the dining room’.
Accommodating the poor
Ada Lewis House, on New Kent Road, was opened in 1913 by Princess Louise. The sixth child and fourth daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, she was a talented sculptor and artist, and a supporter of the feminist movement, the arts, and higher education. It was one of several such housing projects that were built as a result of the substantial bequest of Ada Lewis, to be used to found, endow, and maintain lodging houses for working women. Six storeys high, it offered modest accommodation for twice as many women at half the price of its predecessors.
Just as importantly, Ada Lewis bequeathed funds to support the work of campaigners who wished to see local authorities building similar hostels for low-waged women. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful. London County Council refused to follow the example of Manchester, whose Aston House – a purpose-built municipal lodging house catering for 222 women with beds at 5d a week – opened in 1910. Instead, the LCC became paralysed by the circular argument that low-waged women workers could not afford to sustain LCC housing and conversely middle-class women did not fit into the aim of housing the poor.
Instead, Ada Lewis hostels filled that gap for cheap but good-quality lodgings and set an example that was widely praised and encouraged other wealthy philanthropists and social reformers to follow her example. One of them was Lady Curzon of Kedleston, whose bequest enabled the construction of the Mary Curzon Home on King’s Cross Road, near the station, which unusually included six larger rooms for women with children. Other projects built at the same time include Portman House at 10 Daventry Street, Marylebone, which continues to provide emergency accommodation for homeless women 117 years after it was opened in 1908, as well as Sarah Pyke House, a home for vulnerable Jewish women and girls in Whitechapel, and the Emily Harris Home for Working Girls on Alfred Place, off Tottenham Court Road.
In all, 170 residences were created for women during the late 19th and early 20th century, with particularly strong and perhaps surprising support from the aristocracy and royalty. In her richly detailed account of this movement, Emily Gee credits Mary Higgs, co-founder of the National Association for Women’s Lodging Houses, for her tireless campaigning and her dedicated evangelical work in the first decades of the 20th century. Higgs went to live on the streets, disguised as a homeless woman, in order to write books and pamphlets about her experiences and expose the conditions endured by the inmates of workhouses and common lodging houses in the early 1900s. Her aim was that ‘every town should have, as a matter of course, a place where self-respecting women can find refuge in temporary emergency or live, if her income is a very narrow one, a self-supporting life’.
Though she did not entirely achieve that ambition, her campaigning was not in vain and many hundreds of women were able, as a result of philanthropy and commercial investment, ‘to live out their lives in fulfilling employment, safely and economically housed, going about their business and partaking of all the Edwardian capital had to offer’.
Further reading:
Emily Gee (2025) Hostel, House, and Chambers: accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian working woman (Liverpool University Press for Historic England, ISBN 978-1836244554, £40).
All images: Historic England Archive, unless otherwise stated
