Multi-Storey Living: The British Working-Class Experience – Hardcover

For centuries the inhabitants of Britain lived in small houses. Originally published in 1974, this book tells the story of the invasion of the United Kingdom by that alien dwelling unit, the flat or apartment, and how apartment blocks spread themselves throughout the country to house, not only a substantial proportion of the working classes, but also a growing minority among the middle classes.

Multi-Storey Living is the work of seven scholars who have specialised in housing history. They had long been fascinated by the general rarity and unpopularity of flats in modern Britain, in contrast to the prevalence of multi-story living in most urban areas on the Continent and even in certain cities in the United States. In this book they have set out to explain why flats were, until recent years, so unusual, and why, nevertheless, they have come to house an increasing proportion of the population of British towns in recent decades.

The first half of the book deals with the nineteenth century: the somewhat uncertain development of the middle-class flat in congested London, the growth of the working-class flat, both private and municipal, in Liverpool, and the general failure of the flat to implant itself in the other big northern cities. The twentieth century is covered by a chapter on the changing designs and function of the flat between the wars, when it at last achieved a certain popularity, and a study of the rise and fall of the high flat in the 1950s and 1960s. The book ends with an account of the growth of flat living in Birmingham, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, and a study of the very different role of multi-storey housing in modern Scotland. The book is fully illustrated with original photographs of flat developments in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.